Random acts of joy

A couple of nights ago we skipped the news and went to the circus instead. How frivolous and irresponsible was that at a time like this? the little voice counselling doom and despair kept telling me. How could anyone allow themselves to be distracted from the brutality going on around us? Places like Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, all of them controlled to a greater or lesser extent by the forces of evil at work in IS, al-Quaeda, Boko Haram and the various splinter groups, not to mention corrupt governments, working with them to a greater or lesser extent. Is it right to forget for a moment, by going to see Cirque Beserk at the Hackney Empire, that women and girls are being enslaved and that whole peoples are being subjected to a medieval nightmare?

Guilt and doubt are the great killers of fun because fun allows us to forget. It affords a time of respite. This is why banning fun is the essence of evil. It is also why poisoning religion by banning fun has long been the stock in trade of the evil one, and of his agents. The evil one, far from being an allegorical figure with horns and a pitchfork, is more like a virus which attacks us where we are most vulnerable, beginning with that aspect of human nature which we call spiritual, or religious, or our human consciousness. Consciousness or, to put it in religious terms, conscience, is where we differentiate between right and wrong, between what makes us fully human and what dehumanises or depraves the human spirit.

To begin with, and for most of us, the evil one works most effectively through counsels of doom and despair, accompanied by the voices of accusation and deception. In the very moment of full and uninhibited enjoyment of Cirque Beserk, I am accused of cowardice and moral turpitude as I sense the enemy questioning my enjoyment of such a distraction. Surely my attention should be fully taken up with the suffering and deprivation going on in the world? This private deception plays itself out within a wider psychological context. We are a chronically anxious society, deceived, as individuals, into thinking that if I do not hold up the world like Atlas, it will be overrun by these dark forces and it will all be my fault.

For this kind of deception to be effective, so that evil can take hold and do its malicious work, all signs of uncomplicated, selfless and at times even ‘pointless’ joy, or fun, need to be eliminated. It follows that joy, or fun, is probably the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal in the context of what is often referred to as ‘spiritual warfare’. Spiritual warfare is what all people of good faith, irrespective of their religion, are engaged in at present, even if they would not necessarily call it by that name.

Spiritual warfare centres on joy because joy is of the essence of creation itself. Evil, or the evil one, attacks the goodness of creation and of human beings by first destroying joy. If God is love, and if all things have their being in him, he rejoices eternally in their goodness. He ‘sees’ that they are good, to paraphrase the beginning of the book of Genesis. In this joy over the goodness of things, and of people, he also ‘comprehends’ darkness. In other words, he takes darkness into himself and transforms it through the love which is constitutive of his own being. Joy works through love and sustains all things. Human beings are entrusted to work God’s love into the world through joy – or what we call fun.

This is what happens in the circus. Circuses are contexts in which fun is given at great risk and at great personal cost. The woman hanging upside down on a rope some twenty feet above ground depends on the knots she will have tied herself and on the three pairs of hands holding the rope at the other end. The tumbling acrobat, if he misses his appointed landing spot, could be seriously injured, or even killed. We hardly dare watch him – and yet we do, not because we relish danger for its own sake but because we, like his colleagues waiting with a safety mat in case he misses his landing spot (I won’t spoil it by saying more), are willing him to be OK. We are also laughing with him and with his colleagues when he executes the act with flawless grace. The relentless joy of rave-type circus music, sustains the process and adds to the fun in the most surprising way.

And then there is the clown. His act is rooted in 17^th century Commedia del Arte, a popular form of street theatre in which human nature and human folly are portrayed through stock characters. The clown shows us to ourselves and gives us permission to laugh kindly at ourselves and at human folly. Laughing at ourselves without feeling guilty or afraid cures self deception and all the deceptions which we cherish about those who we fear or dislike. It allows love to happen.  

