In Such Times

The worst politics and the greatest abuses of power invite the best satire. The best satire endures and ultimately finds its place alongside other classics of the English language, or of another language – French comes to mind. It is also honoured among the visual or theatre arts. The best satire is always metaphor or parable. It is also often courageous, although not necessarily beautiful to either read or behold. In fact, its primary purpose and virtue lies in not being pleasing or restful to the mind’s eye, or to what might be called the collective conscience. It exists to challenge and disturb.

Satire must challenge the senses by forcing the reader or viewer to contemplate the consequences of the folly of the times and of the crass stupidity of rulers, as well as of those who either support or benefit directly from their power. But even the best satire will eventually be archived. Times change, seldom for the better.

Parables and metaphors, on the other hand, tend to endure. Their meaning is not locked in to a given set of circumstances, or to any particular time. They are universal. Parables are especially so because they inevitably return us to the great mystery of life itself, bound as it is to relationships which shape and define the history of families and nations. The parables and metaphors of scripture were recorded and written down with this idea in mind.

The root of the word ‘religion’ is ligare meaning to ‘bind together’.  How we ultimately interpret the underlying meaning of religion affects how we live our lives and how power is exercised, how those who hold it know themselves as accountable to the author of all life. Do they exercise power in order to suppress? Or to liberate? Do they bind people through fear? Or liberate them through bonds created in love and held together in trust, trust which makes for civilised society? There is ultimately no getting away from religion when it is understood in this sense of binding together, so we abuse its metaphors and parables to our cost. One way of abusing them is to read them with an a priori agenda or a pre-formed mindset.

Pre-formed mindsets encompass a range of religious and political agendas, often blending or converging in the minds of those who support them. With world chaos and climate change comes, for example, a renewed preoccupation with ‘end times’, or with a focus on a particular nation or group of people who can be hated, or perhaps feared, or with promises of total economic renewal paralleled by an equally all consuming promise of religious renewal. Both have in the recent and more distant past proved to be damaging delusions. Hitler promised re-forestation and wholesale renewal of an ailing infrastructure. Trump also promises the renewal of an ailing infrastructure, along with work and prosperity for all, but beginning with those to whom he owes the most political favours. Innumerable emotional and psychological casualties resulted from the so-called Toronto Blessing, the result of the almost aphrodisiacal power experienced by some of its leaders and proponents at the time.

Added to this, a pre-formed mindset seldom moves those who hold it in a forward direction, even though it requires great energy and commitment to sustain it. A pre-formed mindset corresponds to a car’s wheels spinning in the sand. Its energy derives from desperation, an ever greater determination to hold on to delusion, often in order to maintain a grip on power, to the point that power itself becomes delusional. As a result, those who think they hold it lose their grip on reality, resulting in dangerous paranoia, such as we are beginning to see in Mr. Trump.

Such delusional determination works as much in the arena of politics as it does in religion, the two becoming at times almost indistinguishable. Think of North Korea’s particular brand of Emperor worship.  It also leads to religious and political sectarianism. The growing number of neo-Nazi rallies in Europe and America manifest a form of religious sectarianism, different only in the intensity of its hatred from any other kind of mass religious gathering.

All of this suggests that, among other things, an informed approach to the religions of the world, beginning with their scriptures, is essential to global stability. With stability comes peace and a fair distribution of wealth. This would include the basic infrastructures needed for all to benefit from the kind of entrepreneurship which leads to economic growth. Taken together, the things that bind us together in both a religious and political sense require wisdom as it is understood in the scriptures.

The proper interpretation of the scriptures, and of the bible in particular, is essential for the maintaining of a reciprocal wisdom in the sphere of religion and politics, as is the truthful recording and interpretation of events by a free and morally accountable media, and with a sense of history. The question with which we begin, therefore, is ‘Are things worse than they ever were? Or do we just know more?’ from which follows ‘is it enough to know without entering into the process of healing and making whole?’These questions pertain very much to how we view the future of the planet and the kind of lives our children and grandchildren will lead.

Somewhere embedded in these anxious questions also lies a deep yearning for the kind of wisdom which only comes with knowing and being known by a loving God. The knowing is in the yearning itself. We have a God who yearns with us, while being all powerful. This is a God who entrusts us with sufficient knowledge to overcome the evil and heal the brokenness of our world and society. He does not delegate. He entrusts. To leaders, whether political or religious, God also entrusts a certain power, and with it accountability. Again, he does not delegate..

That power is modelled and given in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It is sourced in him and finds its wisdom and purpose in him. Our own anxiety is also held in him and, in those moments where we are prepared to meet his gaze, taken into his ongoing life and into his love for the world. No power, in heaven or on earth, will separate us from that love or diminish his power to save the world from its self-inflicted destruction. 

The Power

Source: newrepublic.com

It is a kind of iconoclasm – the phalanx of suited men striding into the inner sanctum of freedom and democracy, its leader’s all too familiar jowl defiantly set. There are shades of the grim triumphant moments which augured so much ill for the free world in the early part of the last century. And in the background a super moon prompting other kinds of fears in the hearts of those whose religion risks dissolving into something like superstition – or could they be right perhaps? Added to signs, portents and Halloween is a toxic mixture of hatred in its various manifestations now legitimised (whatever he may say ‘to camera’)  by America’s billionaire celebrity President Elect. What are we to make of all this?

We are to shape hope out of common sense and right remembering, since this is also the season of remembrance. There are lessons to be learned from remembering the years which immediately preceded the last super moon. Realising that we have yet to learn from them means that it is not altogether too late. For one thing, we are being reminded that the legitimate voice of the oppressed and marginalised, especially when it goes unheeded for too long, will make itself heard through legitimate channels by the most dangerous means available to it. Or rather, it will allow itself to be used by the political opportunist wanting raw power.

