Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. As with all good fiction and drama, you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously, I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be oneself.

Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only watched the first three episodes of Broken. I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing. Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in translation, so to speak.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the ‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed. Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers with him – again.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. There are other paths of suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in this particular case.

All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain, although it may numb it for a while.

The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also tied to a particular poem, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.

All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent. They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we see in Broken, they are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying, or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured.  God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made whole again in his brokenness. 

Never Alone

‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7) Passive resistance enacted for all time in active submission. There is something there for all of us.

When it comes to suffering, sanity and survival depend on duality of purpose, on both accepting and resisting whatever situation we are going through personally, or perhaps as a nation. We cannot resist until we have learned to accept reality. I think this is especially true of what we are seeing in Western politics at present. What is happening in both Europe and America is neither a dream from which we will soon wake up, or some kind of game which will end well, even if we are taken to the very brink of self annihilation. It is reality, but it can be resisted. The same goes for our own lives. If we are going through hell, even a hell of our own making, it is still hell. But it can be resisted, rather than simply endured.

Life is not given to us to be simply endured. It is to be lived. But we cannot live, or even endure, without a sense of others being there, or perhaps having been there before us. In the context of neo-conservatism, which is the new fascism, and its subliminal nastiness, we know that others have been there before. Knowing this, we are sustained by the memory of previous generations, of the passive resistance of millions who lived under occupation in the last world war and in the active resistance of those who fought, even if their natural inclinations were to peace. It takes courage and humility to go against one’s natural inclinations when needs must.

 

Something comparable goes on in our own individual hard times. If we have known unconditional love, if we have been the centre of someone else’s world, with or without our knowing it at the time, the realisation of that love and the memory of that person keeps us company. Such memories sometimes consist of no more than a single passing moment of kindness, as the validation of one’s pain, of one’s humanity, perhaps by a stranger. 

The knowledge of this love supplies what is needed when it comes to both accepting and resisting whatever pain and suffering we are currently facing. The effect of that memory is to place us outside the pain, so that we can, for a moment at least, observe it and learn from it. We learn from the pain and suffering in experiencing once again the love. So in it, we also learn to love more deeply and, later perhaps, actively respond to the pain and injustice endured by others. Learning to respond to others in this way is the purpose of life and of all its hard moments.

It is also the essence of what we call hope. Where there has been sacrificial love, love which has perhaps gone unnoticed, there has also been hope. Love makes it possible to believe in a future, for ourselves and for our world. To live in hope is not delusionary. Delusion is more often comprised of a mixture of fatalism and blind optimism which, taken together, amount to very little. They do not require anything of us, or commit us to anyone. 

Fatalism is a kind of passive acceptance which simply returns us to ourselves. It does not enable any life giving connection. It does not feed the hunger of the heart, or assuage the mind’s restlessness. We are still left asking ‘why?’ Optimism, in its thinness, also returns us to this same place of non-acceptance.

The Isaiah passage I have just quoted refers to a deliverer, one who would restore a nation to itself, to what it was intended to be. For Christians it speaks, rather enigmatically, of another deliverer, one who in his own acceptance of suffering meets us in ours, wherever we are and whatever spiritual path we are currently travelling along. He validates our suffering there. He meets us on that path, using the language and thought processes with which we are most at home. 

Where human beings accept this invitation to be at one with him, even if only in a fleeting moment of recognition, they are no longer alone in their suffering. The Saviour of the world keeps company with them.

Heat

In the early morning light, a kangaroo appears in the paddock across from the house we are staying in, here in Australia. We are told to expect kangaroos at dawn and then again at dusk. A whole troop (the collective noun for kangaroos) appears later in the afternoon – and I miss it. I spot the single but miss the collective. At night, it is the ‘collective’ of the grass bull frog which makes itself heard from the creek nearby. You feel the effect of the frogs’ composite existence, rather than see it. The single and the composite are constrained at this time of year by heat and sudden chill, by light and almost light.

We went out yesterday. There was heat, intense, heavy, bright, with only the occasional breeze for respite. The heat slows you down. It forces you to attend to the moment. There is neither time or energy to pass too quickly to the next, or to dwell too long on the previous, and on the past. Everything is held, almost imprisoned, within the heat and this present moment, including the tragic young woman who, for a while, shared our picnic space.

