Never Alone

‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7) Passive resistance enacted for all time in active submission. There is something there for all of us.

When it comes to suffering, sanity and survival depend on duality of purpose, on both accepting and resisting whatever situation we are going through personally, or perhaps as a nation. We cannot resist until we have learned to accept reality. I think this is especially true of what we are seeing in Western politics at present. What is happening in both Europe and America is neither a dream from which we will soon wake up, or some kind of game which will end well, even if we are taken to the very brink of self annihilation. It is reality, but it can be resisted. The same goes for our own lives. If we are going through hell, even a hell of our own making, it is still hell. But it can be resisted, rather than simply endured.

Life is not given to us to be simply endured. It is to be lived. But we cannot live, or even endure, without a sense of others being there, or perhaps having been there before us. In the context of neo-conservatism, which is the new fascism, and its subliminal nastiness, we know that others have been there before. Knowing this, we are sustained by the memory of previous generations, of the passive resistance of millions who lived under occupation in the last world war and in the active resistance of those who fought, even if their natural inclinations were to peace. It takes courage and humility to go against one’s natural inclinations when needs must.

 

Something comparable goes on in our own individual hard times. If we have known unconditional love, if we have been the centre of someone else’s world, with or without our knowing it at the time, the realisation of that love and the memory of that person keeps us company. Such memories sometimes consist of no more than a single passing moment of kindness, as the validation of one’s pain, of one’s humanity, perhaps by a stranger. 

The knowledge of this love supplies what is needed when it comes to both accepting and resisting whatever pain and suffering we are currently facing. The effect of that memory is to place us outside the pain, so that we can, for a moment at least, observe it and learn from it. We learn from the pain and suffering in experiencing once again the love. So in it, we also learn to love more deeply and, later perhaps, actively respond to the pain and injustice endured by others. Learning to respond to others in this way is the purpose of life and of all its hard moments.

It is also the essence of what we call hope. Where there has been sacrificial love, love which has perhaps gone unnoticed, there has also been hope. Love makes it possible to believe in a future, for ourselves and for our world. To live in hope is not delusionary. Delusion is more often comprised of a mixture of fatalism and blind optimism which, taken together, amount to very little. They do not require anything of us, or commit us to anyone. 

Fatalism is a kind of passive acceptance which simply returns us to ourselves. It does not enable any life giving connection. It does not feed the hunger of the heart, or assuage the mind’s restlessness. We are still left asking ‘why?’ Optimism, in its thinness, also returns us to this same place of non-acceptance.

The Isaiah passage I have just quoted refers to a deliverer, one who would restore a nation to itself, to what it was intended to be. For Christians it speaks, rather enigmatically, of another deliverer, one who in his own acceptance of suffering meets us in ours, wherever we are and whatever spiritual path we are currently travelling along. He validates our suffering there. He meets us on that path, using the language and thought processes with which we are most at home. 

Where human beings accept this invitation to be at one with him, even if only in a fleeting moment of recognition, they are no longer alone in their suffering. The Saviour of the world keeps company with them.

What's Needed

Fiction is good for the soul. Other books, like the one I’m reading now about girls’ boarding schools, have a rather different effect. This one is what I would call a ‘trigger’. Read Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979 and you will be immediately transported to a time and place where you were made to gargle with TCP or had grazes and cuts swabbed with barely diluted dettol – though admittedly not something described in the book so far.

Wounds healed pretty quickly with the Dettol treatment. I think this book is a healing book, even if painful to read for those of us who endured the boarding school experience at any time during the period it covers. It rekindles associations; the smell of polish and Dettol among others. But far more significant than these sensory associations are the buried memories of toxic relationships which these associations trigger in later life. 

It is strange to think that adult women – nuns in my case – could with impunity vent their internalized anger, frustration, loneliness and perhaps bitter loss on a select few among a couple of hundred girls aged 7 to 15. No physical abuse occurred, but the memory of Sister Dismas endures. She would appear silently in a dormitory, gently stroking the leather strap the nuns wore around their waists as she raised a single dark eyebrow, her attention bearing down on one terrified child, until a frozen silence gripped us all and, in some weird and disturbing way, bound us to her for the rest of our lives. You don’t forget such people.

There were times, when you were still quite young – 8 or 9 perhaps – when you wanted to love these nuns. You might even have tried to hug them. But they did not know what to do with a hug. They had lost the knack. I think they sometimes wanted to return it, but could not, because their straightened lives had accustomed them not to need whatever it is that an eight year old’s needy hug might elicit from them – what needs of their own it might trigger.

Perhaps our own needs as children were channelled into a kind of ornate beauty which stood out all the more because of the starkness of these emotional surroundings. There were the Corpus Christi processions, the silence and safety of the chapel, a sensed presence of something or someone coming through all the Latin and the incense in whom we small girls in our veils (repeatedly darned by the nuns during the holidays) could confide with complete trust. We learned very quickly, I think, that there was no need to say anything or even to think holy thoughts, although I did admittedly once ask to become holy.

