tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58540624318307166092024-02-21T16:25:06.664-08:00Christian faith in the here and nowLorraine Cavanagh's Blog
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.comBlogger195125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-30174723519102758602018-12-06T03:00:00.001-08:002018-12-06T03:00:01.749-08:00In Such Times: Reflections on Living With Fear<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7aA8zZXooIw" width="459"></iframe>Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-4853118431740065732018-03-03T05:56:00.001-08:002018-03-03T05:56:40.186-08:00By Duty Bound<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig5Qu2aYXSxQji_k5FejZKaOAKmub_uZ-wo1sW3Qtv2X5Z71Yw2LpuOsqyG7oMaSNxGcrhlkcSIklB0hV5g6FdMmFV-UplMy1PayW8qEU-6Qhkpr4W-_xzTui5Ldn51MA7q3hRSPEHyUuf/s1600/The-Crown-920x584.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="920" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig5Qu2aYXSxQji_k5FejZKaOAKmub_uZ-wo1sW3Qtv2X5Z71Yw2LpuOsqyG7oMaSNxGcrhlkcSIklB0hV5g6FdMmFV-UplMy1PayW8qEU-6Qhkpr4W-_xzTui5Ldn51MA7q3hRSPEHyUuf/s200/The-Crown-920x584.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: nme.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are now well into the Netflix series, <i>The Crown</i>. 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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="line-height: 115%;">The
Crown</span></i><span style="line-height: 115%;"> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><s style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></s></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-27320736919348732402018-02-19T05:47:00.000-08:002018-02-19T05:47:08.131-08:00Wilderness Times<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRDh3_1zjRZF5UZzPloKJgDABrHMc02f0QHuNkkjD6ULGBr2YYm5iC6Ip9-aihe_aNB1n9cfc4d72dlGf_XO92zNlq3LCOdi7IEM4V_DNXbrSziH_JsPuyuBbueu7nFbibWXt_aiNn5eG/s1600/Ultra-HD-Stone-Wallpaper-1WC4006476.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRDh3_1zjRZF5UZzPloKJgDABrHMc02f0QHuNkkjD6ULGBr2YYm5iC6Ip9-aihe_aNB1n9cfc4d72dlGf_XO92zNlq3LCOdi7IEM4V_DNXbrSziH_JsPuyuBbueu7nFbibWXt_aiNn5eG/s320/Ultra-HD-Stone-Wallpaper-1WC4006476.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This week’s <i>Observer
</i>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’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">‘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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For Jesus, temptation also came as doubt: “<i>If</i> 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 “<i>If</i> 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?”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-18110636707076515022017-12-16T05:07:00.000-08:002017-12-29T10:40:41.904-08:00More Than 'Ho, Ho, Ho'<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4YrlA66jgdVlPFKDxLaVfuQ5BRnsglhySGgBjcL_fkvZX1BSSDpp4Y0OXvxH5G6-Kts-Qviq4EVg8jMCmOtGp4rPIa4Z3CgUqHlMz2CJacDNOj0kf1V4Fuu2ZZ_rCS6jQ65JGMj70sHb4/s1600/big-issue-seller-on-street-at-christmas-abergavenny-wales-uk-ed44y4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="396" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4YrlA66jgdVlPFKDxLaVfuQ5BRnsglhySGgBjcL_fkvZX1BSSDpp4Y0OXvxH5G6-Kts-Qviq4EVg8jMCmOtGp4rPIa4Z3CgUqHlMz2CJacDNOj0kf1V4Fuu2ZZ_rCS6jQ65JGMj70sHb4/s200/big-issue-seller-on-street-at-christmas-abergavenny-wales-uk-ed44y4.jpg" width="146" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: Alamy.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One of our <i>Big
Issue</i> sellers has decided to be Father Christmas. I chat with him from time to time </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">during the year and buy his paper, so there is a sort of affinity
between us. There is something about good conversation, however brief it is, which
connects you to a person. If you talk with them often enough you discover a
sort of kinship. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Another </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Big Issue</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">
seller in our town has grandchildren in Romania. She has to get on a bus and
travel for an hour or so to get to her ‘patch’. It is not the only bus she has
taken in recent years and we have often talked about this, and about what it
feels like to have children and grandchildren living far away. We occasionally
give each other a hug on parting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Our Father Christmas seller is also from Romania. He is
trying very hard to convince passersby of the festive nature of this season,
but his “Ho, Ho, Ho” sounds a little tired and uncertain. He is imitating another
people’s language, after all, rather than speaking it. He finds it difficult to
speak their language because he does not quite understand their mindset, especially
in regard to him and to other Romanians. Also, I do not think that a jocund
Father Christmas, or the real reason for the festivities, are at the forefront
of the minds of many of those who pass him by, whether or not they pick up a
copy of the <i>Big Issue</i>. If they do
pick one up, they are more likely to do so out of a mingled sense of helplessness
and guilt, rather than as a result of having paused for the kind of exchange
which brings joy to all parties involved.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There is a transparency about this whole scenario, in
regard to the seller dressed as Father Christmas, as if we all know that it is
a rather tired game. But when I stop to talk with him, or even as I think of
him, I see through the Santa disguise to his frailty. I also sense the
uncertainties and anxieties of others in the street, and their frailty too. One or
two of them are wearing Santa hats. Another wears a bright pink coat, an early
Christmas present, perhaps. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There is a certain pathos about it all. This being said,
I would not describe the situation as an unhappy one. It is just normality
trying to enter into the spirit of the season. Everyone is trying very hard, but
most are unsure of its purpose, or of the meaning of the festival itself.
Perhaps they would rather it was called something else, as it sometimes is. In
the US you wish people ‘happy holidays’, rather than happy Christmas. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But in Romania, Christ is still at the heart of it all.
It is still Christ-mas. Presents are exchanged on December 6<sup>th</sup>, St.
Nicholas Day, and the season extends into early January with an emphasis on family
and community and with much carol singing and different kinds of festive foods.
My <i>Big Issue</i> seller, dressed as Santa
Claus, must be feeling quite disorientated as he stands alone outside a
clothing retail chain next to a chemist. The shops have somehow obliterated the
saintliness of Nicholas. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps he senses that many of the people in the street
are wondering what they are doing there too, and he feels a kind of affinity
with their anxiety and uncertainty about the meaning and purpose of all this
shopping. There is an underlying greeting, and even something of prayer, in his
rather tremulous “Ho, Ho, Ho”. For a moment, the pedestrian precinct is a quite
different place. It is transfigured. We sense the words ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ penetrating
the banality of the words being called out by the <i>Big Issue</i> seller. They seem to be spoken from within human history,
projected by the Romanian from his own culture and religion. I think he is also
picking up on something in our collective subconscious, the need to say ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ in response to a divine greeting sensed in rare moments of
stillness during this season. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Christ of Christmas is waiting to greet us. He knows
us well and greets us in his vulnerability, in the risk he takes in coming into
the obscurity of his own circumstances, of having to be born in someone’s
garage. In the years to come, he will know more rejection and disappointment.
He will know pain and failure, as we do, but he will embrace our pain and
failure with a child’s joy. He experiences the same joy in encountering us, as
he did that first odd assortment of visitors, a couple of farm labourers and
three foreign dignitaries. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Joy runs deeper than happiness. It is mined in a far
deeper seam. Joy endures and withstands all manner of suffering because it is
of the very nature of God who is love itself, love Incarnate, love become one
of us. I sense that the Romanian </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Big
Issue</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> seller knows this. It will keep him going in the bleak months ahead. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><br />
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-23202649331262325822017-12-03T08:34:00.000-08:002017-12-03T08:34:47.370-08:00Season of Hope<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHwFn0bk0sDSVNVdrBxXmgAewolA0I7yiUAniLLFsI2-bh0L_uOb-3lOH1eGXet429tMUPAhFBOHJWQ2T4EZtnX0BCMw4-ej-4H3s4BAND8a1tu-QvTQLjy0f-6sGkQfoc9euIEwKdLwE9/s1600/free-advent-backgrounds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHwFn0bk0sDSVNVdrBxXmgAewolA0I7yiUAniLLFsI2-bh0L_uOb-3lOH1eGXet429tMUPAhFBOHJWQ2T4EZtnX0BCMw4-ej-4H3s4BAND8a1tu-QvTQLjy0f-6sGkQfoc9euIEwKdLwE9/s200/free-advent-backgrounds.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This week a man was given his life back. He has been in
prison for 20 years for crimes he did not commit. It is said that he will get
compensation, although it is hard to see what will compensate for the loss of
20 years of a person’s life and with it, presumably, friends, family, career
and reputation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What do people who are wrongfully imprisoned dream of
during their years of mental, physical and emotional deprivation? It must take
a while to even get to the stage of dreaming. Perhaps you give up in the end
and simply try to survive on what little you have in the way of personal
resources – the resources which enable you to believe in yourself and in the possibility
that justice will be done. Perhaps you dare not hope, because hope embodies a
kind of certainty. It is about looking forward to something that you are
certain is going to happen, in the way only children know how to do. Years of
captivity can grind away such innocence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If we retain enough of our childhood innocence we will
not have quite forgotten how to hope. There is an excitement about hope which
moves us forward and teaches us to see the goodness in others. Hope, and the
certainty it promises, derives from the love which is its source. Looking
forward to something good is a quite different feeling to what is experienced
when, sadly, we relish the moment in the future when someone will get their
just deserts, or when we will be finally vindicated at someone else’s expense.
These things may well happen, but the moment, when it comes, will feel hollow. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The difficulty about hope is that the things we look
forward to with eagerness, joy and even a degree of trepidation, do not always
happen, or work out in the way we had thought they would. So there is always
the risk of pain. Daring to hope is also being willing to accept pain and even disappointment.