The heat, which has increased today, served as an initial reminder that she, and millions like her, can never be entirely of the past, even though she remains a memory. Her parting words to us were “Bye. See you again, maybe”. I doubt that this will happen, and yet her words and the memory they evoke, will endure as a present moment, a reminder of the heat of the Australian summer and of our responsibility for all whose lives are made winter by their memories.

She talked a great deal about her life but she was not in a condition to make herself understood and yet having to pay attention to her, to the memories which had brought her to this moment and to this place, made the incoherence of her speech comprehensible. She needed to be heard, but had grown used to being ignored. She had probably been homeless. Quite a few homeless people are billeted to this outlying area of Melbourne. She needed to be understood without feeling pressed or in any way accused.

I kept my sunglasses on, so as to avoid direct eye contact. Sunglasses were a kind of prop for me, the listener, buying me a bit of personal space. I could respond to her sideways on, so allowing the jumbled flow of her words to bypass me without, I hoped, causing her offence and without obliging me to engage with her in a direct way. Direct eye contact means that we move into another person’s space, if only momentarily, and this obliges us to take responsibility for them, whether we like it or not.

Taking responsibility for someone who is suffering begins with allowing the suffering person to occupy our inner space, or consciousness. In the case of this tragic young woman, allowing her to occupy my inner space initially meant ignoring the impulse to physically distance myself, and those I was with, from her, which we could have done by choosing an alternative spot further along the river to have our picnic. It also required that each of us resist the urge to ‘protect’ my small grandson from some vaguely perceived malign influence.

This vaguely perceived influence is what defines our fear of the ‘other’ when it comes to suffering. Our own unease about the woman in front of us was a microcosmic rendering of the xenophobia felt towards millions of homeless people, refugees, or any person or group who make us feel threatened because they are not quite like us. We feel threatened because in some cases we have been allowed, and even encouraged, to think of them as dangerous. But most significantly, they make us feel threatened because we do not know them as persons. This ignoring of their personhood renders us powerless to help them in the immediate moment.

Later, when the heat finally became too much for the woman (she was wearing a leather jacket and torn leather trousers), I was saved from my feelings of inadequacy in the face of her brokenness by her simple parting words,  “Bye – See you again, maybe”. One of the most damaging effects of our fear of other people who are suffering is that we can miss out on their redemptive words and on the hope they bring.

Lent 2016 - The reason for the season

Resilience and self-reliance have long been a British characteristic. Faced with adversity, we pull ourselves up by our boot strings and get on with things. Consistent with this national trait it is reasonable to suppose that many of us think of Lent as a season for self improvement in which God is only marginally involved. Generations have been shaped by the idea that when it comes to facing life’s difficulties, and to self improvement, ‘God helps those who help themselves’. So they can think of Lent as a chance to pick up those New Year's resolutions, that fell by the wayside towards the end of January, with increased determination.

But what makes Lent difficult is that, unlike New Year’s resolutions which almost always aim at self improvement, Lent can very quickly seem purposeless. A couple of days after Ash Wednesday we find ourselves wondering what point there can be in giving up chocolate or wine.

This is one of the ways in which the season corresponds so closely to the forty days spent by Christ in the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan, however we choose to imagine that particular figure. The real temptation lay in purpose, or the lack of it. What was the point? Did Jesus believe in himself enough to go through with this gruelling exercise, let alone the suffering which was to come? Would it not be just as useful, more useful perhaps, if he appealed to people directly by raising his celebrity profile as quickly as possible? Did he even really believe the fantasies he’d created for himself? “If  you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the nearest tall building and his angels will come to your rescue before you even hit the ground, then they’ll believe you” says the tempter, which was true of course.  But it misses the point.

The temptation was not to doubt himself, or even to doubt God, but to doubt that God’s purpose would be worked out and fully revealed in him through suffering. But does the same apply to our own self imposed discipline during Lent? Here we already run into difficulties. If we equate God’s purpose purely with suffering and privation, and our own suffering as something to be got through in order to win God’s approval, Lent becomes little more than an endurance test . But Lenten self discipline is not that kind of test. The purpose of Lent is not to succeed or achieve higher personal standards through some kind of minor privation. It is to accept failure and our need for grace.