The clown is therefore one of the great healers of the human spirit. He is the Christ figure in our midst. He appears in every random act of joy, in shared and generous fun where all kinds of risks are taken for the sheer goodness and beauty of the moment, and in laughter that is entirely devoid of malice. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Last week’s murder of Alan Henning has generated shock waves both here and abroad, a mixture of grief, anger and sheer incomprehension. Why did this happen to such a person? The only explanation we can possibly imagine is that a vital human connection is  missing in the psyche of the man who perpetrated this act. This is what shakes us. Something has been ruptured in this event, something which we take for granted with regard to our shared humanity – ours and those who murdered Alan.

This sense of rupture raises a number of questions concerning what it is to be human and whether there comes a time when people who commit such crimes have wilfully allowed themselves to be uncoupled from their own humanity. There is something about beheading another human being which suggests severance.

It also begs the question of whether evil is inculcated over a period of time and, if so, where does it come from? The one who indoctrinates another person into doing evil must himself, or herself, have learned evil from someone else. Or is a person born evil? This is one of the profound questions faced so courageously by Lionel Shriver in her book We Need to Talk About Kevin. Shriver’s book concerns evil and the individual psychopath. But ISIS represents collective evil, a quasi, even if wholly imagined, emerging ‘state’ which would be shaped and held in place by psychopaths.

The characteristic of psychopaths, whether they act as individuals or as a group, is that they seek out the innocent. Pogroms, holocausts and acts of ethnic cleansing are the work of a psychopath ‘collective’ hunting down and exterminating the innocent people they fear. Evil always fears what is truthful and good.

The murderous activity of ISIS will ultimately reveal itself as the act of  people who are afraid and, since fear generates more fear, their act creates shock waves of fear which extend outwards like earthquake tremors into our own hearts. This is the fear which we must all resist while at the same time asking why such things happen. The asking is important because it is part of faith, and therefore part of the resistance to fear.

Human beings have been asking why innocent people are allowed to suffer ever since they first questioned the meaning of their own existence, and the existence of God. But the question is, paradoxically, part of the answer, part of the meaning. Consequently, our humanity is diminished from the minute we cease to ask ‘why?’ in the face of evil and suffering. Persecutors have always known this, as do  powerful people who  inflict suffering and silence on those they control. In silencing them they seek to diminish or eradicate their humanity which is their inherent goodness and the truth which they speak. Their inherent goodness and unflinching truthfulness is also what makes for resistance in the face of evil and suffering, a stubborn refusal to accept what seems like God’s refusal to answer the ‘why?’ question.

Asking ‘why?’, is part of faith. It forces us out of complacent thinking in relation to suffering, especially when suffering obliges us to examine our views of God, including whether God exists at all. This does not mean that suffering is itself a good thing, as the prophet Job eventually realises. The book of Job seeks not so much to answer the question ‘why does God (if there is one) allow good people to suffer?’ as to expand the human heart’s capacity for faith in a God who, despite suffering, purposes all things to the good for those who love him, as the apostle Paul later writes in his letter to the church in Rome. Despite this, Job does not experience a happy ending. The children who died will not be restored to him. What he does learn, however, is that it is in suffering itself that God’s purpose for the good is worked and will be finally achieved.

The book of Job tells us that evil is overcome by the kind of faith which is rooted in a seemingly unwarranted love for God. It seems unwarranted because God appears indifferent to Job’s suffering. This brings us back to the goodness which was in Alan Henning and to our own ‘why?’ questioning in relation to his death. How do we deal with the fact that there appear to be no easy answers to the question? And how do we deal with the fear tremors which the event has generated, apart from engaging in retributive violence of one kind or another? We deal with both by joining with Muslims in asking the ‘why?’ question. As Christians, we also deal with it by the response already given to us in our own faith, the sure knowledge of the saving power of God enacted in and through Jesus Christ.

Faith in Christ is not a panacea. It does not lead to happy endings, or deny pain, or act as a guarantee against violence and evil. This is because faith is a proactive response to God’s loving invitation to live in union with him. It is a decision of both heart and mind, taken even in the face of evil and suffering. It is also ‘graced’ by God, so that it both frees and empowers.