Dealing with disappointment is the risk we take when we dare to hope in the
fullest sense of the word. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For many children Advent is a season of eager
expectation, having mainly to do with looking forward to receiving Christmas
presents. For others it is not. The presents are spoiled by circumstances;
fighting parents, the death of someone they love, the looming cloud of debt
which is part of the reason that their parents are fighting. The looking
forward ends in anxiety and sometimes fear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Advent is the season for a ‘looking forward’ which never
disappoints. If we engage with it as the beginning of God’s fulfilled promise,
we will not be left stranded on the rock of disappointment, or returned to
ourselves as we were before we began to look forward to the fulfillment of the
promise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The best of our usual expectations often return us to
ourselves, not because we are selfish or unimaginative, but because so often
there is nothing much beyond whatever it is we are looking forward to. Hope
embodies the promise that there is something greater and better than what we
know of ourselves, something that can make a positive difference to the lives
of others. Hope embodies the idea that we are valued and capable of immense
goodness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Christian story is good news because it allows for
the possibility that our expectations can be transfigured, including the often
limited expectations we have of ourselves. So the good news of the coming of
God’s Christ obliges us to live in such a way as to be bearers of hope. As hope-bearers
we give others permission to act and think from the goodness within them, even
if that goodness is not at all apparent. The hope which is given to us in the season
of Advent requires that we shine a light into their darkness and into the
darkness which surrounds us, so that goodness, or ‘righteousness’ may be
released into it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is one aspect of the activity of prayer – holding the
world and our neighbour in their darkness until they emerge into the light. Anyone
who has traveled by air will know the feeling of emerging into bright sunlight
when the plane, as it takes off, finally penetrates the grey of the place they
left behind. The hope promised us in Christ takes us, and all for whom we pray,
through the dark realities which surround us and into that place of light. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-80652073766822041452017-10-18T04:46:00.000-07:002017-10-18T04:46:30.723-07:00#MeToo - What of Forgiveness?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmVqMBa7s0Kj-m0EpHpGwR7IUzo8i-Wiic5qlieJaTGqoTudpBNyhcechkj4UOh63KhRHoxZjU49fB_PYOvcqbtoedL6hFmc_IbdleGHPB0anrzP0YbHIAFoc96x9LX4LfwJVBBbw2UO3O/s1600/MeToo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmVqMBa7s0Kj-m0EpHpGwR7IUzo8i-Wiic5qlieJaTGqoTudpBNyhcechkj4UOh63KhRHoxZjU49fB_PYOvcqbtoedL6hFmc_IbdleGHPB0anrzP0YbHIAFoc96x9LX4LfwJVBBbw2UO3O/s200/MeToo.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source:hellogiggles.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The easiest way to deal with the wounds of abuse – any abuse
– is to think nothing, (never mind say nothing), either of the past or of the
present. You just ‘deal with it’, a very apt expression, but one which, if
acted upon, can be toxic. For one thing, it is a lie. You never ‘deal with it’,
so why, at any point in history, do we pretend that this is possible? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
#MeToo movement is epoch changing, not only because it goes some way towards
validating the suffering of the victims of abuse, but because it gives us all
permission to re-connect with and, in some measure, own, our pain. We do this privately,
in our own dark corridors of remembrance, and in solidarity with others in the
#MeToo movement. We also do it in solidarity with other generations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Abuse, as we well know, is not an emerging phenomenon. It
has been around for centuries, so it helps, I find, to try to place one’s own
pain in the continuum of the abuse suffered by the perpetrators and by those
who preceded them. This does not exonerate the abusers. Neither does it oblige,
still less enable, me to forgive them. As if forgiveness was purely a matter of
understanding contextuality, cause and effect, and thereby accepting the abuse
as inevitable. But this is how women, and I think many men who may have been
physically abused in childhood, try to come to terms with what a generally
abusive childhood or youth still does to them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There are two serious flaws in thinking that we can ‘deal
with’ abuse and the effects of abuse. First, it tends to ignore the fact that
abuse is not limited to the sexual and physical. Sexual abuse, for women, is
more often reinforced by what seems at the time a natural and ‘deserved’
shaming of the person concerned. Perhaps it is the same for men. If an adult
implies that we are ugly, stupid and to be laughed <i>at </i>rather than <i>with</i>, we
accept it as a given. ‘Put downs’, the many chance remarks deemed as OK, but
deeply wounding, enforced compliance with how we should look or behave, all in
the context of dishonest and manipulative relationships, build a toxic mix of
shame, anger, fear and self-loathing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Very few sexual predators will genuinely want their
victim to feel that they are beautiful, intelligent, unique and loved. On the
whole, they will either intuit, or possibly know, that their victim has been
conditioned to believe none of these things. This makes them fair game. It gives
the abuser ‘permission’ to behave as he or she does towards them. Furthermore,
and as we all know, abuse is not limited to the sexual. Emotional abuse will,
often as not, occur between members of the same sex, first in family contexts
and later in social and professional life. By then, it is more commonly known
as bullying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As Christians, each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we ask
to be forgiven as we forgive those who have sinned against us. To be honest, I
find it almost impossible to pray these words when I think of my own abusers,
as well as of the hundreds of women coming forward in the #MeToo solidarity
movement. What does forgiving actually entail for us? As I have never really
found an answer to this question, I tend to mentally ‘bracket’ the words <i>Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us</i> as I am saying them, and hope God understands,
but I don’t just leave the people concerned in a kind of limbo. Later, I ask
God what he thinks those of us who have been sinned against are supposed to do
with our recurring memories, with our feelings about these people, and with our
own anger and shame.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There seems to be no answer to such questions. But I do
believe that we pray to a God who not only understands but shares the
feelings which prompt them. There are many ways we could visualise this
sharing. Being present to the words <i>Why
have you abandoned me? </i>spoken from the Cross is one of the most obvious,
although not always the most efficacious when it comes to having our negative
feelings about forgiveness validated in the moment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps a better way is to see the wounds we still carry,
because they are far from healed, as part of our transfigured inheritance. They
become what makes us worthy of honour in the presence of the Lamb (Rev.14:1). In
them we share in Christ’s glory, beginning with the shame and agony of his
dying and death, but moving with him to his embracing of us in his risen life.
This is not a pious metaphor, or some kind of mental cop-out. It is something
which can take a life-time to learn, or it can be learned in a single
revelatory moment of understanding. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Such an understanding gives us the greatest freedom. This
does not mean that we are given permission to indulge, even momentarily, in
gratuitous hatred and desire for revenge. It means that we too are forgiven for
finding it impossible to ‘forgive’. But such freedom brings responsibility. We
are now ‘responsible’ for our abusers, lest they fall into the abyss. This
means that we must be willing to receive what is needed for us to have a
transfigured way of seeing them, so that we can ‘hold’ them. It does not mean
persevering with, or reviving, destructive relationships. It means allowing
ourselves to have deep compassion for those who abuse us, or for their memory. We
‘hold’ what we know of them, as best we can, in the ‘safe space’ of the mercy
and forgiveness of God, a space which we ourselves are also occupying. Even if the
feeling of compassion only lasts for a moment, it will never completely go away,
<i>for His mercy endureth for ever.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-19443173893504172302017-10-02T05:48:00.000-07:002017-10-02T05:48:44.638-07:00Are We There Yet?<div style="text-align: right;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJFTYF9yjXFMsHFAFyolOq5f5Xy7No65ICFRJ5iavaPKSS_WLDOJAHWP0GfWeL-v_uMqJjCtkdomcnsQORPPfSia9YaXNVi1PWkwmn1iIZif1Zid-e5wHEO6MNMblb1XpbvHqN300zvSuI/s1600/images+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJFTYF9yjXFMsHFAFyolOq5f5Xy7No65ICFRJ5iavaPKSS_WLDOJAHWP0GfWeL-v_uMqJjCtkdomcnsQORPPfSia9YaXNVi1PWkwmn1iIZif1Zid-e5wHEO6MNMblb1XpbvHqN300zvSuI/s1600/images+%25281%2529.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Within half an hour of setting off on a long car journey –
from Wales to the South of France, for example, a small voice from the back
seat would be heard asking the question we parents dreaded. “Are we there yet?”
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ve often wondered if this is more of a
philosophical question than one which has to do with mileage and the hours yet to
be endured. For a child, a twelve hour car journey is a significant chunk of
her remembered life. I also wonder if it’s not a question we are all asking in
regard to all kinds of things – politics, the economy, a solution to
environmental melt down, or even in regard to the end of our own lives – the latter,
especially. Are we there yet?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Children are particularly interested in things pertaining
to life and death. So 'Are we there yet' leads quickly to other questions. What happens when you die? Where do you go? And does such a
place or dimension permit you to pick up where you left off in regard to
relationships, human or animal, which were suddenly terminated by death? Happily
for most children, death is, in a sense, a kind of continuation of life as they know
it, but better. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If they are right, it is still quite difficult to gauge
what the meaning and purpose of life now might be, especially given the very vague
demarcation line which exists between life and death as children often perceive it. Life
is still open-ended for them, less finite, more infinite, so they can see far
greater distances, on the eternity spectrum, than most of us can until, perhaps,
we reach a very old age. Then, we are returned to the conceptual space remembered
from childhood, perhaps without realising that this is what is happening.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In the later mid-life years, before we reach this stage,
a picture starts to emerge from what until now might seem an incoherent, and
often disconnected, series of life events. The questions now being asked are
not so much to do with what happens when you die, as what is the meaning of
life? What is its purpose? Looking back over the years, it seems that on the
whole, we have been far more anxious about purpose than we have about meaning.
Purpose has concrete implications. It has to do with ‘making something’ of
oneself or even, in today’s parlance, of ‘getting’ a life. But unlike purpose,
meaning is something that simply has to be allowed to happen to us. It is a
given.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Underlying our aspiring for purpose lies a considerable
amount of anxiety. Anxiety is another word for fear. So when it comes to the
purpose of life, we are afraid that we might have ‘failed’. The people we fear
most in this regard are usually parents, then our own peer group and all those
significant others who in some way exact standards of achievement, even if
these expectations only live in our imagination. Furthermore, we often imagine
that these particular fears will vanish once those who have instilled them in
us die, but this rarely happens. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On the other hand, insofar as we live and die in Christ,
we are already on the other side of the demarcation line between life and
death, meaning and purpose, and between time and eternity. We are already partly
in the other dimension. Far from being frightening, this dual-time state of ‘existence’
ought to be a sign of hope for us in the present. For one thing, it cuts into
our ideas of linear time, especially in regard to our earthly life-span. When
it comes to eternity, we are in the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We depart from
linear time into a time-frame in which the meaning of life as we know it, has
nothing to do with purpose in the ordinary sense of the word.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> In Christ, and in
the context of eternity, meaning and achievement bear no relation to each
other. We do not need to achieve, or to purpose our life now with a view to
fulfilling someone’s expectations, or our own. In God’s economy, the meaning
and purpose of our life comes in any given moment when a thought or action is purposed
for the good of others and for the good of the earth God created. But, as I
said earlier, it is the allowing which is important. Allowing is not the same
as striving for something. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Allowing God’s purpose for our life is a little like the
biblical concept of Wisdom. Wisdom, the living Spirit of God, has been around
for eternity, ‘dancing’ with God. We are invited to enter into that dance. But
we have to listen carefully for its measure, for the things which allow Wisdom to
be danced through us in our earthly life time. When it comes to what happens
when we die, the person who is wise, and who has taught others wisdom, will, as
scripture promises ‘shine for all eternity’. (Dan. 12:3) We’re nearly there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-16165387132665538872017-09-15T03:18:00.000-07:002017-09-15T03:18:35.780-07:00The Emperor Has No Clothes<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The ‘nones’ (those who when responding to surveys tick ‘none’
in the box marked ‘religion’ but who might possibly tick C of E if pressed)
need look no further for a home. Bishop David Jenkins, that prophet of our
time, once was heard to declare that God was not interested in the Church. God was
all about the Kingdom. It follows that if and when we stumble upon the Kingdom
in the context of the Church, we do not need to look very much further to find
God. The problem lies in defining the Kingdom, if such a thing is definable.
