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’.