Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. 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.

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.

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 Broken. 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.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, 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.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. 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.

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.

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, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.

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 Broken, 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. 

Alive

Dawn (author generated)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light

Woodland Light by Sam Knight

Shorter summer evenings. Intense light. Cool, almost crisp shade. A delighted dog. These are the moments which will play themselves out in our dying, evoking earlier and perhaps similar memories, including kaleidoscopic glimpses of the best of childhood.

Summer again, but now France. The smell of pot-pourri and honey. The stubborn Shetland pony who I adored, but feared a little too. The pony trap which was taken out in the afternoons rattling and shaking because the road was as yet unpaved. White flinty gravel and learning to ride a bike. Fear again, and then success. Jubilate.

Yesterday evening the dog needed his walk and I was pushed for time. The gingerbread had to come out of the oven in 45 minutes’ max., so there and back in half an hour I told myself. Then the patch of light appeared across the cinder path in the woods, a little ahead of us, and with it a certain imperative, a sense of having to stop and stand in it before it disappeared, knowing that in this moment of radiance was, to quote Dame Julian of Norwich, ‘all that is’.

A moment of knowing and a time to remember, especially, perhaps, in the moment of dying. In such moments comes the realisation, or deep knowing, that no real separation exists between light and darkness. As the writer of the fourth Gospel says ‘the darkness has not overcome the light’. He might have added ‘the light has taken the darkness into itself’, which is also to say that the light has allowed itself to be darkness, in order to transfigure it, thereby changing the way we see things.

The light has taken the darkness into God’s self, and transformed it. This overcoming of darkness by light is an act of God’s will, or purpose. It cannot just happen. That might even be to deny the laws of physics. Apologies to scientists for this possibly naive assumption. I am no scientist – but would welcome insightful comments here. In theological terms, the sudden interruption of light on the path we were walking on was an act of primal but ongoing creation. It was ‘all that is’.

We need both light and darkness in order to live. We need the rhythm of day and night, and of seasons, seasons of gestation as well as of flowering and bearing fruit, and in order for all of these to occur we need times of dying.

The writer of the fourth Gospel reminds us that the will and purpose for transfiguring the darkness was embodied in the God man, Jesus. Darkness, our own inner darkness, whatever form it takes, and the dark times of life, can make it impossible to ‘conceive’ life, to sense the light. They are times of dying. We cannot conceive and then propagate what seems simply not to exist, and yet, paradoxically, it is still possible to ‘know’ the light and the life it brings. The knowing of life, and of light, in times of darkness comes with surrendering in faith to the heart of that darkness. We surrender in faith to love. Love is the heart of darkness.

Patches of sunlight, or their equivalent, come as a knowledge of God’s immeasurable love. Part of this knowledge consists in entering joyfully into the will and purpose of God to re-make his creation, beginning with the re-making of our own selves and of the world we inhabit. When it comes to personal suffering, re-making begins with accepting that there is little, if anything, we can do to change ourselves, at least not at the moment. The real danger here lies in feeling that we can do nothing for anyone else either, and with it comes the temptation to think that our life is a waste and that we are a failure. This is the substance of depression.

But it is in vulnerability to God’s love, in other words by ‘faith’, that we are somehow able to go on accepting our situation. Here lies another paradox; acceptance and vulnerability become the surest defence against all that is life threatening, within ourselves and our surroundings, including other people and nations. In all these places of darkness, God’s love, and the love of others, returns us to the light. 

Only connect

My current computer screen saver is Giovanni Bellini’s Christ Blessing, as shown on my post of February 10^th.  I am returning to this picture because it holds my attention in a particular way. With our slow internet connection, there is always time to contemplate it, even if contemplation is abruptly cut off by the arrival of emails and other distractions emanating from the ‘real’ world. By contemplating, I mean looking through the picture, rather than looking at it. To contemplate this picture is to look through it to the Christ who is inviting the viewer into relationship with him, and into a different way of seeing the world. Looking at the face of Christ makes me wonder sometimes which world is the most real – his or the one I seem to inhabit, as most of us do, via a computer.

 

Computers and social network sites, as well as blogs, leave us in a kind of limbo when we are not on them, which is why it is so difficult to turn them off. It is as if we inhabit two worlds at once, in which we deal with what feel like different realities. What kind of inhabiting is this? and what kind of reality am I contemplating as I look at the face of Christ while waiting for the computer to get going? It seems to be a liminal place. I am standing on a dividing line between two worlds, two realities which interface with one another. In contemplating the image of Christ blessing I sense it reaching in to the world being opened up not only to me, but to millions of others, through the computer. When the screen saver goes, an interruption occurs as the computer releases a different real world into the mind space of its user.

But the image of Christ blessing is not so quick to fade. My screen saver remains with me and serves as a reminder of that other real world. The memory of Christ’s hand raised in benediction now confronts the host of alienating images and stories which shape themselves around not only my own consciousness, but also around everything which the computer may have to offer, its potential for both good and evil. The computer is a re-incarnation of that allegorical tree of knowledge portrayed in the book of Genesis. We need to eat carefully of its fruit.