You could say the same thing about the Church. It is not easy to describe what
the Church is, still less what it ought to be, if it is to be true to its Kingdom
calling. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The original commission to go out and make disciples has acquired
a rather hollow tone, given the Church’s history of conquest and forced conversion,
not to mention prejudice and plain hatred. But the kernel of truth remains. If
the Church is called to be anything at all it is called to offer to the world
the peace which only God can bring, the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is even
called to embody that peace. Peace is
its garment and peace is the substance of the body it clothes. It is called to
give that body to the world, as Christ gave his. The Church cannot simply talk
about peace in rather abstract terms overlaid with the clothing of pietism. We
need to tend the hurt and resistant body, lest we be accused, like the Emperor
who failed to realise that he had no clothes, of being completely naked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is the build-up of hurt and the resistance to healing
which makes it so difficult for the Church to truly embody peace. As with any physical
body, allowing wounds to fester without healing can make them life threatening.
Could it be that something like this is happening in the life of the
institutional Church? We keep knocking each other’s old wounds without pausing
to consider the damage. We are more concerned with allowing our buildings to
fall into disrepair than we are about healing the hurts which we have inflicted
on ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">At the more traditional end of the Church, we hide
complacently behind beautiful but arcane (in the minds of many) liturgy,
clerical dress and the kind of managerialism which consists mainly of moving
the deckchairs on the Titanic. At the other end, as I have suggested in
previous posts, lies a mixture of naïveté and hubris. I do not think that either
of these scenarios provides a setting in which the ‘nones’ are likely to meet
God in his Christ. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What is needed, before it is too late, is for the Church
to take ‘time out’, a couple of year’s sabbatical perhaps, in order to focus
prayerfully and pastorally on its relationships, particularly on those which
relate to authority and the pastoral care of its people, clergy and laity alike.
If the present hierarchical system of governance is to endure, those with the
most authority must be subject to those with the least, as Christ was. It is the powerful who must begin this work of peace-making, because peace- making is both the
mandate and the sign of true leadership. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Peace-making in the Church will entail the hard practical work of seeking forgiveness
and the bridge-building which should follow; hard because it requires that
everything that is not of love be burned away. Love must do the burning. This,
incidentally, is about as close as it gets to the burning fires of hell. Hell is hell insofar as it is the ultimate conflagration of love vs.
hatred. In the life of the Church the gates of hell appear to be impregnable, though,
as Christ promised, they will not prevail. The fire of love will ultimately
destroy them, even if the Church as we know it is destroyed in the process. The
gates of hell are such that they bar human beings from the forgiveness which
brings peace, from facing into all the private and collective betrayals,
untruths and resistance to the goodness and giftedness in people which it has
allowed over the centuries, and still allows, leaving only a hard shell of fear
and mistrust, for those who experience the Church at close quarters. This makes
embodying the peace of God for the world very difficult for them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Thankfully, this is not always and invariably the case.
There are acts of heroic self giving which pass unnoticed in the Church’s life.
Priests who minister in and for the love of Christ, and whose work is largely
ignored by the Church’s critics, embody the healing fires of love. Their work
endures in the hearts of those whose lives they have touched. Bishops who are
true to their calling as peace-makers and as pastors to their clergy do the
same. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All of this suggests that it will take time for the
Church to be transformed in such a way as to make the ‘nones’ tick a different
box, but I am convinced that it will happen. Such is the nature of the faith we
proclaim, that we will be changed ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye’ and
that we shall all belong together in Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-13751785179094160062017-08-25T06:10:00.000-07:002017-08-25T06:10:11.509-07:00If Music Be The Food Of Love ...<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAFS9_d4Pe71yM57CmUfkTwGVCTL206nvaRTznX7fnAWS8i1GqljElA_SJN89UJjQmK9WpR0wWzsmpaWLj6FEteGJPa2solJjoyZjl0uJU3SjHPVb-ufTiEDD_s_Dz4d10gh3h1xz2Zu2_/s1600/St.+Sepulchre%2527s.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="139" data-original-width="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAFS9_d4Pe71yM57CmUfkTwGVCTL206nvaRTznX7fnAWS8i1GqljElA_SJN89UJjQmK9WpR0wWzsmpaWLj6FEteGJPa2solJjoyZjl0uJU3SjHPVb-ufTiEDD_s_Dz4d10gh3h1xz2Zu2_/s1600/St.+Sepulchre%2527s.png" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate is being taken over in what
can only be described as an act of spoliation, which the dictionary defines as ‘the
action of taking goods or property from somewhere by violent means’. The
eviction of its classical musicians, for whom it has become church in the
fullest sense, reflects the kind of iconoclastic violence witnessed at the time
of the English Reformation when monasteries were sacked, statues decapitated,
frescoes and wall paintings obliterated. Now, it is orchestrated music that
must be expunged. The musicians who for years have made St. Sepulchre a space
for prayer and reflection, are being removed to make room for ‘worship and
ministry’. One can only presume that what the musicians offer is no longer
deemed to be worship or, for that matter, ministry. The whole unhappy business
raises two things which ought to be of concern to all Anglicans, whatever their
churchmanship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Anglicans in this country have for too long ignored or
condoned the kind of quick fix which certain manifestations of charismatic, and
largely conservative, evangelicalism has thrust upon them. Church ‘plants’, and
St. Sepulchre is to be one of them, are in fact a form of colonisation, a
process which has already been described as the McDonaldization of the Church
of England. McDonald’s and the goods it serves is not only extremely bad for
our health, it is also bad for a nation or community’s self respect. The French
who only a decade ago were the envy of us all when it came to body image, are
now getting fat. Could the same thing be happening to the Church? I think the
spoliation of St. Sepulchre’s indicates a very real danger that it might. The
Church is getting fat as a result of the McDonaldization of its worship and the
commodification of its inner life in God to suit the tastes of the market. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What this danger entails pertains specifically to what the
present incumbent, who has instigated the eviction, is about to do to St.
Sepulchre’s when it comes to worship and ministry. It implies, among other
things, a very narrow understanding of worship itself and, possibly, a very
shallow interpretation of both worship and ministry in respect to how Jesus spoke
and behaved in regard to these vital areas of Christian life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In one of the
most profound theological conversations in the whole of the New Testament, we
are told that worship is authentic when it is done in ‘spirit and in truth’
(John 4:24). Beautiful music, especially classical music and liturgy, and some
traditional hymns, releases the mind and raises the spirit to God. It is a
truth language. It is truthful because
it is received into the listener’s ‘God shaped space’, to borrow from St.
Augustine, Blaise Pascal and scripture itself. It is received in such a way as
to allow for an encounter with God. It does not <i>tell</i> the listener anything, or
issue terms and conditions for this encounter to take place. It simply opens up
a space. Beautiful music is not pure aesthetics, as some may think. It is
worship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Music is therefore a unique and infinitely precious gift,
because in freeing the mind and momentarily opening the heart it allows both
listener and player to encounter one another within the love of God. It is also
essential to ministry, and ministry, rightly understood, is essential to the
ongoing life of the Church. Bands, trendy songs and shallow sensationalist
preaching do not minister to anyone except the performers themselves. They do
not serve. They simply perform. Classical musicians serve. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The proof lies in
the extent to which trendy songs and endlessly repeated cliché choruses do or
do not transform those who imbibe them. Do people come away from these events
less selfish, less needy, more able to love those they find hard to love or
even respect? Are they more lovable themselves? Are they Christ-like in every
sense? Are they the body of Christ? None of the methods which purport to make a
church successful bear any relationship to what it means to be the body of
Christ. They are not evangelism. They are part of a commercial enterprise. They
deal in the commerce of spurious success, and they are entrepreneurial in
following a set recipe for achieving that success. Beautiful music, especially
when it is performed in a church, does not purport to do either of these things
and for this Anglicans should be grateful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What then can liberal thinking Christians, as well as
people who are ‘not religious’ do to prevent the Anglican Church from sleep
walking into a place where God in his ineffability is rarely to be found? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps the future lies with the ‘nones’. People who
describe themselves as ‘nones’, when it comes to religion, are extremely
valuable to the Church. For one thing, they are capable of being prophetic, because
they are, by their own definition, outsiders. Jesus loved outsiders. He did not
require them to prove that they had a faith. He knew them and loved them for
who they were. He loved them because their faith, and the truth to which it witnessed,
consisted in the extent to which they were capable of love, and on this alone
did he rate people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Church must be a place which draws people to itself because
it touches them where they need to both give and receive the love of God. This
is its ministry, and it is the ministry of every local church. Worship will
only happen when a church has been ministered to with Christ like love and in a
spirit of service. It will happen when people encounter something of the
sacred, of the enduring nature of the mystery of God in the beauty of their
surroundings, and in music. Let there be music at St. Sepulchre’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-21015406658837080452017-08-22T09:40:00.000-07:002017-08-22T09:40:52.853-07:00Black Dog<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There is a French saying <i>ne pas être dans son assiete</i>, which roughly translates as ‘to not
be fully in one’s own plate’, as when pasta, badly served, overspills onto the
table. It’s a great way of describing the general sense of being all over the
place which I think many of us experience from time to time. It is not
something we can easily ‘snap out of’, as sufferers of anxiety and depression, in
all its manifestations, will know. Not being fully in one’s plate is a debilitating
state of mind, especially if you are a writer, teacher, or someone tasked with
preaching sermons or providing leadership. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There are other names for this state of mind, like ‘writer’s
block’ or ‘black dog’, not that the two are identical, but they invariably
feed on each other. I find they do the same in the course of the average day,
since all days are potentially creative, whatever kind of work we do. Things get put off when we are blocked. We feel
tired. We live for that cup of coffee, or something worse. We are not fully in
control. There is something random and anarchic about the way we go about the
day and the way we apply our thinking, if we are able to think at all. At the
same time, we are absolutely static, inwardly ‘blocked’, so that there is not
even the dubious thrill of the roller coaster effect, teetering on the creative
high before plummeting to the depths. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The way we are feeling prevents us from doing anything specific.