Faith is a decision to ‘stand’ in that place which God chose to place himself, the place of human suffering and of death. The Greek word for ‘cross’ is rooted in the word for ‘stand’, Greek being the language of the New Testament. So to ‘stand’ in that place is to stand by the Cross of Christ where we find that we are accompanied, or rather met and embraced, by Christ in the suffering of innocent people like Alan Henning and in the grief of the vast majority of Muslims who deplore his murder.

The Cross is both the first and the last place where we encounter God as one who is totally ‘for’ all human beings, and in solidarity with them, especially when they suffer. In this mysterious way, he is the answer to the question.

Reality Overload and How to Bear It

It has been said that human beings can only bear so much reality. This might imply that beyond a certain point they either go mad, or simply zone out, as happens to most of us when we witness on the news yet another incident of barbarity and pre-meditated cruelty committed against women. What can we do about it? And how do we manage our own feelings in relation to these occurrences? There have been three this week. The first involving the incarceration of a Muslim woman, Mariah Yahya Ibrahim, who became a Christian and subsequently married a Christian man. She awaits execution for apostasy, having first been allowed to give birth to her child. The second is the gang rape and public hanging of two sisters in a village in rural India. The participants included members of the local police force. The third involved a pregnant woman stoned to death by relatives in a major city in Pakistan for refusing to comply with an arranged marriage.

How should Christians, and all people of faith, respond to such things? The disgust and outrage prompts us to get out there and do something – protest, write letters to governments or join an organised petition, all of these being perfectly valid courses of action, even if they leave us still feeling powerless and ineffectual. But they are not the only things we can do. There is another way, an even more powerful way to effect change.

It has to do with being ready to face and fully engage with the pain itself from within our own history of suffering, our well of loneliness, be it ever so slight in comparison to what we see and read in the news. Our inner well of loneliness is that place where human consciousness, or conscience, is rooted in the history of every individual’s life experience and connects with the sum total of suffering which makes up human history. It is the place where we learn, sometimes through bitter experience, the difference between good and evil. We return to this place and face our demons when we pray. Our demons are the thoughts, inclinations and predilections of which we are perhaps ashamed but which may be connected to circumstances beyond our control, circumstances which sometimes do not even pertain to our own lives.

The more we do this returning, and own our pain and our demons before God, the better equipped we become to face the evil and violence that is committed on a daily basis against women and girls. A rape is committed in India every 22 minutes. In the moment that we return to our inner place of darkness, where we know ourselves and are known by God in all the fullness of what we are, we can be pretty sure that some hideous act of violence is being committed against a woman somewhere in the world.

The point of what I am saying is not to induce guilt or a sense of hopelessness. Neither am I suggesting that prayer, the centering down into our own inner dark space, our place of loneliness, is a form of escapism. Rather, it is a matter of owning the darkness in ourselves which makes us part of God’s purpose for our world. His purpose is the complete overwhelming of darkness by light, a purpose which is already being worked out in the moment we own the darkness and loneliness in our world to God.

The psalmist writes, ‘darkness is not dark to him. The night is as bright as the day.’ (Ps.139) This is a mystery and not one which is given to us to understand in this life, but eventually it will be fully understood by everyone, beginning with the perpetrators of the worst crimes against the innocent. They will see and understand what they have done in all its dreadful fullness. So we take the suffering of women and girls, as we hear of it today, into this place where we are ‘known’ by God and we are in solidarity with them, as Christ is in solidarity with us in our own darkness. It is from our own place of darkness that we share in the outrage of people around the world at the crimes which have been committed against these women this week. It is in this place that the world’s anger and grief has meaning and purpose because it is ‘known’ by God in ways which we do not as yet fully understand. We plead for justice in this place of darkness. We ask for mercy, knowing as the prophet Job knew in the depths of his own darkness, that our redeemer lives – and we carry on caring.