Reaching for the edge

Some years ago, we went to Taizé, a place where Christians and many others who are seeking God go to find him. They find him in many different contexts, different ‘mansions’, to quote the word used by Jesus as a figurative way of talking about heaven and the hereafter. At Taizé, these ‘mansions’ are really different kinds of spaces in which surprising encounters take place. They are the moments which together make up a new friendship, perhaps a first experience of what it really means to live in community, but at Taizé the most significant moment happens in the context, the space, in which collective worship takes place.

The summer I visited Taizé, was extremely hot. We sat, several hundred or more, in a huge tent with all the entrances opened to allow a cross breeze.  The altar, or focal point for worship, was very close to where we were seated, but at about a third of the way through the singing the whole gathered community turned to face a different focal point, at the other end of the tent. Suddenly we were out on the edge. Others were now at the centre.

There are many people today who feel out on the edge of things when it comes to questions of faith and ultimate meaning. Perhaps the Church they have known in the past has failed them in some way. It has either left them behind by failing to address crucial life issues in a way which is both credible and hope giving, or it has become introspective, concerned with its own career prospects and with a very partial understanding of the real meaning of tradition.  These concerns have caused it to become stuck in a place which makes it impossible for it to ‘turn’ in the way the worship focus at Taizé allows people to turn, so that those on the edge can also be near its centre. As with the Taizé community, the ‘turning’ is what gives life to the wider Church as well as to its worship. It is also, coincidentally, the root meaning of the greek word for repentance, greek being the language of the New Testament.

For the Church, repentance is about turning outwards towards God and towards all those who are on the outer edges of its life, but who are still rather wistfully seeking God within its walls. It does not really matter how this turning is done, as long as it is done because the Church, in all its denominations and groupings, wants to connect more deeply, more compassionately, and more truthfully, with God and because it wants to make it possible for those on its peripheries to do the same. These are the only ends which matter when it comes to ‘turning’.

 One of the signs that the Church, in its different denominations and sub-divisions, is failing to ‘turn’ is that it is becoming increasingly introspective. It is looking inwards, but without allowing the deeper questions to surface. Something has happened to its heart with the result that it is unclear of what it is really about. It is anxious about numerical growth and relevance. At the same time, it does not want to be seen to capitulate to secularism. So pragmatism rules the day, with the result that the Church is perceived by many as becoming increasingly secular and, ironically, increasingly irrelevant.  

With its heart growing cold, its anxiety feeds on itself, so the Church has little choice but to resort to managerialism on the one hand, or crowd-pleasing tribal religion, as well as the manoeuvring of party interest groups within its own walls, on the other.  Both are forms of retreat inwards, rather than a forward movement of turning outwards.

Nevertheless, management does have its uses. Creative outward-looking management liberates and empowers. It enables movement. It can also provide a little mental space in which to allow the things which really matter to emerge and focus in the collective mind while the Church, as an organisation, gets on with reorganising itself. It is a little like dreaming of the next blog post while sorting out the cutlery draw. This kind of mental break, or ‘space’, allows important questions to surface. When the Church is not allowing important questions to surface while it sorts out its cutlery drawer it is simply managing a static situation. It is no longer reaching out through leaders with vision and contemplative zeal to those outside who need the fruits of such vision and zeal – and who the Church also needs without always realising it. So perhaps the Church needs to forget itself for a while and allow the old walls to crumble without being in too much of a hurry to put up new ones.

The Church endures wherever there are enough rooms without walls, or ‘mansions’, to allow everyone to meet Jesus Christ and live in them in his love. In other words, where it focuses outwards in such a way as to allow those on the edge to also be at its centre. It seems, to those on the edge, that the Church is often afraid to let go of the familiar in order to grasp at what is unfamiliar, but which resonates with the truth they need to hear spoken from the pulpit, conveyed in the sacraments and lived out in the care of the least of the Church’s members. People on the edge have already heard this truth in their own hearts.  Perhaps it is they who are called to convey it into the heart of the Church.