It paralyses, and makes it impossible to do what, theoretically, we should do in
order to get back on track and motor forward. There are different methods for achieving
this forward momentum. Personally, I find that methods only work for a while,
and that when they no longer work you are back on your own, dealing with the
black dog, or with writer’s block, or with the inability to dream up a sermon
if that is what is required of you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I have slowly learned that what is needed in all of these
situations is a deep and inexhaustible energy in which we can trust, something
which we can draw on simply by owning our desire and need for it. Whatever work
we do, but especially if it is creative work, we must continually return to its
creative source. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But this is impossible if we have not first learned to accept
and believe in ourselves as gifted, or fruitful, full of life and hope even if,
right now, it feels that we have ground to a complete halt. Knowing ourselves
as fruitful is not the same as feeling reassured by relative success. Success will
often come at the price of the work itself, because to be sure of success means
being willing to think of one’s work as a commodity designed to satisfy consumers
and fit the mood of the moment. This is as true in the context of preaching sermons
as it is in any other creative work. In
our own low moments it is tempting to simply generate the kind of work, or
preach the kind of sermons, which will satisfy the criteria for success or
popularity. But we may end up hating ourselves for doing so, and then hate the
work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We are only fruitful when we write or say what gives
people permission to flourish as the persons they were created to be. We are
fruitful when we free others into their gifts so that they can use those gifts,
and their lives, in the service of the truth which makes us free. For this to
be possible, we have to trust our own giftedness enough to wait on it, even in
the depths of depression and self doubt, because it is often there that we meet
people and offer them hope in their own dark depths. We offer them hope because
we have visited the depths ourselves. We
have learned to forgive and accept ourselves there, so we are in a position to
help others do the same.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A good way to begin this process of self acceptance is to
get into the habit of returning to any period, or even a single moment, in our life
when we knew ourselves to be utterly valued, that our very existence was a
blessing to someone else. It is important to re-own such moments without
feeling guilty that we are doing so, because guilt is itself a denial of love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Loving and forgiving one’s self is the hardest kind of
loving there is, especially if you have not been equipped for it in early life.
It is often much easier to remain in the depths of depression and self doubt,
simply because they are familiar depths, whereas acceptance and forgiveness
open up new horizons, new roads to travel into the unknown. The unknown is
frightening because discovering it will inevitably involve getting to know
ourselves as we really are, and accept our giftedness. We are gifted in and
through the love of God from whom all energy for creative work, and life
itself, proceeds. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-15335634894119680002017-08-09T04:48:00.000-07:002017-08-09T04:56:31.169-07:00Morning<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIfq2cizPwFDuyM_xNyPpJTPEkfqT1KfceVe-b45CQf3RiWKGv_SeIMcx6yu5zXc-ick9z4bBcC22O7ZM60I0YH6sIUzgooZ5sYeqkQuUL8OLqTZQTjjKr0P2NiQy52xS9IX8ytE7qDnC-/s1600/North+Korean+people.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="182" data-original-width="276" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIfq2cizPwFDuyM_xNyPpJTPEkfqT1KfceVe-b45CQf3RiWKGv_SeIMcx6yu5zXc-ick9z4bBcC22O7ZM60I0YH6sIUzgooZ5sYeqkQuUL8OLqTZQTjjKr0P2NiQy52xS9IX8ytE7qDnC-/s200/North+Korean+people.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: nedhardy.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What gets you out of bed in the morning? In a way, I find
this question harder to answer as I get older. It has to do with old habits
wearing thin. The things that used to get me going are either no longer
relevant, or no longer exist. When it comes to relevance, after 43 years of
being together I’ve finally had to accept the fact that my husband really does <i>not</i> like hot tea, so to trek back upstairs
to bring it to him the minute the pot has brewed is a waste of time and effort.
I now pour it and leave it for him downstairs. Then there’s the other reality.
The children have long since left home and now lead lives of their own at some
considerable distance from ours. The only reason for getting up early for their
sakes has to do with fitting in with international time zones. This we manage
to do at other times of the day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But I still get up an hour earlier, and I still have a
reason for doing so. For one thing, there is the silence, both external and internal.
We live in a silent place. In other words, silence is consistent. It is a
given. There is no ambient traffic noise. There are no times of the day when we
are even particularly conscious of noise, apart from the change of predominant bird
cry. Buzzards are very active at the moment and the swallows have not yet started
marshaling the troops for the long flight south. They will get noisier when
they do so in a couple of weeks time. Also, we have cut down the old elder in
which the crows used to nest, as well as fight with the magpies. Their
departure has made the silence almost palpable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">External silence has the effect of quelling internal
noise. In the first hour of the day the busy mind is subdued. It has not yet
woken up to mundane preoccupations, although it is not asleep either. In fact,
I find that it is more awake than at any other time of the day. It is open, in
every sense of the word. For me, the first hour of the day is a time of openness
to the Real Presence, but it is not a mental vacuum which I expect God to fill.
Instead, I find that I am involved in a kind of three-way dialogue between the
mind, the senses and God. But rarely is anything said. Instead, the heart is
allowed to have its own mind, to speak from its concerns and from its fears. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Today, it spoke of North Korea and the US, and of the
threat to our very existence which the leaders of these two nations represent.
The mind, and my personal fears, being quelled, I was able to sense the impact
of the situation on its most helpless victims, the ordinary people of North
Korea. What came to mind was a picture of its baby-faced leader peering through
what seemed like an old fashioned pair of binoculars while two of his adjutants
stood by. One wore an army uniform. The other was dressed in a thin fleece type
jacket. The army character looked thin. His companion was emaciated. Their
leader was wearing a warm well cut heavy coat. He looked very well fed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The memory of this picture, seen either on line or in a
newspaper, speaks to me of the deeper evil, and of the most pressing danger,
which is at the root of this crisis. It is the total disregard for other human
beings which comes when two narcissistic leaders are sated or infatuated with
power. No doubt if these two leaders were to disappear, others would replace
them, so the solution to the crisis does not lie in praying that they, and the
danger they represent, will simply go away. In fact, when we are engaged in the
kind of three-way dialogue I have been describing, the idea of a ‘solution’ to
the crisis of potential nuclear holocaust recedes a little. We realise that something
more than a solution is needed, because a solution would be no more than a political
construct designed to get these two leaders out of the impasse they have
created and so allow the rest of us to breathe a sigh of relief, at least in
the immediate present. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But whatever calming devices are deployed,
in respect to the two antagonistic leaders, they will not make a jot of difference
to the suffering endured by tens of millions of North Koreans. Their suffering will not be diminished,
even for a moment. The silence of the early morning tells me that it is their
suffering which matters most when it comes to any kind of meaningful solution
to the Korean crisis. There is no particular logic for thinking this, and it
will appear naïve to many, but for those who know the value of silence, engaging together <i>in</i> God with the suffering of ordinary
North Koreans is vital spiritual work. If you have read this far, please reserve an hour of mentally uncluttered
time to join me in this work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-27006068800446264112017-07-29T05:52:00.000-07:002017-07-29T05:52:48.207-07:00Dreaming Up a Church<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">At school, when
it was too wet to play lacrosse (O happy day), we did country dancing in the
gym. One of the dances involved going to the back of the line and partnering
the last person on it, so that you would both eventually end up at the front. I
think the dance was called ‘Strip the Willow’. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I
am right in my recollection of ‘Strip the Willow’, or even if I am confusing it
with another dance, the basic pattern has stayed with me as a blue print for
ecclesial life; how the Church could yet be, and how this new joyous way of
being could liberate it into becoming the kind of Church which the Lord of the
Dance might like to be a part of. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">I think he
probably is a part of it. It’s just that the Dance has moved on. Reels and
country dances have a way of moving on by shifting the focus and altering the
plane of action, so transforming the action itself. It is this shifting and
re-focusing which the institutional Church needs to allow itself to do, if it
is to keep dancing with its Lord, and if it is to survive at all. I say allow,
because the movement is not a plan to be decided upon by those at the top and
then enacted by those at the bottom as best they can. It is not a strategy for
keeping going. It is the energy in which the Church should live and move, the
energy which it breathes and then releases into the world. Or which it wilfully
refuses to breathe because it is afraid of the risks entailed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">This is not
as abstract as it sounds, any more than the Dance is itself an abstraction. Nevertheless, it does require some right side of the brain thinking, to acknowledge and
borrow from a much more complex line of thought.<a href="file:///C:/Users/lorra/Dropbox/LMC/Lorraine%20and%20Sean's%20shared%20folders/blog%20drafts/2017/Dreaming%20up%20a%20Church.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> The Dance is a pattern, a
collective creation, energised by the measure of its music which is its heart
beat. The music is too fast, too compellingly joyous, to allow for strategy, for
watching one’s back lest a fellow dancer fill our place unobserved. The Dance is
not a competition in which one person or group feels threatened by another. Fear
plays no part in it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">What makes
the Dance a living Church, as opposed to a fearful and disconnected institution,
is the will to love, at least for the duration of the Dance itself, in other
words on this side of eternity. It moves in tandem with the changes, chances
and inexplicable suffering (seemingly allowed by God) of this transient world. Given
such a fluid, and at times frightening, situation, there is little time to do
anything other than love. This is another skill which the institutional Church
seems to be in danger of losing. The momentum of its collective inner life is
slowing down because it has forgotten how to love. So it is losing the measure
of the Dance.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Part of the problem,
indeed most of the problem, is one of separation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel
puts it well ‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children
sitting in the market places and calling to one another, “We played the flute
for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”'. (Matt.11:16) One
half of the dance, the clergy hierarchy (especially those at the top of the
line), has become dislocated from the other, from the people who the clergy
exist to serve, the people at the bottom of the line who are ‘playing’ and ‘mourning’.
So it feels to those who are either at the bottom of the line or outside the
Church altogether, that the clerical hierarchy is doing its own thing, its own private
dance, one which is completely detached from the people, despite the fact that the
people are the other partners in the Dance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">What
practical solutions can we offer to save the Church’s true life in the Dance? We
could begin, perhaps, by breaking the existing clerical caste system, which is still
redolent of class and privilege, though not restricted to either, and which is
currently stuck in a mould, or cast, of its own making. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">The cast
reveals striations of love which have become set in stony hearts. In order to
break these hearts – and they do need to be broken, so that those called to be
bishops, priests and deacons, can relearn to love their people, the people at
the top end of the line need to link up and partner with those at the bottom. This
is fundamental to the sacramental commission given to them. We love in and
through our sacramental ministry, particularly in the celebration of the
Eucharist which we take from the altar to the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">In terms of
ecclesial life, such a partnering would require two ‘givens’; the first
that no ordained person should be doing a desk job and the second, that every
ordained person should be mentored, or partnered, by a lay person. All clergy would be non-stipendiary. In regard to mentoring, we would begin by drawing on the skills, life experience and wisdom
of older lay members of our churches, who might well be paid. These older members (aged at least 60,
but preferably older) would mentor those clergy from whom current leadership expectations
are the greatest; in other words, bishops, archdeacons, area deans and/or
ministry area leaders. These expectations ought, one hopes, to diminish as the
existing hierarchical structure is gradually dismantled. We could begin this dismantling
process with all clergy being elected or sponsored by the members of their church
(as happens already in some denominations) and bishops being elected for a
fixed term by clergy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">But what, the
reader is now probably asking, is to be done about the running, or management,
of the fabric of the institution, its buildings, real estate and pension
schemes, to name only a few? To which the answer might be, is it too hard to
believe that there are not willing, and perfectly able, retired people who could
do this (remunerated) work? Perhaps someone reading this post could make some
practical suggestions in this area. Meanwhile, let’s dream of a Church which recognises
and honours its Lord when He turns up unexpectedly, hoping to join in the
Dance.<a href="file:///C:/Users/lorra/Dropbox/LMC/Lorraine%20and%20Sean's%20shared%20folders/blog%20drafts/2017/Dreaming%20up%20a%20Church.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/lorra/Dropbox/LMC/Lorraine%20and%20Sean's%20shared%20folders/blog%20drafts/2017/Dreaming%20up%20a%20Church.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
I am indebted to Ian McGilchrist’s <i>The
Master and His Emmisary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World</i>,
Yale University Press, London (2009)</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/lorra/Dropbox/LMC/Lorraine%20and%20Sean's%20shared%20folders/blog%20drafts/2017/Dreaming%20up%20a%20Church.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This post is a development of some of the ideas I shared in an interview with
Mark Tully for the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Something Understood’ July 16<sup>th</sup>,
2017</div>
</div>
</div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-38299374077523454582017-07-19T09:40:00.000-07:002017-07-19T09:40:41.076-07:00Broken - Making It Real<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I have only just started watching the BBC drama <i>Broken</i>. As with all good fiction and drama,
you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously,
I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three
episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to
surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience
moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to
let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be
oneself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good
drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not
only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and
this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are
truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some
point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only
watched the first three episodes of <i>Broken</i>.
