In Such Times

The worst politics and the greatest abuses of power invite the best satire. The best satire endures and ultimately finds its place alongside other classics of the English language, or of another language – French comes to mind. It is also honoured among the visual or theatre arts. The best satire is always metaphor or parable. It is also often courageous, although not necessarily beautiful to either read or behold. In fact, its primary purpose and virtue lies in not being pleasing or restful to the mind’s eye, or to what might be called the collective conscience. It exists to challenge and disturb.

Satire must challenge the senses by forcing the reader or viewer to contemplate the consequences of the folly of the times and of the crass stupidity of rulers, as well as of those who either support or benefit directly from their power. But even the best satire will eventually be archived. Times change, seldom for the better.

Parables and metaphors, on the other hand, tend to endure. Their meaning is not locked in to a given set of circumstances, or to any particular time. They are universal. Parables are especially so because they inevitably return us to the great mystery of life itself, bound as it is to relationships which shape and define the history of families and nations. The parables and metaphors of scripture were recorded and written down with this idea in mind.

The root of the word ‘religion’ is ligare meaning to ‘bind together’.  How we ultimately interpret the underlying meaning of religion affects how we live our lives and how power is exercised, how those who hold it know themselves as accountable to the author of all life. Do they exercise power in order to suppress? Or to liberate? Do they bind people through fear? Or liberate them through bonds created in love and held together in trust, trust which makes for civilised society? There is ultimately no getting away from religion when it is understood in this sense of binding together, so we abuse its metaphors and parables to our cost. One way of abusing them is to read them with an a priori agenda or a pre-formed mindset.

Pre-formed mindsets encompass a range of religious and political agendas, often blending or converging in the minds of those who support them. With world chaos and climate change comes, for example, a renewed preoccupation with ‘end times’, or with a focus on a particular nation or group of people who can be hated, or perhaps feared, or with promises of total economic renewal paralleled by an equally all consuming promise of religious renewal. Both have in the recent and more distant past proved to be damaging delusions. Hitler promised re-forestation and wholesale renewal of an ailing infrastructure. Trump also promises the renewal of an ailing infrastructure, along with work and prosperity for all, but beginning with those to whom he owes the most political favours. Innumerable emotional and psychological casualties resulted from the so-called Toronto Blessing, the result of the almost aphrodisiacal power experienced by some of its leaders and proponents at the time.

Added to this, a pre-formed mindset seldom moves those who hold it in a forward direction, even though it requires great energy and commitment to sustain it. A pre-formed mindset corresponds to a car’s wheels spinning in the sand. Its energy derives from desperation, an ever greater determination to hold on to delusion, often in order to maintain a grip on power, to the point that power itself becomes delusional. As a result, those who think they hold it lose their grip on reality, resulting in dangerous paranoia, such as we are beginning to see in Mr. Trump.

Such delusional determination works as much in the arena of politics as it does in religion, the two becoming at times almost indistinguishable. Think of North Korea’s particular brand of Emperor worship.  It also leads to religious and political sectarianism. The growing number of neo-Nazi rallies in Europe and America manifest a form of religious sectarianism, different only in the intensity of its hatred from any other kind of mass religious gathering.

All of this suggests that, among other things, an informed approach to the religions of the world, beginning with their scriptures, is essential to global stability. With stability comes peace and a fair distribution of wealth. This would include the basic infrastructures needed for all to benefit from the kind of entrepreneurship which leads to economic growth. Taken together, the things that bind us together in both a religious and political sense require wisdom as it is understood in the scriptures.

The proper interpretation of the scriptures, and of the bible in particular, is essential for the maintaining of a reciprocal wisdom in the sphere of religion and politics, as is the truthful recording and interpretation of events by a free and morally accountable media, and with a sense of history. The question with which we begin, therefore, is ‘Are things worse than they ever were? Or do we just know more?’ from which follows ‘is it enough to know without entering into the process of healing and making whole?’These questions pertain very much to how we view the future of the planet and the kind of lives our children and grandchildren will lead.

Somewhere embedded in these anxious questions also lies a deep yearning for the kind of wisdom which only comes with knowing and being known by a loving God. The knowing is in the yearning itself. We have a God who yearns with us, while being all powerful. This is a God who entrusts us with sufficient knowledge to overcome the evil and heal the brokenness of our world and society. He does not delegate. He entrusts. To leaders, whether political or religious, God also entrusts a certain power, and with it accountability. Again, he does not delegate..

That power is modelled and given in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It is sourced in him and finds its wisdom and purpose in him. Our own anxiety is also held in him and, in those moments where we are prepared to meet his gaze, taken into his ongoing life and into his love for the world. No power, in heaven or on earth, will separate us from that love or diminish his power to save the world from its self-inflicted destruction. 

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.