Many will believe that the people have indeed spoken, when all that has happened is that their legitimate grievances, and the worst of human nature, have ‘morphed’ into one another and then been taken over by a man who wants only to win. One note of hope is that the existing democratic system will make it impossible for him to fully realise his most damaging ambitions in the longer term.

Another note of hope comes this Sunday. Many Christians will be keeping it as the Feast of Christ the King. One of the gospel readings tells us of Christ’s brief exchange with Pontius Pilate who is a weak leader desperate to hold on to power by trying to please all on whom his power depends. Pilate does not know what to do. He is very much afraid of the voice of the people. They have the power to accuse him of treason. They would have been a mixed lot, although mostly Christ’s own people who are now baying for his blood, the blood of Christ and possibly that of Pilate as well. Pilate must please them or his position, if not his life, will be in jeopardy, so he asks Jesus to give him a lead:  “What have you done?” The tone is urgent, even desperate.

The answer is silence, apart from a few short remarks, one pertaining to the nature and source of power itself and another to the nature of real authority. Jesus tells Pilate that real power comes from God. Real power is completely free because it is sustained, as well as given, by God alone in love and in trust. Pilate does not have real power, because he is at the mercy of the people’s voice, and he knows this.

The really powerful person knows that power has only been entrusted to them for the greater good of those they are there to serve. They will be accountable before God for what they have done with this power, as well as for how they have acquired it. All this would have been deeply unsettling for the Roman Procurator, as it would be for Donald Trump were he to have a similar conversation with Jesus today.

Jesus spoke of his purpose which was to ‘testify to the truth’. Words like ‘truth’ as it pertains to authority, are foreign to people like Pilate and Trump. It is not the language they speak. Authority comes with speaking and acting truthfully. It comes with integrity. Integrity implies singleness of loving purpose. We see no evidence of such a purpose in a power-hungry and emotionally unstable plutocrat.  We therefore discern no true authority in him.

Furthermore, the kind of power Jesus is talking about pertains to a different kind of world. In that world, that ‘kingdom’, if there is no true authority, there is no real power. So far, we have seen nothing of true authority in Mr. Trump or in any of his aides or supporters. But this does not mean that he does not have the power to wreak irreparable damage on our planet and on the world as we know it. But we are not to give up on this world, or on the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.

True authority is integral to the truth which is born of the love of God who is the source of all power. No wonder Pilate asks, sardonically, and again desperately, “What is ‘truth’?” The power of truth, and the authority it bestows, lies in sacrificial self-giving love. For those who hold it, power’s most disturbing and defining moment comes when they must acknowledge the truth about themselves in relation to the power entrusted to them, a power which may not sit well with the authority they believe they are exercising. Pilate knew this in the moment of his exchange with Jesus Christ. When will such a moment of truth occur for President Elect Donald Trump?

Honour-Bound

When it comes to deciding the future of nations, thinking ought to be a heart and mind

Source: fox11online.com

business, rather than a matter of gut feeling. Gut feeling has nothing to do with the mind and little with what is true and honest in the human heart. Gut feeling is emotional short term reactivism. When it is pandered to as a means to acquiring power it yields toxic results. Gut feeling licenses duplicity and it is gut feeling which is currently driving the American election. It is also shaping the news, because there is nothing else to shape it in regard to this election. 

In terms of the two candidates left in the ring, one of them is prevented from saying anything for which a person could conceivably vote. The other majors on people’s ‘gut feeling’. Gut feeling, especially in this highly personalised electoral conflict amounts to a celebration and further promotion of all that is least attractive, intelligent or desirable in human beings. At present, there seems to be no end to the dark tunnel this is taking us all into. The endless celebration of what is least honourable in human beings results, I think, in something like what we used to call Hell.  

A collective ignorance of history leads, as we know, to its being repeated. Gut feeling is all we have left on which to base world-changing decisions when we have not paused to make connections with the past. The most significant of these could be described as the political and religious extremes which feed on gut feeling and lead, often very quickly, to the worst kind of megalomaniac autocracy. Nero and Hitler spring to mind. Both, in their different ways, were popular with their people. Both owed much to gut feeling.

The question we are left with, then, is how can a nation be at its best when all it has to go on for its political decision-making is gut feeling which leads to damaging and highly contentious short-term decisions? I would suggest the revival of the idea of honour.

By honour I do not mean that which is associated with rank or prestige. I mean the kind of honour which, in the poetic tradition of courtly love, equates with courtesy. There is nothing shallow or short-lived about honour, or courtesy. In fact courtesy is one of the attributes of God. 

The 12^th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, spoke of Christ as her ‘courteous Lord’. Honour, as it pertains to courtesy, has to do with principled love, love which is both of the mind and heart, love whose principle lies in a willingness to sacrifice itself for the good of those it loves. We are not seeing very much of this in the two Presidential candidates, but perhaps it is alot to ask of two people who are fighting each other to the death by fair means or foul – most often foul.

Courtesy pertains to self-sacrificial dying, as does the traditional notion of honour when honour is enacted in love. ‘Honour’ killing is therefore an evil distortion of the meaning of that word. Evil is always a distortion of the good and we are seeing quite a bit of distortion of the good in this election.  Where lies and half lies masquerade as truth we have evil in the making. Where the worst in human nature is manipulated in a thinly disguised appeal for raw power, we have the raw material of corruption. But it is never too late for light to overcome even this particular darkness.

The sign of light overcoming darkness begins in what is known in scripture as ‘the scandal of the Cross’. The current US election has majored on scandal. Perhaps in the aftermath of this no-win situation, when the nation begins to heal from the damage it  has done to itself, it will regret the passing of one who served it honourably in his leadership, and with unfailing courtesy.  Perhaps it will learn for the future that we get the leaders we deserve.