from the edge

Saturday 21 January 2017

Please breathe

Source: Wikipedia
Children and babies cry in an alarming way. Once the crying really gets going, there comes a point when the child stops remembering to breath. He has no conscious method for letting go of the inhaled breath so that the next one can follow. A terrible momentary silence ensues. Were these fits of rage and anxiety to continue to be expressed in this way in adult life, you would think of such a person as suffering from some sort of narcissistic personality disorder in which hysteria can be usefully deployed for recording feelings and preferences and getting other people to gratify them. There are no prizes for guessing what adult in the public eye might fit such a description. For one thing, his inaugural address has been described as the angriest in his nation’s political history.

The question this leaves us with is not so much whether he will or will not follow through with his insane agenda, but how do the rest of us handle the anxiety which his behaviour generates for each one of us personally? I think we begin to handle it by remembering to breathe in a particular way. Most of us are not in a position to urge him to ‘breath’, although we still hope that there are people of power and influence who might still be able to do this, but it is not likely to be you or I. Instead, our task is to behave as we would if we were present at the scene of any other kind of emergency –we begin by making sure we are reasonably safe, lest we become a casualty ourselves, and then start looking around for those in need of help.

Thinking healing into the world politics of the moment works in a similar way and takes us to a comparable place. We have to be present to the anxiety and to the causes of it, without becoming a casualty ourselves. We do this through a kind of ‘breathing’. We begin by breathing in and as we breathe out, we drop down into our deep ‘centre’ – like going down in a lift, or elevator.

 This may sound like a rather introspective exercise, but it is quite the opposite. We drop down into the centre (also known as the ‘ground’) of our being in order to let go of everything we think we are – the layers and layers of false self-perceptions that have built up in our lives so far. We do this for a bit – a few minutes, a few hours, a few weeks maybe – until this ‘ground of being’ becomes our natural space, our habitat.

This is the space of the true self from which we can assess any situation calmly and objectively but also with compassion. In time, through doing this exercise, and ultimately living it, we will learn wisdom, and learn how to use wisdom in a measured way for the good of others and not for the enhancement or reassurance of our old ‘self’.

Learning wisdom is not the same thing as knowing the answers to the world’s problems or even, at times, to our own. It has to do with understanding how the tangled web which is the sum total of what is also called human ‘sinfulness’ has become so utterly intractable. The core of this understanding lies in knowing that any one aspect of human sinfulness – an individual’s lust for power and adulation and his or her indifference to the price which others will pay for it, for example – is potentially ‘redeemable’. By that I mean that it can be transformed, or better still, transfigured into something quite different, something which is in the gift of a merciful God and the outworking of God’s grace.

So, to return to the centering down exercise, we learn to encounter human sin in that deep place without being either anxious or frightened by its enormous implications, or instinctively hating or feeling revolted by its perpetrator. We remember that the perpetrator is bound up in his own darkness, in the addictive nature of his self-idolising behaviour, and we remember how easy it was for something comparable to happen in our own lives, and how disastrous it may have proved to be.


So we allow this dangerous person a little space in our deep place. We allow the light to touch him. We do not do this grudgingly. Quite the contrary. We do it as we beg wordlessly for mercy from within our deep place, so that he can be held by God, as we are. Ultimately, the grace which we make room for, as we simultaneously let go of our false self and of all the artificiality we have needed to sustain it, is felt as light and as a lightness of being. He needs to feel this too. It is the peace which literally ‘overcomes’ the world and governs our individual lives – ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’.

Friday 13 January 2017

Glimmer of Hope

Source: cbsnews.com
Yesterday, I read of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s moving tribute to the victims of Auschwitz, which he was visiting for the second time. There was another quite different tribute from President Obama, his farewell speech to the people he has served for the past eight years. I read or listened to them within hours of each other. In between, I took in my daily dose of the goings-on at Trump Tower and other power enclaves pertaining to the incoming US President and his chosen few, some of whom are already distancing themselves from their master. Hopefully, they will at least put some brakes on the madness.

Hope is what we need right now – hope in the face of real global danger and the human capacity for pure evil, as Archbishop Justin Welby described it from Auschwitz. Hope is sustained by a basic faith in people, that people have goodness and wisdom in them, even in the darkest of times.

Most of us hope we can simply do a little better this year than we did in previous years. But hope is not just a matter of wanting to do a little better. “Could do better” was what we used to read in our school reports, the most damning indictment and signal of hopelessness that any child could receive. I think I would have preferred to have been deliberately and downright bad at something, than to be told that I ‘could do better’. I have often wondered if the teacher was simply in a hurry to get through her pile of reports. Could she (it was always a ‘she’ in my case) put a face to the name? And if she could, did she care enough to qualify that terse remark, a remark which can completely skew an individual’s life? ‘Could do better’, but somehow never will.. because.. who knows? And who cares? Next report card.

There is a connection to be made here between authentic teachers and genuine leaders. Both have power to a greater or lesser extent, power over people’s lives or over the future of nations. Genuine, or authentic, leaders are also innately teachers. They have authority. What is needed from leaders is not power but authority. Power is not the same as authority and it rarely brings out the good either in those who have power or in those over whom they exercise it. It is possible to be powerful and have little or no genuine authority (as with certain media and business moguls) and equally possible to have real authority but little or no power, Christ himself being the supreme example of this.

Authentic leaders embody hope because they have this Christ-like authority. They have no need to posture in any way, to adopt a public figura. They are quite comfortable being who they are, even if they are not naturally gregarious. They do not court popularity or put themselves in a position where they are obliged to return favours. They simply want the best for the people they serve, whatever form their leadership takes, whatever the power, and whatever the status it does or does not bring with it. Their authority speaks to the goodness in people and so brings hope. As the outgoing President said in his farewell speech “Democracy works when our politics reflect the decency of our people”. Authentic leaders teach hope through example, thereby bequeathing real political authority to those they serve.

Authority in leaders is often recognised as a glimmer of hope, in small gestures which speak of mercy and the loving kindness of God. They have a certain way of making eye contact. They take a certain affectionate initiative in all their encounters with people. They often have formidable powers of recall. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury could meet someone in a local church gathering and remember their name, only having met the person a number of years before on the day he confirmed them. Years later, he would greet them in a way which signified genuine recognition, saying their name in the way you do when you meet an old friend. That is authentic leadership.

In embodying God’s mercy and loving kindness, authentic leaders are bearers of hope. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not conveyed through mere conviviality. It is not some passing joy, gone with the handshake. Optimism often comes with not being prepared to look at unpleasant realities and come to terms with the things, or the people, they fear – not being prepared to look them in the eye. For certain kinds of leaders, optimism is best conveyed through minimal eye contact because the optimist really has nothing to say to the person whose hand they are shaking. Eye contact makes a powerful person vulnerable to being asked questions. The slightest social exchange makes them accountable as leaders.


An optimist does not make a good leader. Authentic leaders will have looked at what people fear and felt the fear themselves, alone, perhaps as they pray or meditate. Such moments return them to their people in the deepest sense and return them to God who alone is the source of hope. Prayer and meditation return us to the place of our own innate goodness, and to where the wisdom of God indwells us as a people. It ought to be the bedrock of our politics.