Absence

We are approaching the shortest season of the Christian year. It lasts a little over a week and is known as Ascensiontide.

Ascensiontide is a season for celebrating absence, a season of paradox.

Edward Hopper 'Automat' (1927)

Absence correlates with loneliness. A great deal is being said these days about loneliness and whether or not the problem of loneliness in our society is either helped or exacerbated by the internet. Are we living in an increasingly ‘virtual’ world, one which is, by implication, false? If so, loneliness, in its various manifestations, especially those related to addiction and abuse, must also be connected to loss and bereavement, the loss of what is real and true in human relationships.

It is at first surprising that the Christian Church should treat this interim season, between the Ascension of Christ into heaven and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as one of joyful expectancy. For the disciples, it was also a time of disorientation and emotional disorder. Ascensiontide is a time of conflicting emotions. A certain tension prevails which needs to be broken, so that negative and sad emotions can be dis-ordered and then reconfigured in ways which change how we see things, and perhaps how we see God. Ascensiontide is, like Advent and Lent, a time of preparation in which we know God in his absence, prior to knowing him in a new way.

We get so used to a negative experience of absence in our lives, absence associated with separation or bereavement, and to what it does to us, that at times it is hard to imagine how life would be if that absence were to be filled. Absence speaks of a space that has been vacated, either because someone, or some animal we love, has left us or died, or because we ourselves have left another person or a place we associate with happiness, so absence also resonates with loss.

How does such a seemingly bleak situation connect with the season of Ascensiontide? I think the answer comes in the form of joyful expectation, or ‘hope-filled waiting’. Hope involves risk. It means being prepared to have our sadness questioned and then thrown into disorder while we remain realistic about what caused it in the first place. Hope comes with being realistic about how human beings connect or engage with one another, and about life itself and our own mortality. The disciples waiting in the upper room were acutely aware of their connectedness with one another in the one whose presence they so missed. They also feared for their physical lives.

A sense of connectedness is essential to our physical and emotional survival, especially in times of separation or danger, but connectedness does not have to be limited to our immediate family or social ‘circles’, to employ the language of social media. We are also connected to all those who, in these times of religious extremism and global turmoil, fear for their lives. This is the wider context in which our own particular sadness, and whatever emotional violence we may be experiencing, is held and healed.

Connectedness also has to do with having a sense of history, our own, that of our society and of the planet which we share. When connectedness is understood in this way it sustains us because it allows us to understand life as an unlimited, or eternal, creative event. There are scientists who are even beginning to think of the universe, or universes, as an eternity of eternities. Presumably it is ‘uncreated’ life itself which connects these eternities.

Such a way of thinking might also help us to make sense of conflicting emotions. The moving unbounded event of life anchors the chaos of our negative or destructive emotions. It reconnects them with the interdependence of all living things, and reconnects the present moment with both the past and the future. The way our individual lives have touched upon those of other people, including those whom we have perhaps never met, is part of this continuum. Where our connectedness with others is interrupted we experience a profound sense of absence, or loss, a kind of relational vacuum. Perhaps the internet makes us feel this loss all the more keenly.

But it is in this acute sense of loss or absence, this vacant space, that we wait with joyful expectation for the renewing event of Pentecost, for a sudden surprising ‘wind of change’ which derives from a single source, a single energy. It derives from the energy of God’s love, of truth itself, at work in the present moment in which a particular absence is perhaps being most acutely felt. 

On Dying

Last week I was privileged to be at the bedside of a man who was dying. I say privileged because the experience was akin to what I feel when I approach the altar before celebrating the Eucharist, a sense of being on holy ground, in the immanent presence of God and, like a number of Old Testament prophets who found themselves in a comparable situation, having nothing to say. It’s not that I had nothing to say to the man who was dying. I had nothing to say to the fact of death itself. There is a built-in instinct to talk in the presence of death, knowing that a person’s sense of hearing is the last to go, and in the mistaken belief that our talking will somehow assuage their loneliness, or their fear of oblivion, as well as our own. Being at the bedside of someone who is dying obliges us to think about our own mortality.

As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being the only person left alive on earth except for one ancient spectral figure who would one day meet me over the brow of a sunny hill. I later recognised different versions of the same nightmare in my everyday unnameable fears. Most of us experience unnameable fear from time to time. It is like waking from sleep, disorientated, having dreamed of being in some unfamiliar and perhaps threatening dimension from which one has not fully returned. These are the disorientating fears which inform all our other fears and return us to the fear of oblivion which is the fear of death itself.

Viewed as part of our fear landscape, the idea of death has something to teach us about the everyday fears which beset our lives. Am I intelligent? Will I be accepted? Will I fail? Am I loved? Will I be remembered? Each of these fears is, in its way, the spectral figure waiting to confront us over the brow of the next hill. They embody the fear of ultimate nothingness, the fear of oblivion. They also return us to ourselves and to our own life span, to who we are in relation to other human beings and in the continuity of time as we know it. They are the fear that we have not done enough, been enough, lived enough.

Who we think we are, or want to be, will often accord with the perceived expectations of someone who we may have feared in earlier life, a parent, a teacher, an admired or envied sibling or friend. All of these fears can be summed up in the fear of failure which is closely linked to that of loss. Loss begins from the moment we are conscious of our own mortality. Failure and loss are both significant because they pertain to the concept of judgment and to what lies beyond judgment, the unknowableness of death.

The fear of judgment is greater than the fear of death itself because judgment determines what will ultimately happen to us. The fear of judgment pertains as much to the present moment as it does to the dimension of eternity or, if we are young enough, to what we will make of our lives in the relatively near future. In terms of existence itself, there is, in the human psyche, a sense of the determining moment, one which has to do with oblivion, or death, versus eternal life. This sense of the ultimate, of something following death (even if that something is oblivion or nothingness) is common to everyone, irrespective of whether or not they have a faith. For those who do have a faith, a deeply embedded fear of judgment therefore governs who we are, and what we do with the present moment.

But for us at the moment, whether or not we are accompanying someone who is dying, or perhaps facing death ourselves, facing the emptiness, the ‘nothing’, can become the beginning of a fullness, a presence which consumes all fears. In it, we are reminded not only of our mortality but of the mystery and joy of our existence. We sense that some greater creative power deliberately, of his own will, desired, and continues to desire, that we not simply exist but that we be fully alive from the moment of our conception into eternity itself. He desires and purposes this eternal life within the re-creative energy of his own love and we are invited to play an active part, to make conscious choices which will accord with this purpose. To this end we are given two great gifts, the ability to think and the capacity for love. We deploy these gifts in the present moment. Both work together, but it is the capacity for love which determines the outcome of judgment and our ultimate destiny.

Love is not something that we can resource from within ourselves, or plan and deploy in a bounded and rational way. It is sourced from within God and therefore unlimited, unbounded. The choice we are given, beginning in the present moment, lies in allowing this God, who is love itself, to claim our lives as they have been, as they are, and as they will ultimately be in death and in the decisive moment of judgment. So judgment is a two-way decision, but one in which God has already chosen us. All that remains is for us to say ‘yes’ to his invitation to be in union with him.