Lent 2016 - Exposing the lie

It’s an idea we’re going to have to get used to. Donald Trump may yet become President of the United States of America, which is still the most powerful nation on earth. How might this come about? There is no simple answer, and I am no political pundit, but one thing seems clear; that the fomenting of hatred gets you a long way in politics. 

Source: The Guardian

The guile it takes to foment hatred serves as both trowel and weapon, useful as a means of turning over the blackest, and often richest, soil of emotions in the human heart, and as the deadliest of all weapons, the guile which is also known as duplicity, or deceit. Guile, or duplicity, covers up a multitude of evils, most notably those which used to be known as the seven deadly sins.

Thinking about the politics of America, which claims in its own constitution to be ‘one  nation under God’, the rhetoric swirls around as the presidential primaries get under way, and we detect its heavy religious undertones. The tool of religion, whose purpose is to ‘turn over’, or convert, human hearts and so open them to the transforming work of love, becomes the weapon of xenophobic fear and ultimately of hatred itself, hatred which is spawned in human hearts through pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth – the seven deadly sins. In and through any or all of these, using the tools of duplicity and deceit, the demon of hatred urges a nation on into the night. Perhaps it is time we all thought more carefully about our politics.

When it comes to duplicity, politics and religion are easily confused. They merge in the shadows of those outmoded deadly sins. Take lust, for example. Lust has more to do with power than it does with sex, although the two often go together. Lust for power is not always immediately recognisable because it is easily disguised by personal charisma or by flattery, both pandering to the lowest common moral denominator.

Evil is of its very nature duplicitous. In terms of politics, evil can be disguised quite effectively, either as what is good for the nation (because those who are infatuated with one man’s charisma are encouraged to believe that it is they who represent the nation in its purest state), or, on the other, as an ideal which they both want and deserve. Once these two untruths have been firmly established, nobody should be allowed to question the means or the motives for promoting them. But occasionally the terrifying truth slips out, as it did when someone recently asked what it will feel like to know that Donald Trump has it in his power to press the nuclear button.

Either way, fear seems, once again, to rule the day. But this too is part of the great deception. The period which Christians observe prior to celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is also a time for exposing deception. Exposing deception begins with ourselves. The season of Lent is a season for reflecting on unquestioned attitudes which we may not even know we have, attitudes to race, gender, power and the unconscious assumption that somehow ‘might is right’.

Our private assumptions and our most secret prejudices combine to make the sum total of a nation. So Lent is an opportunity to review, and perhaps repent of, our politics. By doing this personally we also do it as a nation, knowing that ‘all have sinned’ in this area at one time or another. As nations we have all fallen short of the loving purposes of God, and as nations we are invited to be open to the transforming work of his grace – and to the new life we share in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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)

Out of the Whirlwind - Spiritual Warfare and the Middle East

Touching base once again with the news after a short break, I am painfully aware of how life goes on, or does not go on, depending on which country you happen to be living in. If you are one of the 33 million people who have been dispossessed or made homeless by conflict, life might just go on for the next 24 hours if you are one of the lucky ones.

As I have said on previous occasions, reality is hard for most of us to bear. For one thing, if you are not personally caught up in the tragedy of violence, you are cast into the disempowering role of bystander. Being a bystander brings on feelings of guilt and a general sense of helplessness, the two being corresponding aspects of despair.

The violence and turmoil which we read and hear about in the news is at its worst in the cradle of civilization, where we have our shared beginnings. What happens in the Middle East affects all of us because the Middle East has shaped our collective DNA, historically, culturally and spiritually. Perhaps this is why we are so inarticulate in the face of it all. It triggers feelings of dread and helplessness which are hard to describe. Perhaps they have something to do with our rootedness in the soil of those lands, the soil of our collective human history.

In his poem ‘The Second Coming,’ W.B. Yeats describes war as a ‘falling apart’ of our collective sense of self. He is talking about the disintegration of meaning, as it pertains to the meaning and purpose of human existence. Sectarian violence, and the chaos which it wreaks on the lives of countless individuals, undoes centuries of what we think of as civilization. At the heart of this undoing lies evil. Yeats, who was writing at the time of the first world war spoke of a ‘blood-dimmed tide’ being ‘loosed’ on the world. Today, we have the same blood-dimmed tide overwhelming Syria and Iraq in the form of murderous sectarian hatreds which are rooted in the darkest evil.

In the face of such evil, how are we to speak of a merciful God, or convey the message of hope given to us in the gospels? I think part of the answer lies in a deep conviction of our being loved by God. This is the conviction of faith which takes us beyond belief into the true meaning of all good religion, reconciliation. Yesterday, I read of a Palestinian academic who took some of his students to Auschwitz, so that they could get a better understanding of how and why the state of Israel came into being. He did this because of his faith in reconciliation as the only way for Israel and the rest of the Middle East to survive.

Deep reconciliation is a kind of ‘letting go’ into the very depths and darkness of love itself. We confront the hatred of both the past and the present in that place. The tragedy of the current conflicts in Syria and Iraq is that its key players have neither the will nor the motive to ‘let go’ in this way because they are driven by hatred. Hatred, like love, absorbs people completely, so that you end up hating not only those who you think are your enemies but also those whose interests you claim to be defending. This is how we recognise evil for what it is. It is a lie which leads only to the ‘black hole’ of nihilism and despair.

But there is also a darkness of love, which is its opposite. This is the darkness, or stillness, at the heart of the whirlwind, the tornado, in which Elijah the prophet was caught up and heard the word of the Lord. We can all connect with the stillness which is at the heart of the tornado around us, the ‘still small voice’ of God, when we engage with faith and hope at a deeper level. In the context of the world’s storms and tornadoes – political as well as environmental, we return to this place of darkness which is at the very core of our being, as it is at the core of the world itself. In it, we are offered a terrifying choice, whether to succumb to the despair of hatred, or stand firm in the heart of the darkness of love and of ‘not knowing’ and hear the still small voice of God speaking hope into it. This is what Christians call spiritual warfare. It can be done alone or in the company of others, although it is best done together. So if you are reading this and know of one or two people with whom you could undertake this work, tweet or facebook them and share the link.