The computer takes us to dark places and, potentially, to a general darkness, although not  always one which is specifically ‘religious’. It is important to differentiate between general darkness, the darkness of ignorance and materialism, and that which seems to pertain solely to religion, as many people understand it. Those who distrust religion will often associate it with the kind of darkness which comes with the preaching of hatred and murder. This particular darkness is encapsulated in the image depicting the Arabic letter ‘nun’, for ‘Nazarene’, as it is used to single out Christian homes for the intimidation or destruction of those who live in them.

The task which faces all of us, if the world is to survive the current tide of religious violence, consists in bringing together these two images, the one of Christ blessing, and the Arabic letter, and allowing them to confront one another. It is challenging and, at times, frightening work. Firstly, because it requires that we come to terms with the idea that the light, as we see it in the Bellini painting, and as we sometimes sense it in the deeper reaches of our own consciousness, has not been overcome by the sinister darkness associated with the letter ‘nun’.

Secondly, it obliges us to also look at our own inner darkness, those feelings of doubt, fear and anger which surface from time to time and for which there is often no obvious or immediate explanation. This process of confrontation begins with our accepting and coming to terms with the light which we also carry within us. It is the light of God’s presence, the working of his grace in our lives, to the extent that we allow it. Allowing grace into our lives is a matter of making ourselves available to God. It is what the writer Simone Weil called disponibilité.

Being available to the work of light brings us to the outer limit of what we think of as our ‘selves’. In so doing, it faces us with a particular kind of emptiness, one where the ‘self’ that we understand we are, including all its dreams and desires, loves and hates, has to be literally ‘forgotten’.[1] This is what Christ meant when he talked about ‘dying’ to self. In the moment of forgetting, or dying, we are invited to drop down into darkness, the darkness of not having answers, of not knowing, and at the same time of trusting in the light which literally ‘lightens the world’. This whole process of forgetting, dying and trusting leads to a new kind of knowing and seeing.

There is a connection to be made in the process of  knowing and understanding on one level with that of not knowing or understanding on a deeper and more significant level. We are talking about the inhabiting of two worlds, or realities. At the deeper level, we don’t need to know things in the same way. We don’t need to have made sense of why the world is as it is, or to have come up with solutions. All that is required is that we maintain a connection between the light, as we see it in the holy face of Christ, and all that is chaotic, violent and dark in our world.

On the whole, this work of connecting is best done by individuals who are prepared to be open to it for most of the day. They will find, in any case, that once they have made themselves ‘available’, being open to the work of grace will become a way of life, although it will not prevent them from carrying on with life as they have always lived it, with regard to what they do for a living, their marriage or relationships and all those in between times when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular.

The vital work of engaging with darkness, while remaining in the light, is a matter of remaining connected at a deeper level with the light we see in the face of Christ, who confronts and overcomes the darkness in the world around us.

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[1] I am grateful to Maggie Ross for many of the ideas which inform this post, especially that of  ‘forgetting’. See her recent book Silence: A User’s Guide, (DLT)

Loving and learning - Some thoughts for Freshers' Week

The beginning of the academic year coincides with the season for Harvest thanksgiving. Although I live in the country, where the size and quality of harvest depend on the climatic vagueries of the British Isles, I am also aware that harvest is not just a matter of crops, livestock and garden produce. It is about life itself. Our whole lives are a harvest, at whatever stage they have reached, and in them we are responsible for the lives and harvests of others.

Those who are either returning to university, or going there for the first time, are embarking on a new stage of life’s harvest. Academic work, like the physical work of farming, is concerned with sowing and reaping, to borrow from a well known harvest hymn. It is primarily concerned with being open to receiving the seeds of wisdom, the kind of wisdom which will help today’s students shape their future and with it that of society.

Society is composed of human beings. It is made up of a dense web of interconnected relationships, beginning with those of a person’s immediate family. That primal family relationship connects persons to each other and, over time, integrates them within the system we call a free and democratic society. Integration is not about being subsumed or swallowed up by the greater whole, still less by any one ideology or political system. It is about being a mature human being, ready to assume responsibility for other human beings, beginning with our immediate neighbour. It means knowing that we can make a difference to society.

The purpose of education is therefore to prepare people, from the age of about 5, or perhaps younger, to take their place in a free and democratic society and to work towards enhancing and preserving it. When it comes to higher or further education, enhancing and preserving the things which make for democratic society are not only a matter of acquiring skills and qualifications, important as these are in their particular contexts. They are a matter of learning how to think in a way which is worthy of our humanity. In other words, the purpose of higher education is to learn how to think in order to be able to help others to become fully human. This ultimate end is also God’s purpose for his world, and hence for society, because God is concerned with our humanity to the point that he assumed it himself.

