Not Torn Apart

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

By their fruits...

Big Ben and Houses of Parliament
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The advantage of an eclectic schooling, or even a disrupted one, lies in the way it conditions a person to the possibility of seeing things in more ways than one, through different cultural prisms. The casualties of such a primary intellectual formation lie chiefly in the realm of mathematics and history. It is hard to get a grasp of numeracy when it is taught in more than one way and, as in my case, in more than one language. But the patchy impression one gets of history, from going to different schools and not always in the same country is, in the longer term, a far greater risk to intellectual health.

For one thing, if you change schools often, you don’t put down intellectual roots. This means that you don’t properly belong to any one thread of history. You have become disconnected from your own historical thread, the one you left behind when you went to live in another country, and you have arrived too late in the academic year, or even in the trajectory of your life, to pick up that of your adopted land. You feel disconnected from its particular contextual flow, from how your peers are already being shaped and acquiring their political identity from within their history. This puts you in a defensive position, one which makes it difficult for trust to take root, so you switch off during history lessons and, as a result, become even more alienated.

Perhaps one of the important things to learn from this election is that we are in the process of re-thinking our history, a history which is being shaped demographically. We can look at this demographic re-shaping of history in a positive light, if we choose to do so, or we can feel threatened by it. The choice is open to all of us. 

Our history is also being shaped by a fluid ‘pick and mix’ approach to politics, and by rapid change and temporary party alliances within the political system. It is arguable that these temporary alliances are in part a response to the rapid changes we experience at every level of our consumerist collective life. We have become a pick and mix society, picking and choosing between different party policies but seldom clear about how we coalesce as a nation. Even so, this political fragmentation may yet bear fruit in surprising ways.

What is needed is the re-establishment of trust, beginning with a genuine renewal of the system itself. The old two party system is faltering because a sizeable proportion of the population does not feel connected to it. This feeling of disconnectedness has grown out of a sense of disillusionment with the political system itself and with the people who govern through it. The system is a closed one by virtue of the way votes are counted and power subsequently allocated, and by the forced obeisance imposed through the party Whip.

It seems almost certain that the outcome of this election will lead to one of two things; either a marriage of convenience similar to that of the last parliament or, preferably, to a minority government in which all will have to listen to each other for the sake of the common good, and thereby begin to shape a new and better history for this country. They will do this by taking shared decisions on a policy by policy basis. The difference between these two methods of governance lies in their potential for re-building trust in a political system which has been strained to the limit as a result of the last two general elections.

On the one hand, and most recently, coalitions, despite their moderating effects, ultimately reduce governance to deal-making behind closed doors, to which all parties to the marriage are obliged to sign up even if they played no direct part in the brokering of the deal and know that those who voted for them disagree with the policy in question. On the other, lies the possibly less efficient but more transparent way of reaching decisions whereby policies are agreed upon openly and collectively on the basis of what is most good and sensible for the nation as a whole.

As with the system, so with the people who hold the power within it. Cameron’s recent Freudian slip suggests that politicians must speak and act in ways which protect their careers, even if the speaking and the acting do not ultimately coincide. As a result, those standing for election to the highest office in the land are tainted with the same distrust which many feel towards the political system as a whole. This will continue for as long as politicians choose to retain the present electoral system and operate within its protective confines, but history has proved that disillusionment in the people who take advantage of flawed systems, and govern through them, has serious consequences. Politicians may be just like the rest of us but more is expected of them. That is the real price of power.