I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I
get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing.
Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which
surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are
different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in
translation, so to speak. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the
truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of <i>Broken</i>,<i> </i>pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the
‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed.
Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers
with him – again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in
<i>Broken</i>. There are other paths of
suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among
them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at
great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in
this particular case. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo
across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not
only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for
God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate
a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they
usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain,
although it may numb it for a while. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial
about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is
bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also
tied to a particular poem, <i>The Windhover</i>,<i> </i>as is his priestly vocation. The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent.
They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we
see in <i>Broken</i>, they are at the heart
of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made
concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental
word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying,
or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and
sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured. God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane
attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made
whole again in his brokenness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-11218747396354485922017-07-06T05:04:00.000-07:002017-07-06T05:08:10.367-07:00Armageddon - or possibly not<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz3gaH3NIbn1b0mUYZGLgo1EF9NFAReYJw9Ssh3Gp96UmSS8qJVLjkju1fMGQ7T8WE3bZzAagvoVnVm5PGcxMhrMS0pkOBt0Akdsujy1YYBDWrPYLpNcJQwd_kwkrNo3xB98M9Pjb4DSMP/s1600/download+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="115" data-original-width="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz3gaH3NIbn1b0mUYZGLgo1EF9NFAReYJw9Ssh3Gp96UmSS8qJVLjkju1fMGQ7T8WE3bZzAagvoVnVm5PGcxMhrMS0pkOBt0Akdsujy1YYBDWrPYLpNcJQwd_kwkrNo3xB98M9Pjb4DSMP/s1600/download+%25281%2529.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: BBC</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I was still at my convent boarding school when the Cuban
missile crisis peaked. They were thinking of ringing our parents to ask them to
take us home. Maybe it was the end of the world. We were told to pray, not that
we really understood the scale of the threat in relation to ourselves, still
less to the wider world. We did sense something unusual, though, about the
school possibly having to close down in the middle of term, so it was vaguely
frightening, even if the fear was sugar-coated by the prospect of an extended
half-term break.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I cannot say that I was truly afraid of what might happen
over Cuba. My earliest memory of fear was on my stepfather’s boat. I was about
five and the crew would play at dangling me, screaming and kicking, over the
side. That was real fear. Real fear, the kind that grips and paralyses a person
happens when the threat is direct, immediate and personal. All three apply to
the individual and to the collective in equal measure. Those who have
experienced war will recognise this. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But there is another variant on fear, which is the vague
fear we have all learned to live with. It has its peaks and troughs. Right now,
given the situation in North Korea and the leadership vacuum in America which
has helped to ramp it up, you could say that it is peaking, perhaps like the
Cuban missile crisis with which I am sure it is already being compared. And
there are other fears swirling around, most of them having to do with the instability
of financial and property markets, along with climate change and the medium to
long-term effects of Brexit. Added to these are the ‘plagues’ said to presage
the end of the world, the zika virus, if you live in South America, being one of them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All of these fear triggers have, in one way or another,
happened before, with huge cost to human life and happiness. As a result of
them, many people have ceased to believe in the existence of an all powerful
God, still less a merciful and wise one. They will say that those who persist
in believing in such a figure are clinging to some kind of psychological prop
which enables them to get through life and to manage their fear. But getting
through life, whatever it throws at us, by simply managing fear, is a thin
substitute for a life lived in, with and through God, as it was lived for us in
Jesus Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What we are given in Christ is an altogether different
way of managing fear. It is the last thing most of us would think of doing in
frightening situations, although with wise leadership and a less frightened
electorate we might limit, or even prevent, most of the fear situations which
face us today. Instead of succumbing to fear, we are told to keep our inward
eye firmly fixed on the embodiment of truth, the Word made flesh, the Christ
walking towards us on the turbulent water. This is the ‘way’ and the ‘life’
that enables us to deal with fear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If we return to the Armageddon-like representations of
the current North Korea nuclear threat, one thing is clear: There is unfinished
business, and North Koreans, who are ruled through fear, are not allowed to
forget this lest they cease to be quite so fearful. North Korea is technically
still at war with the US over the carving up of the country and the ensuing Korean
war. No peace treaty was ever signed. This possibly deliberate oversight has
led to a great deal of loss of face for the ruling dynasty of the north,
beginning with the present incumbent’s grandfather. Powerful and morally weak
leaders find it hard to cope with loss of face, except through violence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In the context of Korea, Trump has added to the existing
problem of loss of face by upping the ante in regard to violent retaliation and
thereby provoking the already angry Kim Jong Un who, like Trump, is a powerful
and morally weak leader. Narrow readings
of religious texts do nothing to allay our fear of the end of all things being brought
about through the hubris and stupidity of President Donald Trump, and the
hubris and cleverness of Kim Jong Un. In fact, it is being exploited in certain
religious contexts for political power-driven purposes. The exploitation of
fear through religion is a long way from the kind of life Jesus was talking
about when he spoke of himself as the ‘the way, the truth and the life’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What then can Christians learn from their own Leader
about managing the world’s fear? Many of the key exchanges which take place
between Jesus and powerful people, as well as those who fear them, are
contained by the words ‘You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you’.
In other words he calls us to convert fear to something resembling the
honouring of the enemy – you might call this love, although perhaps not
immediately. I think Jesus may have been talking about something resembling ‘chivalry’,
which is <i>not</i> an exclusively masculine
virtue, incidentally. Rather, it is a sense of the need to brace oneself for
the best we have to give when it comes to the things we fear. Those who lived
through the second world war, if they are reading this, will remember what bracing
oneself for the best one has to give entailed. So will the doctors and muslim
taxi drivers who rushed to the scenes of the recent terrorist attacks in
Manchester and London. I think that they were able to call on something within
them resembling chivalry, or honour, perhaps even love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All of this may not seem to relate directly to what we
are feeling about the possibility of a nuclear attack by north Korea, unless we
can conceive of a way of ‘centering down’ to that place of goodness and honour
which lies somewhere within even the worst of us. Centering down to the best
that lies within us does not involve an introspective search for the good in
ourselves. It is more a case of being available to it, should it suddenly emerge
and surprise us. Coming to terms with our own goodness can be frightening at
times.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When it comes to managing fear, in relation to ourselves
or events in the wider world, this is only possible when we are willing to
allow our fear to be ‘converted’, or turned into something else, by God. We do
this in and through our life in Christ. We do it collectively as the Church and
privately as every single individual who secretly wrestles with fear. We do it
by wanting, more than anything, to see our fears, both public and private, finally
overcome by the peace which comes with courage and must ultimately end in
reconciliation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<h2>
<br /></h2>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-11763788311209478912017-06-27T05:52:00.000-07:002017-06-27T08:44:31.127-07:00Sick At Heart<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It takes a while for living compostable material to rot
down and become the stuff of life again. It’s best not to examine it too
closely while this is happening. Perhaps this is what the Church of England was
thinking during the decades spanning the abuse of vulnerable people by one of
its prelates and by another highly regarded individual whose integrity was
compromised by, presumably, the toxic mix of sado-eroticism and religion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Eroticism and religion have long been known to serve each
other, when allowed to. Only read some
of the poetry of John of the Cross, for example, and the worryingly sadistic reaction
it led to at the hands of his deeply religious tormentors. They were afraid of
its power and equally afraid of the poet’s ability to contain and focus that
power in a God-ward direction, something they were not able to do. Powerful
life-giving spirituality can make others envious, especially if those others are
already powerful in a worldly sense, but exercise their power in a formal religious
context. Power can be erotic and, in this respect, is always dangerous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Religion, and Christianity especially, has always played
dangerously with erotic power, especially in the form of sadism. Sadism is
highly flammable stuff which, for some reason, is easily ignited in the
religious mind. Think only of the still enduring fascination with medieval graphic
portrayals of the suffering of Christ, rendered in the visual language of
modernity. Mel Gibson’s film <i>The Passion of the Christ</i>, comes to mind.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps all this is part of a processing of our own dark
fascination with perverted religion, as it combines with violence and with
sexual sadism of one kind or another, not to mention personal charisma and the
vanity which accompanies it. Some would say that if the Church as we know it is
to survive, it must keep a cap on all this dark stuff, even if its highly
placed prelates and senior figures are revealed to be actively part of it. The more
cynical might just write them off as ‘collateral damage’. But it won’t do.
