No Laughing Matter

Somewhere towards the middle of yesterday’s Guardian there was an article lampooning Theresa May’s visit to Bridgend. In it, we read that ‘Supreme Leader Kim Jong-May’ received a ‘rapturous’ welcome. Perhaps this tells us something about Bridgend. Or is it that English public life (allowing for the fact that the event being described took place in Wales) now merits such headlines, in order to grab our attention, sated, as we are, with personality politics?

I am not a fan of Theresa May, or of her party, but I am not comfortable with her name being so closely associated with that of a baby-faced psychopath intent on global destruction. If a respected newspaper does this, it somehow implicates all of its readers so, as a regular reader of the Guardian, I am made uncomfortable by the idea that I am guilty by association if I find the suggestion at all funny.

But perhaps we are all guilty by association, when it comes to the politics of the day and how they are reported in the newspapers we read.  After all, we are a free society, ideally made up of properly informed individuals empowered to make choices through the legitimate means of the ballot box. We may not be able to effect much change as individuals, but we are still part of a free society. We belong to one another. It therefore behoves newspapers like the Guardian to weigh up its intent in regard to the kind of democracy most of us aspire to, when it comes to how it lampoons the current Prime Minister, at least while she is still in a position to determine the nation’s future and plays some part, again, by association, in that of the rest of the world. Headlines and trivial articles such as the one I am referring to are neither fair nor funny.

Setting aside personal reservations about the present government which is, after all, largely responsible for the mess we are currently in (it was they who called a referendum to sort out their internal squabbles over Europe and arguably to get themselves re-elected under David Cameron), the worrying thing about that headline is that it closely associates us with a society which is far from free and is likely to remain so for some time. Its leader wields absolute power and is directly responsible for human suffering on a vast scale, as are other despotic tyrants. We are also warned by reliable medical sources that the leader of the free world, who holds similar power, is equally unstable when it comes to his state of mind. All of this presents us with a frightening scenario.

What we are looking at is the potential for chaos, in the fullest sense of the word. Chaos happens when societies fall apart because there is not enough of a sense of collective responsibility for their historic future, or when individuals in the context of community, family and relationships no longer feel accountable for the stability which those cohesive agents ought to maintain. As with the mathematical chaos theory itself, it is the smaller elements which bring about the most significant change, for better or for worse. But herein also lies hope.

The Christian idea of prayer is grounded in a sense of responsibility for the greater good of the other, beginning with the least and the smallest. This is what is meant by the words ‘Thy Kingdom come’ which were taught to his followers by Christ himself. To pray, in the fullest sense of the word, is not about cultivating a sense of denial about the realities we face, hoping that somehow things will work out for the best. Rather, it is about embracing reality in the present moment or, better put, ‘facing into’ it. Christian prayer is not simply about asking that things will or won’t happen. It is about taking the reality of either of these scenarios into the deepest and darkest place of our own psyche and allowing it to be seen by God. Words may come but they are by no means essential. What is essential is the truth, sincerity or integrity of what it is we are bringing, beginning with ourselves.

Bringing ourselves to God will involve coming to terms with both private and collective fear and with the helplessness we all feel in the face of  what is going on in world politics today. The Guardian, perhaps inadvertently, made light of these fears in the article I have referred to, but they are no laughing matter.  

In the immediate present, we are given to ‘face into’ the chaos of the prevailing climate of election fever, both at home and abroad. At the same time, we ‘face into’ the uncertainty which is both the cause and the result of break-up and fragmentation, on the one hand, and of the false sense of strength and power which comes with isolationism in international relations, and obscurantism in religion, on the other. Pockets of resistance, like Christians in the Middle East, or moderate Muslims, or indigenous inhabitants of lands which could profitably be exploited for valuable timber, oil or shale gas, have a hard time of it. We ‘face into’ their darkness as well, doing so in the knowledge that to the God we worship in Jesus ‘darkness is not dark. The night is as bright as the day’. (Ps. 139:12)

This apparent paradox is not a denial of reality, but the embracing of a greater reality. It is the reality of Easter itself, of the risen Christ alive in every possible sense of the word, inviting us to live this message, beginning with our willingness to take responsibility for the madness of power and of those who want it at any price, as we face into the darkness but speak and live in the light of the risen Christ.

Alive

Dawn (author generated)

Perhaps the less said the better when it comes to Easter, as opposed to Christmas with all its its carolling and food preparation. There is a different kind of build-up to Christmas. Setting aside the present-buying hype with all its attendant pressures, Advent, if you take it seriously, is about light and darkness. The days shorten as, each Sunday, another candle is lit, insistent light piercing the growing darkness.

Easter has a very different prelude. There are the long weeks of Lent, coinciding with the lengthening days of early Spring as they lead us into Holy Week. Lent was originally intended as a time of preparation for baptism, culminating in the deep darkness of Holy Week.

Holy Week is an invitation to re-learn the art of remembering aright, remembering how things are, coming to terms with the reality which we can only bear in very small doses, given the weakness of human nature and our capacity for self delusion. The triumph of Palm Sunday leads almost immediately to the betrayal which follows the last supper, and the hours of agonised prayer in a garden near the city while others slept.

Our lives are summed up in these six pivotal days, as our mortality is defined by them. Many churches end their Maundy Thursday liturgy by a stripping of the altars, followed by the resounding closure of the church bible. The sound will echo around the darkened empty church, a reminder of the transience of worldly things, the fickleness of popularity and success, and the fear of oblivion with which we associate death itself. Good Friday follows, and then the long wait through Holy Saturday when tradition tells us that Christ descended into hell to rescue Adam and poor old Judas. The Church waits in silence for his return.

Then comes Easter, the most unexpected kind of return, redolent of the silence and subtlety of the beginning of all things. The reality of the Resurrection has a way of dawning on us quite gradually, as it must have done for those who first witnessed it. It happened, we presume, at first light, that moment when after a long night of sleepless watching, we realise that the night darkness is not darkness any more. There is a softness and a secrecy about this realised moment.

Belief in the Resurrection is about realisation. It is something understood at the deepest intuitive level of the human psyche, what we might call the ‘soul’. The triumph of the Resurrection is commensurate with the triumph of the Cross. It is about forgiveness. There is a deep and almost hidden joy about it, a joy which takes hold of us as if by stealth. This is what we experience as new life in a moment of real forgiveness.

The dawn moment, for those who take part in the great Easter Liturgy, is subtle. It is ‘silent as light’, to quote a certain well known hymn. It returns us to the silence of the beginning of all things, a beginning that simply was, rather than ‘existed’ in any kind of mathematically construed time framework. It also returns us to the defining ‘yes’ of a young girl’s acquiescence to God’s invitation to be at one with her and, because of her courageous obedience, with us.

So it is also about the relatedness which is intrinsic to God’s being. To talk of the ‘existence’ of God is to limit God’s being, to try to render it down to our level of understanding, to deny the mystery of what we call the Trinity and to deny his relatedness to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection was not a matter of reviving a corpse. It was, and is, about the risen and glorious body, something which we will ultimately share in, as we shall fully share in the relatedness of God’s own life.

The Resurrection is divine mystery. As Christ said to his friends shortly before his death, there is much more that we could know but, like his friends, we would not be able to bear such knowledge. From this it follows that the Resurrection is a mystery because we cannot fully understand its implications,  or perhaps we are not ready for them until we understand them in the moment of our dying. We are not yet able to fully embrace the mystery of the Resurrection because of our inability to live with the kind of joy which is unique to Easter, or, put differently, because of our unwillingness to live in the contemplation of God.