Where learning is undertaken for the sake of the other, in other words for the greater good of society, it acquires the characteristic of love. This changes the way we think about the subject being studied. First, because allowing love to motivate our learning takes us out of our individual selves. Loving what we learn, or learning with the heart, inevitably distances us from our own individual objectives; my career, my earning power, my status and standing vis a vis that of others in my peer group. Secondly, it motivates the learning process. The love of learning makes clear our reasons for choosing any given subject and provides the focus and energy needed to stay the course to the end.

Many people starting their university life are not at all sure why they are studying the subject they have chosen. Perhaps someone has advised them that it is what they are most suited to, or it was a spur of the moment decision. They somehow fell into the subject and, as a result, may never engage with it in any depth or with any degree of real love.

Learning has to be undertaken for its own sake, in other words in love, before its harvest can be deployed for the good of others. The love of learning for its own sake imparts a deeper meaning to the subject chosen, because love involves self giving. Every minute devoted to the study of any one subject, every lecture to which full attention is paid (including the less interesting ones), every seminar or tutorial, every essay or presentation, is a visible enactment of the love which powers the work and will continue to power whatever it becomes in the coming years.  

Self giving love expresses itself in learning as disciplined argument coherently expressed. Disciplined thought and clarity of expression give us permission to feel passionate about the subject we are studying. Passion follows discipline, and not the other way round. Passion without discipline simply degenerates into opinion. A university degree is therefore not a piece of paper certifying that we have a right to an opinion. It certifies to the fact that we have learned to think rationally and that we are considered ready to put our intellect, or whatever professional skills we have acquired, to the service of others. It also signifies that our learning is ongoing, that we are always learning in order to understand more deeply the purposes of God for the world of today. 

Holding It All Together

Multi-tasking has become a sign of character, almost a virtue. The person who can hold more than one set of ideas in their heads and work with them simultaneously is to be admired and if possible emulated. Such a person has grip. Having grip, or focus, is a pre-requisite for success because where there is grip and focus, there is energy, forward momentum and a general ability to hold things together. Loss of grip leads to inner fragmentation and ultimate breakdown. Perhaps this is where our psyches reflect the disorder which surrounds us in the world; countries falling apart, entire regions without infrastructure of any kind, whose power-holders seem accountable to nobody, so that their grip on power depends on the extent to which they are able to generate and maintain fear over those they control. This in turn feeds their own fear, the fear of losing control, of losing power, or ‘grip’.

Somewhere there needs to be a change in the way we think about control and grip, both in our own lives and in the way many people experience power, either as holders of power or as victims. Perhaps we need to think differently about our inter-connectedness by getting a better sense of the two-way traffic of power and control, that we are both controlling and controlled when it comes to our human interrelatedness, our sociality.

Sociality is not something we can identify as a quantifiable cause or effect, something which can be pictured with the help of data and statistics. It is built into our emotional DNA and into the history of the human race and of the planet to which we all belong. We have an inbuilt fear of the unquantifiable, anarchic and strange, but the strange and the unquantifiable are also bound up with human longing, with dreams for the future and with the anticipation or uncertainty which they bring. Perhaps this is why we are so often checking things. We constantly check our emails, or whatever information may be available via the latest phone app, giving us the  latest statistic or result which could impact our lives, either directly or indirectly.

We worry and fret, often without knowing what it is we are worrying about. In fact the things which cause us to worry and fret are even built into our entertainment. Information is also entertainment but information which has become entertainment does not relieve fear, even for a moment. In fact it frequently has the opposite effect. We need a moment’s stillness to make sense of all the information before it merges with entertainment and  generates more fear. Fear creates barriers. It is the greatest destroyer of sociality.

I believe that the capacity for inner stillness is the way to true sociality. Inner stillness is enormously powerful. It reconnects us with one another by allowing for a deeper awareness of the sheer ‘is-ness’ of things, of ‘being’, which is life itself in its purest form. It enables us to let go of fear, so that things can regain their natural equilibrium, their level of sanity. 

Stillness makes us conscious of life’s depth and force by bringing us into the presence of God. This is where God is to be found and it is also what God is. He is the stillness which gives space for the life which holds all things together. He is also the life itself. No matter how hard a person works at religion, if they have not known God in stillness, they have achieved nothing. The very word ‘religion’ is taken from the Latin ligare  which means to ‘bind together’, not through force or psychological manipulation, but through the kind of love which is only fully experienced when we encounter God in this place of inner stillness.

He makes himself known, or recognised, in the most ordinary of social contexts, as he did for the two disciples who recognised the risen Christ ‘in the breaking of the bread’, in the context of an ordinary meal. In that moment they recognised something they had always known but never known so fully. It was a moment of truth. The encounter would have given them a new and more truthful way of understanding their place in the world. 

We can all have such moments, and the world needs us to have them. They come when we are able to relinquish our grip on the ‘must haves’ and ‘must do’s’ of life and return to stillness, to our own centre, bringing our troubled world with us, knowing that it is held there and, in some mysterious way, calmed, even if only for a moment. Try it.

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.