Dealing with Depression - Letting go and letting be

On Sunday I had one of those ‘low’ days, the kind of day everyone has from time to time when it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s good in our lives and what isn't. The day gets ‘lower’ as we dig ourselves ever deeper into a generally negative view of our self, our current situation and other people. In the end we just become resigned to it all and, depending on temperament, will either turn to some form of palliative overlay, usually in the form of activity or ‘busyness’, or try to get a grip from within, through denial or self-enforced cheerfulness. Somewhere in between lies acceptance. We have to accept that the situation just is. We have to step back from it, at least in our heads, if not in our emotions, and take stock, by appreciating it’s being as it is and that it might even go on being that way for some time. We let go while at the same time accepting the reality of the pain itself.

In the sense that most day to day suffering is, of its very nature, tedious and repetitive, pain blocks our sensory perception of the possibility that we might be surprised by something new. So, as I have found in my own low moments, it is important to do everything possible not to allow the pain to block the way we might perceive things differently. Sensory perception gets blocked when we allow the pain to be artificially reduced or trivialised (in telling ourselves that it’s not all that bad really and that we should ‘snap out of it’) or, on the other hand, allow it to completely overwhelm us, mentally, spiritually and sometimes physically.

Taking control in low moments is not a matter of deciding on a course of action, or willing oneself into a different frame of mind by minimising the significance of our pain in sweeping it back to where it came from, wherever that was. It is a matter of sighing it out, of letting it go. It is the equivalent of ‘breathing through’ a contraction during labour, in order to relax the mind and body for the next one. The technique works in a similar way for dealing with depression. We breathe through it by a process of acceptance and sighing.

But accepting our feelings does not automatically entail unquestioning acceptance of our situation, as I know in regard to my own as a woman in the Church. Rather, it allows us to get out of the situation and look at it objectively, as well as looking objectively at the way we are feeling about it, especially as those feelings affect the way we relate to other people. Accepting negative feelings, with or without their being associated with unhappy memories, is the first step in taking real control of ourselves and of the situation which is causing us grief. Being simply passive to the pain is the quickest and surest way to allow whatever darkness we are experiencing in any given situation to overwhelm us. So we have to ‘labour’ through our feelings by sighing them out. The sighing is important because it obviates the need for words. But we still need someone to listen and be with us. With low days and low moments it is important to allow our sighs to be directed to someone who can show us how to get through the whole process of being ‘low’ and emerge intact, and not only intact, but a new person. This is part of what it means to be re-born in Christ. 

This happened to me on Sunday. I was sighing (yet again) about my situation vis a vis the Church. I was sighing into God and into his Christ. This was made easier by the fact that I was in the congregation rather than leading the service. It was a most refreshing change made possible by a cycle race which obliged me to take a major detour so that I arrived too late to be ‘up front’ with the other clergy. At the end of the service, having chatted to a few of the parishioners there, I was reminded of my great love for them all. Later, a colleague came up to me. I apologized for being late on account of the cyclists (I was pretty annoyed with them too which didn’t help the ‘low’ feeling) and she responded with a hug and something along the lines of ‘lovely that you’re here with your people’. Generosity of spirit, grace and goodness in a colleague who shares her ministry with me (when she doesn’t have to) with those particular words, ‘your people’, dispelled the low feeling in an instant, along with all its attendant bits of baggage relating to the Church and my situation in it. Her smile and those words were the answer to my sighing. Sighing out our pain into God opens us up to hearing him, or recognising his presence, in surprising ways. He makes himself felt from within the pain, often through the sheer goodness of others. 

Breaking the Rules

I don’t usually blog on a Sunday. I try, usually unsuccessfully, to have a Sabbath break from the computer. It is a difficult rule because, like millions of other users of the internet, the computer has accustomed me to a fast staccato rhythm of life. Slowing down the rhythm and easing the tempo brings withdrawal symptoms, including physical ones, because, like most people, I am in some measure addicted to this keyboard and the particular freedom it brings.

