In Such Times: Reflections on Living With Fear

By Duty Bound

Source: nme.com

We are now well into the Netflix series, The Crown. It is compulsive viewing, not just because of its brilliant performances and direction but because, for me at any rate, it speaks of things relating to the idea of duty. We seldom hear of duty these days, or think of it in the way the monarchy must think of it, as a binding relationship between love for a people and what must be done for the preservation of an institution. Neither do we think of how duty makes victims of those who are bound by it in the exercising of power, of the choices they must make and of the terrible failures which these choices can bring in their wake.

You could say that when duty is bound by love it ceases to damage those it serves, but from the moment duty hurts or blights another life love has taken leave of duty. No matter what the powerful person’s subjective feelings may be, they are, in this respect, the victims of their own power. This was the situation which Pontius Pilate found himself in.

The idea of duty has gone from being out of fashion to downright embarrassing. It’s not something you talk about. Faithfulness to duty seems like a cold, almost inhuman virtue, having nothing to do with love. Kant would have approved of this uncoupling of love with duty. But we, as a compassionate society, like to think that we would never countenance doing something out of duty which would knowingly hurt another person.

In that case, what of honour, and ‘honour’ killing? What of FGM? For some, these terrible actions are a matter of duty. But are we responsible for such actions when those who do them have an entirely different understanding of duty, of its place and purpose in society, than we do? Of course we are responsible, not only because the law of our country forbids such things, but because we are all responsible for everyone’s wellbeing and safety. Duty and responsibility go together. It follows that we are all accountable to the highest power for the extent that we do or do not exercise what we now call a ‘duty of care’ to others.

Those with the most power and influence bear the greatest responsibility for the duty of care for those whose lives they affect. They are therefore the first to be held accountable to that highest power. They are accountable for the lives which their decisions will affect, inasmuch as they have the power to influence them for better or for worse. Doing the right thing out of love may cost them their position. Pontius Pilate knew this only too well, but Jesus reminds him of who he is ultimately accountable to. At the same time, Pilate is not a free agent. Unlike the betrayer, he is bound by his duty to a system, the Roman Empire. It is Judas who, in reality, held the greater power. He was a free agent, compared to Pontius Pilate.

For the powerful, doing one’s duty is not always commensurate with doing the right thing. Duty bound by love is constrained. Love places a constraint on ill considered actions which arise from a sense of the dominant power of duty, in all positions of leadership. Love makes requirements of duty, not the other way round. But the good news is that love ‘unbinds’. It unbinds leaders who are prepared to take the risk of going beyond duty for the sake of love, when they are in a position to do so.

The Crown reminds us that powerful people are not free agents. They are not always in a position to make decisions in which love has the last say, even if they would like to be. We tend to judge the actions of powerful people from the safe distance of hindsight, forgetting the constraints, mores, and even lack of communication which may have complicated matters still further at the time. We have a duty to these powerful people, a duty coupled with the love we ourselves receive from the highest power and for which we must allow safe passage to whoever has wronged us either recently or in the past. The prayer taught by Jesus obliges us to take responsibility for them in our memories, to forgive, as we have been forgiven, to allow God’s love safe passage.

This is not about whitewashing over the past and pretending that wrongs were never done. Neither is it about forcing ourselves to feel lovingly towards people who have wronged us, when we do not. That is simply to prolong a lie, and the lie may be part of the ongoing pain and damage we are still having to endure. Taking responsibility for those who have wronged us is about owning those fragile human beings, even if they are dead, along with the pain they caused, and may still be causing – even if they are dead. This is as true for nations as it is for the individual. Love dictates duty when it comes to doing what is needed for salvation to happen among us.

Wilderness Times

Re-visiting the blog after a 2 month absence (I’ve been working on a new book) is a fast forward exercise, lurching from pre-Christmas to one week into Lent. It feels like a pale replica of how I have always imagined travelling at the speed of light, compressed and outside time. This year’s transition from the post-Christmas season to the beginning of Lent makes life feel compressed, as it might be in inter-galactic space travel. It has left little room for mental or emotional adjustment. We are travelling at the speed of light towards light.

Easter being early this year, there has been very little time to re-adjust to the season of Lent. Epiphanytide ended rather abruptly less than 10 days ago and Lent has suddenly arrived with the first snowdrops. The wilderness season is upon us wrapped into the season of gestation and first growth. In this particular wilderness season, the one which presages ultimate and eternal life, we are obliged to think about what must come first, which is death.

This week’s Observer Magazine features an article about death (‘Memento Mori’ by Emma Beddington). It is a brave article. It also invites Christians to distance themselves momentarily from what we believe about death and re-engage with this unpopular subject from another perspective, the one which many people are most used to, which is simply the fact that ‘WeCroak’.  

‘WeCroak’ is now a phone app which reminds its user of the truth about their own mortality several times during a single day. Lent is a season for dealing with truths that most of us would rather not face, especially the ultimate truth that we must all die. You could say that it is a rehearsal period for death itself.

The only really frightening aspect of death is that, when the moment comes, we may not be quite ready for it, so it is essential to come to terms with this fact if we are not to be taken unawares by death. The purpose of Lent is to provide a space for facing the reality of our own mortality and of the passing of all things, both good and evil.  The phone app is useful here because it simply says, as it pipes up in its random way (there is no set time-table), that whatever you are doing or thinking or saying right now, this precise moment could be your last. What, therefore, would you really like to be doing, thinking or saying?

Facing into death is also essential for knowing how to live. We face into death by facing into the reality, or truth, about the present moment, or of our present set of circumstances. Am I at this moment bored? Or hungry? Or short of sleep? How do these feelings and states of health colour my responses to the needs of others? The last question is the one that matters most because our lives are bound up with other lives, especially those we deal with on a day to day basis.

This is not to suggest that Lent is a time for repression and arduous discipline aimed at some kind of mind enhancement or dubious self improvement. It is a time for defeating the kind of death which destroys the individual from within and then goes on to destroy society and the world we inhabit. Every individual is responsible for the greater whole.

We begin to address the questions which pertain to the present moment by throwing out old habits of mind which have passed their ‘sell by’ date, so to speak. What we thought yesterday about any given issue or person pertains to memory, and after a while memory can become skewed. Memories need to be revisited, and this may not always change them for the better. The truth of a memory sometimes has to be revealed as worse than we had thought it was. Facing into this truth is also a kind of dying, dying to the lies we have grown accustomed to living with.  

Lent is wilderness time, patterned on the forty days endured by Christ in the desert when he would have faced into the truth about himself and his life’s purpose – and questioned it. Lent is a time for questioning and for facing into doubt. The biggest questions are invariably presaged with the word ‘if’.

For Jesus, temptation also came as doubt: “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread (you know you can do anything and you must, of course, take sensible measures when it comes to your own comfort and wellbeing)”. It came as “If you are the Son of God, jump off this great height (and show them all who you really are. You know you won’t die – or do you?”)

Lent invites doubt. But we need doubt if we are to know the truth about ourselves, and hence about the purpose of our life and of our own mortality. Lent obliges us to seek out and face into doubt, as we return to our own particular wilderness, to our compressed memories and to the truth about what we are doing, thinking or saying in the present moment. The good news about Lent is that we are never alone in our memories or in any of our doubts.