My father visited me shortly afterwards (a rare occurrence) to reassure himself that I wasn’t going to become a nun. I wasn’t. Such moments of wanting ‘something else’ for one’s life often come, and then go, in a person’s early years. But they leave behind a sense of need for something like holiness. It might re-surface later, triggered by circumstances or a crisis, or by something evoking what the Corpus Christi processions left in their wake, like trailing incense. It is easy to confuse holiness with ‘atmosphere’. But worse is the way we can render ourselves incapable of recognising holiness, and our need for it, when we come across it in other people, which we do whenever love is returned.

Children feel holiness initially as having to do with being made to feel uniquely significant and wanted. The same is true of the elderly and the vulnerable. So governments, though secular, have a duty to be holy and to nurture holiness in others, beginning with children and all vulnerable people. Their duty does not lie in shoring up the system but in loving the people. The same could be said of the Church.

Governments might begin such a systemic transformation by focusing on schools where there are insufficient teachers, or where teachers are hampered in their duty of loving care by the kind of perverse legalism which forbids them to hug a child or tend to him or her physically if that child is hurt. Governments could focus their attention, and their funding, on hospitals where cuts have rendered whatever medical care they can give ineffectual in the longer term. Or they could look to the real needs of understaffed care homes where loving care is sometimes in very short supply.

As with the convent of my school days, holiness, which is love, is no less available to policy makers or senior clergy than it is to children. Indeed, it is required of us all and is there for the asking. Christ has promised as much.  

What Ever Happened to the Cure of Souls?

Is ‘leadersmithing’ what the Church really needs these days? An article in last week’s Church Times (Comment, Church Times 3^rd March, 2017) has left me wondering about this. 

Leadership, as the article suggests, is becoming more than ever a skill, ideally to be learned in one of those hothouses for training talent-spotted future bishops and archbishops. 'The word 'leadersmith' implies something like 'coping'. It also has a rough hewn edge to it. It resonates with the earth and the workaday business of the factory shop floor. But the sad reality, when it comes to leadership in the Church, is that it is more often about stress of management. Perhaps the emphasis on the kind of skill needed to achieve and then survive in high office in the Church also involves learning how to engage with the kind of rivalry that goes on beneath the surface when career clericalism is revealed for what it really is.

  

While ambition and personal advancement are to be expected, though not necessarily desirable, in the context of secular organisations, is ‘leadersmithing’, really how the Church of God should be shaping its future leaders? I seem to remember Christ warning his disciples against such an approach, offering them instead a young child as a model of true leadership. Perhaps he was thinking of Isaiah 11:6. Admittedly, the child must have been very young, given that most children, once they are old enough to go to playgroup, very quickly learn how to fend for themselves in regard to power and territorial ownership. Chanel 4’s The Secret Life of Four Year Olds ought to be mandatory viewing for those picked for high office in the Church.

Power and being childlike are, of course, incompatible. Furthermore, power is seldom accompanied by authority. With a few notable exceptions (Barack Obama and Pope Francis being two of them), powerful people are often more childish than childlike, especially when their grip on power is threatened. More than one world leader springs to mind in this latter regard. These people have little genuine authority. They are an example of how childishness, if not outgrown in childhood, becomes dominant self interest in later life. Dominant self interest, and the envious rivalry to which it too often gives rise, does not elicit respect or bestow the kind of authority needed for true leadership.

True leadership brings with it the authority which comes with transparent love for the people a leader is called to serve. This is what Jesus meant by being childlike. A leader who has this quality will be instantly recognisable and trusted because the nature of their love is essentially sacrificial. For clergy, whatever their rank, sacrificial love is what is entailed in what used to be called ‘the cure of souls’. It remains the essence of our calling today.

Having the cure of souls involves commitment to God. In other words, it involves all the time that it takes for a person to be able to see themselves and others as God sees them. In terms of how they perceive themselves, this will inevitably lead to a ‘refining’ sacrifice. The cure of souls involves the refining of one’s own soul first. For one thing, it will demand that the ordained person be prepared to let go of all that they hold to be important in terms of their career in the Church.

Career clericalism is arguably one of the aspects of Church life which most undermines the work of mission and evangelism. There are few things more incompatible with the good news of Christ’s gospel than a distant and overly busy bishop who has little time for his or her clergy – or the priest who, when the peace is being shared, is too busy looking to see how many people are in church that Sunday to make eye contact with the person in front of them who is in need of a small moment of their undivided loving attention. Those who turn to the clergy for wisdom or understanding may want to speak of their hidden fears in regard to the state of the world, or to someone they love. They expect to see, or sense, the loving kindness of God working through the priest or bishop. They expect to see the face of Christ in that person. Sometimes they do.