Rottenness will never do. This suggests that a radical change in the way the
institutional Church is currently perceived is needed now more than ever. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It takes time for things to rot but once they have
reached a point of no return, excision remains the only possible option. This
is beginning to happen in the Church, largely thanks to the courage and
persistence of the victims and through the action of the police. It did not
happen as a result of the niceness or kindness of Church leaders. When it comes
to abuse, whether in the Church or anywhere else, niceness and kindness are not
enough. Niceness and kindness do not stop the rot. Many of us are sick at heart
for the rottenness of the state of the Church and for its complacency in regard
to rampant injustice, and some of us are angry. We are angry about the citadel
mentality which dominates so much of the Church’s life, at least in that which
pertains to those with power and influence. It is a mentality which is not simply
limited to protecting the interests of abusers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">If you are a woman
priest in certain provinces of the Anglican Communion, or simply a member of a
sectarian group within it, you will very soon feel powerless in the worst
possible sense of the word. You are not part of the citadel, the largely male inner
sanctum which holds to status and to the power which comes with it, but which
is seldom used for the common good. You will be someone who is denied a voice. All
the more so, if what you say or do troubles its peace of mind and general
complacency in regard to arcane laws and an unworkable authority system which
is ill designed to nurture gift among all God’s people and so allow Christ to
speak to our society. You will know what it feels like for ranks to close and
exclude you from the inner sanctum of the powerful, though all may smile and
many will be nice to you. If you are a member of the LGBTQ community, you will
experience the same thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For people belonging to either or both of these groups,
serving the institutional Church is not life in its fullest sense. It is not
life as Christ promised it. It follows, quite obviously, that the institutional
Church is not Christian in the sense that Christ would have wished it to be, so
it is not working very well. It is not freeing people into Christ. Rather, it
has been reduced to a largely self serving and introspective system with
something rotten at its heart. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To be a Christian is to be a liberator, one who empowers others
as Christ did. So it follows that those who hold power within the institutional
Church must look first to the victims of abuse, and of institutionalised
misogyny and homophobia, in order to set them free. They will do this by
seeking their forgiveness before beginning to enact the kind of radical change which
will enable the victims of every kind of abuse to live in the fullest sense of
the word. For this to be possible, radical change is needed both within the
Church’s own political system, the power games of superficial niceness played
out by a select few, and in its spiritual life which is perceived by many as
pallid and meaningless, bearing no relation to the dangerous freedom offered to
us in Jesus Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This suggests that if the Church is to survive at all,
its survival and its future life will begin with speaking and acting with
integrity. The abuse scandals, and the institutional misogyny of the past
twenty or thirty years, have led to many people losing all confidence in the Church’s
integrity, and hence in the Christian gospel itself. What people are looking
for today, in the life of the Church, as well as in public life in general, is
integrity. This has been the message of Glastonbury 2017: Give us integrity and
we will start to re-engage with politics. It is a message which the Church
needs to hear for itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-26825364717531514652017-06-19T06:34:00.000-07:002017-06-19T06:34:12.993-07:00What Are You Doing Here?<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Summer, and heat, has come upon us unexpectedly, even
though it is mid June. Those of us who rely on a good crop of runner beans for
the freezer were just getting used to the idea that we were likely not to have
a summer at all, and hence no beans, when along it came. I still don’t think
the beans stand much of a chance. The gales and the wet have enfeebled them,
possibly beyond hope.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Beyond hope. How easy and how disconcerting it is to slip
into melancholy and pessimism on a day like this. Perhaps we should be better
prepared. Perhaps we should know ourselves well enough to see such thought
trends coming and not allow them to spoil the present moment. But the present moment
is far more complex than it might seem in the heat of summer. It is, after all,
shaped out of a million other moments which, according to how they are
remembered, define our lives and the realities we live by. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">While musing on reality, I find myself remembering
another hot summer day back in February, when we were in Australia (see my post
of 9<sup>th</sup> February, 2017). We were listening to someone’s jumbled, confused,
and tragic memories, the realities which shaped her life in that moment, and
the pain they brought, a pain which was only partly anesthetised by drink. Such
present moments, our own and other people’s, and the realities they face us
with, are sometimes too hard to bear, especially when they come upon us
suddenly. I remember feeling that I had not served that person well, even by listening.
As far as I could see, I had been unable to effect any kind of healing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Our own realities need a time of gentle germination
before they are exposed to the terrifying light of memory. Heat, like today’s
heat, forces the seeds of long buried memory
to germinate, to seek the light and warmth needed for growth and healing. The
light is also in the telling of them, whether spoken or written, and the warmth
is in the listening, or in the kind of attentive reading which enables us to
understand and accept, through the story being told, how our most private
memories shape the realities we live by. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On such a day as this, in the sudden heat of mid June, these
memories are revealed to us, perhaps for the first time, like a piece of pottery
straight out of the kiln. They emerge, hot, in this present moment of heat and soporific
silence. Silence is not the absence of sound, or even of noise. It is the ‘still
small voice’ heard at the very heart of that noise and of today’s heat – out of
the fire in which Elijah heard it, as he
dared to face down God’s question “What are you doing here?” Heat forces itself
on us with this question, a question which waits on our memories for an answer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“What are you doing here?” is all that is left after all
other questions have been burned away, or ‘refined’ as the bible puts it. What
shall I do? How can I love or make myself deserving of love? Why am I unhappy?
These questions matter to the extent that they enable us to know the answer to
that one seminal question. “What are you doing here?” What is the meaning and
purpose of your life in relation to God – or in the fear and resistance to such
a relation? Part of the refining process involves how we process our memories.
These memories, and how we live with them, pertain to the reality, or
non-reality, of our existence, to whether the life we lead is really worth
living. Right remembering always pertains to the truth, even though that truth
may need to be fictionalised, painted or rendered into music or, perhaps, mathematics.
These all serve the refining process, our own and that of others. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is why art and scientific research matter so much. Science
which is pursued with the artist’s reverence for truth and life is salvific. As
separate life paths, art and science yield knowledge about the kind of truth which
saves us from ourselves and from the delusions which are the product of wilful
ignorance. Such knowledge also pertains to justice, our own just dealings, including
our thoughts and mindsets in regard to any number of historical events and
current social issues, and returns us to the desire for a deep and unnameable truth.
Taken together, the desire for justice and for knowledge of deep truth comprise
a ‘push’ for life, or a resistance to
it. They therefore pertain to every single person’s life choices. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Being ‘refined’ begins with allowing ourselves to be
questioned by God, as Elijah was and as the allegorical figures of Adam and Eve
were before him. In both cases, the question remains the same, “What are you
doing here?” We babble excuses and justifications for ourselves and for the
life we presently live, as Elijah did. Or we blame someone else, as Adam did. We
also blame circumstances, often justifiably. But silence always returns us to
the same question, “What are you doing here?” because the one who asks it is the
answer. <s><o:p></o:p></s></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-52283057364010389962017-06-06T05:17:00.000-07:002017-06-06T05:17:09.927-07:00One Love<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvrKiHU12EAeMSNTdwX1PoKoYAyCvwM_GXXfzcPeo6n2kX8PD9-eBs6CQLGx-Q5Qr39shj5SxV3Dz0BdlnZHkTtkOPh69q4OKQg3rE8tMHuE6UUYLwd_z78UDjTcGGhmYkHLu66pmZKSPj/s1600/Billboard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="182" data-original-width="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvrKiHU12EAeMSNTdwX1PoKoYAyCvwM_GXXfzcPeo6n2kX8PD9-eBs6CQLGx-Q5Qr39shj5SxV3Dz0BdlnZHkTtkOPh69q4OKQg3rE8tMHuE6UUYLwd_z78UDjTcGGhmYkHLu66pmZKSPj/s1600/Billboard.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: Billboard.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">‘There is no fear in love’ ( 1 John 4:18). If I’m
honest about it, these words strike me as optimistic, even somewhat whimsical.
Most people’s life experience has demonstrated at one time or another that fear
takes absolute precedence when it comes to violent defining moments, or ‘crises’,
in the full sense of the word. When it comes to how we imagine we would behave
in a violent crisis intentions are invariably good, even heroic, but reality, when
it kicks in, often reveals us to be anything but heroes. Not that this is always
a bad thing. The independent hero can be counterproductive in times of crisis. He
or she can put the lives of others in danger. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">On the night people were randomly stabbed in a
London restaurant, the u-tube footage shows police telling them to lie down and
not run, or even move. They were not to be heros. If there was to be heroism,
it would be a matter of holding together, and of having the courage to trust
the police who were trying to contain the fear.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The lying down, and what must have been an agonised period
of waiting for the ‘all clear’, suggests that fear can only be confronted, and
then contained, through trust in what it means to be real community. Real
community is about being in ‘communion’ with one another. In a moment of violent
crisis, being in communion begins with trusting those who give the orders which will enable all innocent
people to live. It is about everyone belonging to one another, so that whoever
holds legitimate authority in any given situation is also fully in communion
with the rest of us. In the wider
context of our shared public life, this is only possible when there is wise and
competent leadership, wisdom being a combination of vision, compassion and
common sense. Such leadership is vital in times of mass violence<strike>.</strike><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><s><br /></s></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The present mayor of London, a wise and
compassionate leader, has told people to expect an unusual amount of police presence
and high level security in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. He has
also told them not to be afraid, not because he wishes to delude them into
thinking that these are not frightening times, but because he wishes them to
know that their fear is valid and that he will do everything he can to protect
them under his mayoral leadership. This is why Trump’s remarks about Sadiq Khan
are both crass and dangerous. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A few nights ago, we saw another example of wise and
compassionate leadership, this time coming from a twenty three year old woman
and her co-celebrants at a rock concert. She was affirming communion, so you
could say that her initiative to re-stage the concert so soon after the terror
attack which took place at the last one was not only courageous in a human
sense, but had something of the self-giving of Christ, and something of his innocence.
His innocence was reflected not only in her, but in the faces of those attending the concert, as
they faced down the violence that had been, and might yet be. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No doubt most of the young people attending the second
Ariana Grande concert had been at the first one, with its tragic and terrifying
outcome.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What brought them together a second time? I believe it was the
collective will to be 'as communion', so defying those who would fragment and
ultimately destroy what is good about our society and our way of life. This is
what made this concert so unlike any other concert. There was an exhortation to
love one another in the facing down of fear. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All would be remembering the horrors of the previous
celebration. Many of those attending this one were probably there when they
took place. All would have felt the fear. Some would not have known what to do
with the feelings these memories evoke, especially in their immediate
aftermath. But they knew, and their leader knew, that to return to that moment
of naked fear, evoked by the memory of the perpetrators’ crazed envy and untrammelled
hatred, as it was expressed through brutal mass murder, was not why they had
come to this second concert. To remain in that moment, or to return to it by re-invoking
hatred for the perpetrators, would have meant defeat for them and for all of us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instead, their leader, was in this moment urging them to celebrate a eucharist, a shared moment of love and thanksgiving. She was offering them a different
and better way, a way out from fear, so that they would not spend the rest of
their lives emotionally short-circuiting back to the lie which bred the hatred
on the part of the perpetrators. But neither was she exhorting her fans to some
kind of collective mental discipline involving them being seen to enjoy
themselves. She was affirming and releasing the re-creative love which lies
within each one of us. She was inviting her fans to be ‘as one’, or as
communion in spirit and in truth. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To love one another is to worship God in spirit and
in truth. I believe that, whether consciously or not, it was to this end that
she told them to “Touch the person next to you. Tell them you love them – even
if you don’t know them. Those watching this at home, do the same.” It was a
sacramental moment, a hallowing of the ‘matter’, of our shared humanity, in the
face of the sacrilegious acts committed a couple of weeks earlier in the name
of God.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In saying these words, Ariana Grande was helping us
all to face down our fear of terrorism, by being in deeper communion with one
another as a free society. Perhaps she was thinking of the two generations who,
in the last century, fought and died for that freedom. If so, she was also
inviting communion across our generational barriers – all the nonsense we tell
ourselves and others about how much better things were in the good old days. Not
only was the singer telling them that love was very much alive within each one
of them, regardless of the envy of religious extremists, but that we are all,
regardless of age, gender, race, nationality, or politics, deeply at one with
each other and that we are called to worship God, as we love one another, in
spirit and in truth. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-87963421334696109732017-06-02T10:19:00.001-07:002017-06-03T04:25:07.535-07:00Not Torn Apart<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There was a massive falling out this afternoon in our
house. It had to do with one person, (tried beyond the limits of human
endurance it seemed) coldly destroying another person’s complex lego helicopter.