Not checking the internet or writing blog posts on a Sunday is both a liberation and a constraint. It liberates me for other things, like gardening and being fully present to other people, but it also constrains by denying the immediate satisfaction of a certain hunger. But today, as I break this self-imposed rule, because the coming week will be busy and afford little time for blogging, I feel liberated. Is this because writers have to write, so that breaking the ‘no computer’, and hence ‘no writing’, rule releases pent up creative energy, and hence stress? Or is it because self-imposed rules, or any other rules which are mindlessly adhered to, seldom fulfil their purpose? I think it is a little of both.

 Breaking rules is not just a matter of reclaiming freedom, however that is conceived. It is also a matter of discerning truth. This begs two further questions: How do rules help us to come to terms with who we are? And how can we know that a rule is self-defeating and ought therefore to be changed or abolished?

The second question really takes precedence over the first. Yesterday, I attended a very moving First Communion Mass in a Catholic church. There were about 300 people there. Being an Anglican who was once a Roman Catholic, and so not by nature a rule breaker, I spent the first part of the Mass trying to come to terms with the fact that there are regulations which forbid me to receive communion in a Catholic church. I felt like a person invited to a banquet who is shown all the civilities but not served any of the food, until I noticed that everyone was moving up to the front to receive communion, including a number of people known to me who were not Catholics. Everyone, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, were just helping themselves to the food which they knew they needed. I breathed a prayer of relief, feeling somewhat silly in doing so, and melded into the queue.

 The whole situation reminded me of a remark once made by an Anglican bishop, “No Church can keep a good God down”. Forbidding the reception of communion by people who are not of a particular denomination is a rule which is self-defeating, and so devoid of purpose, as are so many rules which forbid and exclude people from experiencing God’s love in whatever way they can.

Breaking the wrong rules in the right way can be as tough as keeping the wrong rules for the wrong reasons and that is why I addressed the second question before the first. So, to return to the first question, it is when we step over the boundaries of misconceived notions about tradition, the Church and certain kinds of loveless ‘morality’, and recognise our overriding hunger for God that we really come up against the truth about ourselves. Recognising this truth about ourselves frees us into creativity because it gives us permission to own our hunger for something more than the material and the mundane.

Being human means being hungry for something more than bread, as Jesus himself taught. He taught this because he knew that our humanity is sustained and informed by our hunger for truth. Our hunger for truth, as Saint Augustine found, along with a number of later philosophers who came at it from an entirely different direction, is the passion which makes us fully human. It is inextricably bound up with who we are and with all our other partially admitted longings. Together, they make up our need and hunger for truth which is also a hunger for God.

Once we recognise our hunger for God, it becomes easier to discern which of the rules we set ourselves need to be kept without question and which are in fact obstacles or impediments to satisfying this hunger. Some of the best rules need to be broken from time to time, or dispensed with altogether. If they are not, then the rules simply add to existing layers of guilt and neurosis rather than freeing us from them. The same holds for rules which contain, clip or limit real creativity. These need to be constantly kept under review, and broken as an when needed, as I am finding in writing this blog post on a Sunday.

Ultimately, all life is about creativity.  We are only fully human when we are being creative, but being creative is not the same as being ‘productive’.  Creativity is not a currency. It is life itself. This is what Jesus is talking about when he says that he is the way, the truth and the life. He is talking about the recognition of something necessary and familiar and yet entirely new and strange, the voice of the shepherd which the sheep know and recognise, offering them a way in to the place where they will find real food, where they will find the kind of truth which liberates.

He is not saying that only people who recognise his voice in a particular way, by adhering to certain terms and conditions, can be part of his flock. Rather, he is telling them how to recognise what is counterfeit and destructive. He is inviting those who are prepared to trust him to walk with him and, in so doing, to break quite a few ill-considered or self-imposed rules. He is also teaching them that the truth which is of God never stands still. It grows and shapes itself around the needs of the times, so it requires new rules, or boundaries, boundaries which allow it to flow unimpeded into the hearts and minds of those who hunger for it, which is all of us.