This was a treasured object for which the instructions have been lost. As a
third party trying for twenty minutes’ respite before setting off for the nearest
play area (it being a damp afternoon), the inevitable uproar proved that my ‘red
line’ is far closer than I had hitherto assumed it to be. I was furious with
both of them – until, of course, an almost unbearable compassion, ‘twin
suffering’ perhaps, took hold of the situation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Then it became a case of who to deal with first when it
came to ‘damage containment’ – and assessing where the most significant damage
lay. The easiest course of action might have been to lay down the law by
shouting louder than either of the combatants and to dismiss the lego as just
an old toy, easily replaceable, thereby also dismissing its owner’s valid grief.
Such a course of action would have done nothing to heal the far more
significant long term damage which might have been done to the two individuals
concerned in their relations with each other. Such moments embed themselves in a
person’s memory and grow like tumors as, over the years, they become overlaid
with words or gestures which ‘trigger’ that particular memory, so giving it
enormous significance. Ideally, the situation needed to be resolved without the
final arbitrator appearing to take sides. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But in such defining moments, one’s instincts are often
correct. So the first tranche of my volcanic fury landed on the perpetrator. How
then was this person to be helped to take the first step in the healing process,
unless I could provide some cooling off time – time to really feel what the
victim was feeling? Meanwhile, the victim continued to howl – taking full
advantage of having been wronged. It became clear that reconciliation was only
going to take place once the victim had stopped howling for long enough to hear
the word ‘sorry’ spoken in truth, a word which was beginning to shape itself in
the perpetrator’s heart, once the usual formulaic (no eye contact) ‘sorry’ had
been said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I demanded more of both of them – more willingness to
take responsibility and more courage to let go. And perhaps because by this time I was close
to tears myself, I got it. There was silence, life-defining silence, followed
by a deep embrace, almost painful in its goodness. And then laughter. For a
moment we knew the Kingdom of Heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Applied to the present fevered political climate this invites
pause for thought. Hatred, bitterness and blame could be transfigured in a
single moment of ‘twin suffering’. Everything might be perceived in a different
light, the light of hope, which is the knowledge that all things work to the
good for those who have not forgotten how to speak the kind of truth which
makes for real reconciliation, but reconciliation is not what we want from our
politicians – or is it? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The gospel for this Pentecost Sunday speaks of a
comparable situation. A group of people holed up in a room, afraid, confused
and by now probably falling out with each other over who was to blame for what
happened two days ago. Everyone wants the last word. The Christ steps in to
the room, seemingly from nowhere – or had he been there, unrecognised, all the
time? Into the mounting tension he speaks the words “Peace be with you”. They
are a command, not an exhortation, a command which comes from within the
deepest compassion for the human predicament, of which my two combatants were
only a tiny sample. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is our humanity which is at stake in such quarrels
because blame reduces not only the perpetrator of the original wrong, but the
victim as well, to an object – something to be conquered, ‘bested’ or won over.
The recent televised election debates, though articulate and at times
passionate, suggest that our politics are a magnified version of what went on
in that upper room, before those words were spoken, and of two children trying
to have the last word over how and why the lego helicopter was wrecked. In so
doing, each is trying to have power over the other, to reduce the other to
something legitimately ‘won’, a kind of trophy figure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The incident which took place in that upper room reveals
that the authority given by Christ to forgive or withhold forgiveness is the
only authority which really counts. It follows the command to be at peace,
knowing that we ourselves have been forgiven. How badly do we want forgiveness
in these elections? Or peace for the world in the longer term? No political party can deliver on these
things. It is we who must start by wanting it, working from within the system
itself, of which we are a part whether we like it or not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-81434037634042143242017-05-25T08:20:00.000-07:002017-05-25T08:20:10.577-07:00Hope<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGV_okVphSGHrwJRM5CzAHtm1Uv2-b_tjNoi6a0d8qPqyF5yRdqXXNMzvBSwyG_kFll2X2S0SYW86RUwiL2tHKlqW1RjRjozi-mJ9jHoZnLQ3WpsfCcJqxa6teAIgLW94R5M2AM4CaxN4m/s1600/Manchester+bomb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGV_okVphSGHrwJRM5CzAHtm1Uv2-b_tjNoi6a0d8qPqyF5yRdqXXNMzvBSwyG_kFll2X2S0SYW86RUwiL2tHKlqW1RjRjozi-mJ9jHoZnLQ3WpsfCcJqxa6teAIgLW94R5M2AM4CaxN4m/s1600/Manchester+bomb.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: The Guardian</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Liturgical seasons are seldom in tune with the emotions
of the immediate moment. Today is Ascension day, a time, we are told, when the
disciples who were left behind after Christ’s ascent into heaven went down the
mountain rejoicing. It seems paradoxical, to say the least. They should have
been silently weeping, as we are when we think of the children and young people
murdered on Monday as they were partying in Manchester. How, then, can we speak
of Christian joy and the hope bequeathed in Christ on this Ascension Day?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps the difficulty lies in part with our tendency to
over spiritualise our great festivals. This one is especially hard to ground in
something like reality, and yet it has to be grasped in a way which helps us
make sense of the now and the ‘not yet’ – when ‘this Jesus shall come’ the
angels said, in the way he had just left. Perhaps more importantly, this final
parting is axiomatic to the deeper truth of the Resurrection. If Christ had not
been finally parted from his friends in this way, who is to say that he did not
disappear only to die again (which would nullify the first death, both
forensically and theologically) and then what? Is there a long since decayed corpse
somewhere, as many would like to think, waiting to ‘de-mythologize’ the
Christian story? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">These are the kind of theological distractions which make
it hard to make sense of the Christian faith and even harder to do so in the
context of the times we live in. How might the Ascension of Christ, and the joy
and hope of his disciples, help us come to terms with Monday’s atrocity? I
think the clue lies in the undifferentiated nature of joy and hope. The two are
of a piece. In terms of Monday, and of the intended collective psychological
damage it is wreaking, these are made concrete in every look, word and gesture
which speaks of compassion, the kind of compassion which comes from ‘being
there’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We are all called to ‘be there’, to ‘wait’ as the
disciples did ‘in the city’. But we are called to do this while receiving the
blessing which Christ gave to his friends even as he was parted from them. To
receive such a blessing, especially in times like these, means owning the need
for it – or owning the need for ‘mercy’, which is another way of talking about
blessing. It was Christ’s parting blessing which gave rise to the disciples’ otherwise
unaccountable joy and ongoing hope. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Hope is not wishful thinking. It has nothing to do with
denying reality. Rather the opposite, in fact. Hope is the courage to own the
reality of Monday night, with all its complex causes, including the benighted
nature of the perpetrators’ own reasons for doing what they did. Christ’s blessing
holds all of that darkness. This does not mean that all will be well in the
best of all possible worlds. It means that anarchic forces, however they
manifest themselves, will not prevail in destroying our humanity, what makes us
persons in the fullest sense. This is the truth to which those who have suffered
through the centuries have witnessed, and it is the truth to which we are called,
irrespective of the religious, or non-religious, path we choose to walk in
responding to that call, provided we walk it with integrity, in a desire for
the blessing or ‘mercy’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-66274469957222025262017-05-20T09:11:00.000-07:002017-05-20T09:11:00.554-07:00Being at Odds <div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We live in a world of difficult people, or so it is
convenient to believe – until the truth dawns on us that we ourselves are among
their number. This is especially discomfiting in the context of family life. We
don’t choose our families. We are simply landed with them, along with idiosyncrasies
(theirs and our own) which seldom mellow with age. Given the assumption that our
lives are made problematic by the difficult people around us, it is likely that
we are part of the problem, if there is one. Perhaps this is also true of
relations between nations and communities. We all suffer from blinkered vision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Blinkered vision happens when a nation is perceived
entirely within the visual/conceptual space of one individual, or in a memory
retained of one unhappy experience in the context of a nation or group. As a result, we can’t ‘see’ the other person,
or the other group, completely and might not even want to. Better to let go
of the memory then, as far as possible, and widen the field of vision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A blinkered attitude to people who we dislike, but think
we know well, can lead to an involuntary protectiveness which can also be
misconstrued as selfishness. Selfishness is really about fear. It is about protecting the unhealed
wounds which give rise to a damaging self perception. The wounds may have
originated in misunderstandings that could have been resolved long ago, but
somehow lingered on until it was too late, and too hard, to heal them. Sometimes
it just isn’t possible to let go of such memories. There are just not the means
to do so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To make matters worse, the memories may have been dismissed,
or deemed to be unimportant, by one or more of the parties involved. The wound
inflicted was denied, so that the pain remained unvalidated. Unvalidated pain devalues all parties to a
dispute, and leads to long term toxic relationships. In families, devaluing often takes the form
of ‘put downs’. In these contexts, ‘put
downs’ are always about fear and denial and witness to deep and enduring unhappiness.
They devalue the person’s pain and deny its validity, while also reinforcing the
defences of the one who is doing the putting down, without allowing for the
healing of <i>their</i> pain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Difficult people,
ourselves included, are ‘difficult’ because, on the whole, they are in pain,
though they may not admit this even to themselves. And since, in the context of
family, as well as in national life, all perceive the other as difficult, it
follows that all are dealing with pain. Or perhaps they are not dealing with it
because they cannot even acknowledge it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There is a paradox here. When
irritation bubbles to the surface as a result of an oft repeated action, word,
or enduring habit, it might just be possible to experience, in the moment of
irritation, or of being at odds with someone, the deepest compassion for the
other party. A fleeting revelation occurs, even as the annoying words are
spoken, and this revelation can be painful. It is seldom sought, but if the
deadlock between two people is to be broken, such a revelation has to be
desired. It might even re-trigger our own pain, but in being a trigger, it can
elicit empathy which is a more demanding and a more subtle version of what
otherwise might simply be called ‘understanding’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Those who practice
Buddhist meditation might describe empathy as mindfulness. For Christians, this
means being mindful of our need for the grace which makes empathy possible, by
validating our pain as it does the same for the other person. Grace is God’s free gift. It is given in love
because God desires not just peace, but the full validation of persons which
real peace both gives and requires. We cannot effect healing, or improve our
relations with difficult people, without it. </span>Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-88144151975151756322017-05-11T04:18:00.001-07:002017-05-12T02:04:42.276-07:00Whom Do You Seek?<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The revered Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh has written
a book about fear.<a href="file:///C:/Users/lorra/Dropbox/Lorraine%20Documents/Lorraine%20and%20Sean's%20shared%20folders/Blog%20drafts/2017/Whom%20do%20you%20seek.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
In it he speaks of a universal transition trauma – the moment of birth. He
describes how the nine months preceding birth are a time of simple existence, of
equilibrium and, above all, of acceptance. All that is needed for basic
survival is supplied through the body of another. Whether or not that ‘other’
wills it, the unborn infant simply receives. Then, the teacher argues, comes
birth, and with it fear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Most of us have not experienced the kind of therapy which
takes you back to the birth moment, but we have all experienced fear, to a
greater or lesser extent, at certain times in our lives. The moment of birth is
a moment of primal fear. It is primal because it is the first moment in our
lives when we are forced to come to terms with need. This need is massive and,
for the newborn child, wholly incomprehensible. In the moment of birth it makes
itself felt as an urgent need for immediate survival – air, nourishment and the
closeness of another human body, the latter two being of a piece. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The need for tactile relationship endures. Long after we
are able to breathe independently, and feed and clothe ourselves, there remains
a deep need for the ‘other’. As emotionally healthy adults this need is fully
met when we can recognise, and perhaps meet, another person’s need as well.
Those who have experienced emotional abuse in childhood (and all abuse is
emotional), will go on through life trying to have their emotional needs met,
either by repeating the pattern learned through their parents or, perhaps, by
trying to prevent or make up for the neglect they experienced by making
themselves indispensible to others, both of these coping strategies leading to
further toxic relationships and thwarted lives. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is why I find the story of the risen Christ meeting
a grieving friend in the garden so significant. It is a moment of healing in
which the friend is not only restored to herself but ‘given permission’ to use her giftedness.
She is tasked with announcing the good news of the Resurrection to others. But
first, Jesus asks her why she is weeping and who she is seeking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I think her tears
and his questions speak of the human condition itself. We are all, at times,
weeping for what has been lost or never fully realised in our lives. Even so,
there is a paradox in the conversation between Christ and Mary, as it is
recorded in St. John’s gospel. Mary, on realising who is speaking to her,
reaches out to grasp him. She needs him. But he tells her not to touch him
because he is not yet risen to the Father. Later, though, he will invite
Thomas, the one who needs empirical proof before he can believe in the ‘hallucinations’
of someone as distraught as Mary (we are always a bit hard on Thomas) will be
invited to touch him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This seems a little unfair. It should have been the other
way round, Mary being allowed to hold him, rather than Thomas the sceptic. Unless,
of course, we think more deeply about the need being expressed by Mary. It is a
quite different need from Thomas’s. Mary’s need represents what we are all
seeking in that deep hidden part of ourselves. It takes us back to our first
breath, our first cry of need for someone. Mary’s need is more than a need for
reassurance that what she is seeing and longing for is in fact happening, as
was promised. It implies hope fulfilled in a moment of deep need. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">She recognises Christ as ‘Rabboni’, the beloved Teacher,
as he says her name. Part of the reason for our chronic loneliness as a
society, or as members of a particular church, is that we seldom hear our name
being called – our name being the person we really are. It may even be necessary to hide who we are, or to deny
our giftedness, because there are some who fear us. Their fear will translate
as envy and could destroy us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The same thing can happen in families. Abusive parents
fear, and want to suppress or control, the real person in their child, because
that person challenges them. In being who and what they are, they show their
parents the truth about themselves. Truth spoken through another person’s
integrity can remind others that they are not who they imagine themselves to
be, or would like others to believe they are. Truth spoken through another’s
integrity, or giftedness, can make another person feel undermined or
threatened. No wonder, then, that the women who brought the news of the
resurrection to Christ’s closest friends were dismissed as ‘foolish’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
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<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/lorra/Dropbox/Lorraine%20Documents/Lorraine%20and%20Sean's%20shared%20folders/Blog%20drafts/2017/Whom%20do%20you%20seek.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Thich Nhat Hanh, <i>Fear – Essential Wisdom for Getting Through
the Storm</i>, Rider, London (2012)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-40246243464582893442017-05-04T03:38:00.000-07:002017-05-04T03:38:10.629-07:00The Tactical Vote<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">According to St. John’s account of Christ’s Passion, it
was 'expedient' that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation
not perish. Whether in the Church or in society, </span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJCJw8LiIWg9lj9UvONsS-QCJJrtmg90lmGn9nmnJDuhFsvGEFBQyrV3S_HwOPlzBZ9clc9khI-ssbmFOcAd1eUEmmo-eVLR4eS7JgUlRQZ2ARu9VOx3ecn1DGiRP7s2-Btf0TJTpjOptu/s1600/General-Election-2017-Logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="122" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJCJw8LiIWg9lj9UvONsS-QCJJrtmg90lmGn9nmnJDuhFsvGEFBQyrV3S_HwOPlzBZ9clc9khI-ssbmFOcAd1eUEmmo-eVLR4eS7JgUlRQZ2ARu9VOx3ecn1DGiRP7s2-Btf0TJTpjOptu/s200/General-Election-2017-Logo.png" width="200" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">expediency, strategy, power
games in which ‘the people’ are either duped with impossible promises or
blatantly used for political leverage and then discarded, point to the fact
that the message is the same: ‘It is expedient’. This, along with whatever slant
or ‘spin’ is afforded by the media and powerful interest groups, seems to be
the order of the day when it comes to election campaigns. It is a far cry from
the freedom and democracy for which two generations fought world wars in the
last century and for which many risk their freedom and their lives today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is also why some of us are unhappy about tactical
voting. There is something ‘expedient’ about it. But it somehow goes against the
grain in regard to democracy itself. How
we do, or don’t, exercise our hard won political freedom is a matter of
conscience. It may be expedient not to vote, but in doing so, we risk turning
our back on the true meaning and purpose of an election. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A tactical vote stops
just short of not bothering to vote at all and not voting at all is an
abrogation of our individual responsibility for what is still a free nation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Part of the reason for my own unease about tactical voting
lies in the fact that this country does not yet have a truly representative
electoral system. It is also, paradoxically, why some people justify the
practice in the first place. Although untidy and possibly less efficient,
because the government it would deliver might be more difficult to administer, proportional
representation would at least make the voter feel more directly connected to the
political process and perhaps better motivated to engage with it. But that is
not the only reason why some of us draw back from strategically ‘working’ the
existing system, which is what tactical voting entails. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When it comes to tactical voting, you are also working from
a negative position. Tactical voting is like driving in reverse when you have
missed a turning, and then finding yourself mired down off the edge of the
road, unable to move in any direction. You back up to something like the worst
compromise and so can end up voting for a party whose policies and values you
profoundly disagree with. This leaves you feeling more disenfranchised, or unrepresented,
than you would have been had you voted with your conscience in the first place.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But you tell yourself that it is expedient to vote
tactically, in order to be sure you keep the party you really <i>don’t </i>want out of the picture. This is
not to say that you are wrong to want to keep them out, but that in ‘working’
the electoral system you deprive yourself and the best political parties of a
voice. Tactical voting is negative thinking and negative thinking is not about
vision. If tactical voters were to vote with their conscience, the ones who
have less political presence but far more wisdom, and with it far more vision,
might just win a few more seats in government. The nation badly needs wisdom
and vision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This brings me back to the trial of Jesus of Nazareth,
and to why I shall vote Liberal Democrat in June, even though on paper the Lib
Dems may not win a seat in our constituency and Ukip could, in theory, gain a
little ground, chiefly from erstwhile Tory voters. I am not voting tactically
because to do so would be to vote against my political conscience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I do not think that political conscience is shaped solely
by the policies of any one party, although conscience will, if it is alive and
healthy, afford a reliable guide as to the moral validity of specific party
policies. Political conscience is also shaped by a desire not to betray those
who in previous generations sacrificed so much for the democratic freedom we
now have, even if that freedom is severely compromised by the system itself, as
well as by those who ‘work’ it still further, to their own ends, once they are
handed power through the ballot box.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It was ‘expedient’ that Jesus should die for the people
because, in having him executed, the state and the religious authorities were
able to avert a direct confrontation in which all would be losers – politically.
Handing him over to the secular authorities was a tactical manoeuvre and, of course,
an act of betrayal. We all participate in this act from time to time in our failure
to live up to the demands of conscience, to do and say the truth and to stay
focused on righteousness when it comes to the moment of testing, including the
testing of our own integrity in the ballot box. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The main challenge is fear, fear of our littleness and
lack of political grip, given the quantity and complexity of the data which is
constantly being thrown at us, and fear of the weight of the system itself. But
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s way of sweeping aside all that makes
for fear, all the doubt and confusion which too often leads us to settle for second best, including the way we
exercise our political freedom in the coming election. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-11373758523012592202017-04-27T05:01:00.000-07:002017-04-27T05:01:41.211-07:00No Laughing Matter<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Somewhere towards the middle of yesterday’s <i>Guardian</i> 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? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Guardian</i>,<i> </i>I am made uncomfortable by the idea that I am guilty by
association if I find the suggestion at all funny. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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<i> Guardian</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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<i> seen by
God</i>. 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>Guardian</i>, perhaps
inadvertently, made light of these fears in the article I have referred to, but
they are no laughing matter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-47629265050723707002017-04-17T05:40:00.000-07:002017-04-17T05:40:47.235-07:00Alive<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyYKncE2C7PzSEiCaE8xC9Jl8XqL19AO2Y7jwWlxbvm0ESSO9A1rF-f3qR4rIg_Tbc-eX-AjjqEaJZwezqWCyUQMtSCZi6uyEdPrUDX0Y8epQDsbyeWgHL_W62O4Z7alozHDL9ugBnCdJC/s1600/Dawn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyYKncE2C7PzSEiCaE8xC9Jl8XqL19AO2Y7jwWlxbvm0ESSO9A1rF-f3qR4rIg_Tbc-eX-AjjqEaJZwezqWCyUQMtSCZi6uyEdPrUDX0Y8epQDsbyeWgHL_W62O4Z7alozHDL9ugBnCdJC/s320/Dawn.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dawn (author generated)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <i>was</i>, 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5854062431830716609.post-7390531767346434732017-03-30T10:29:00.000-07:002017-03-30T10:29:18.142-07:00Never Alone<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">‘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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Lorraine Cavanaghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521904557657864455noreply@blogger.com0