Part of the purpose of Lent is to remind us that if there is anything resembling purpose in human suffering, it is bound up with the purpose of God’s Son choosing to ‘empty’ himself, a literal translation of the greek word used in Paul’s letter to the Philippian church. Christ chose to empty himself of his divine freedom, but not of his divinity, in order to bind himself, like a slave, to human suffering and the consequences of human greed and selfishness. The mystery of suffering, or its ‘purpose’ becomes part of God’s purpose in Jesus Christ, a purpose which is still being worked out in the world today. The outworking of God’s purpose through suffering and what we call sin means that all human relationships are transformed in the minute a person or nation recognises and seeks the grace which comes with forgiveness. With forgiveness comes reconciliation and the beginning of a new creation.

The new creation begins with reconciliation with God, leading to ultimate reconciliation among people and nations. This may sound overly optimistic until we remember that reconciliation depends on all parties to any dispute wanting it enough to be truthful with themselves and with each other about whatever suffering has been caused and the part they have played in it. In other words, there has to be a willingness to say the word ‘sorry’. Reconciliation can only take place when this word has been spoken.

Before we dismiss this idea as impossible, a good Lenten discipline might be to take five minutes of the day to be truly still in the face of this life determining truth. Being still means being open to God so that God, in the nakedness of the suffering Christ, can look at us. In doing this, we see ourselves as he sees us, beginning with where we have wronged or been wronged by others. This is not simply a matter of  going over the past, waiting for anger, guilt or doubt to surface and then quickly burying the whole painful business until the same time tomorrow. It is a matter of allowing transformative grace to penetrate the deepest and darkest parts of our hearts and memories and waiting for God’s purpose to be worked in us in this moment of truth.

If we can spare another five minutes, we might try to imagine the unimaginable, in other words to pray the unthinkable; that all the parties who are contributing to the devastating destruction being wrought at present in Syria would pause and be still in a similar way – and allow the mercy of God into their hearts and minds, so transforming the lives of millions of innocent suffering human beings.

Benedic, Domine, nobis

Benedic, Domine, nobis, et donis tuis. These are the first words of a Latin grace, grace being a Christian prayer said before meals. They translate as ‘Bless us, O Lord, and your gifts’.

We rarely pause long enough to understand what the word ‘bless’ means, or what we are doing when we, often casually, invoke a blessing on others. When a person sneezes, we bless them, a custom which derives from the once held belief that a sneeze separates the soul from the body, so making it a prey to the devil. The words “Bless you” were spoken to snatch the soul back, so to speak.

It is not the only prayer to have been rendered commonplace. The exclamation “Oh God!” is a cry born of a visceral need for God in the moment of its uttering, even if that need is unacknowledged. Given the state of global politics, and the future of the planet itself, would that such an exclamation could be uttered in the desire for it to be heard.

This is why I have, once again, used Bellini’s Christ Blessing as an image for this post. All of last week, and in the wake of the recent plane crash over the Sinai peninsula, the painting has been at the forefront of my ‘envisioning’ mind. One does not simply look at such a painting. One envisions it by carrying it about in one’s inner consciousness, because it is iconic in the original sense.

Icon means image, or ‘imprint’, of a real person. An icon has, quite literally, a life of its own. So it has to be allowed to do its work which, in the case of the Bellini painting, is the work of blessing. Christ is blessing all that we have seen in the last week by way of tragedy and human suffering, on whatever scale. At the same time, he is blessing the private tragedies and agonies which many people live with on a day to day basis. All are blessed and embraced as part of  human suffering.

The Bellini painting engages the imagination on a number of levels, because this is how iconic paintings work. They invite us to engage with, and to allow ourselves to be engaged by, the image. The image engages us where we are bound, or captive, to the suffering of the rest of humanity and to the causes of that suffering.

So it engages us in the visceral nature of our own, sometimes denied, feelings and responses to suffering. We become the child separated from a parent in a crush at the last remaining border gate opening to a new life. We are in the tragic hopelessness of a disgraced Church leader, or of the young man who, accidentally or not, has murdered his step sister. It engages us at every level of conflict and in all its causes. Whether or not we bear some personal responsibility for suffering, the Christ of the painting continues to bless and to speak peace into it.

But the blessing, and the peace which comes with it, are neither superficial or easily bestowed, because together they constitute judgment. It is impossible to receive a blessing if one is out of favour with the one who gives it, and out of kilter with what it represents. So we are also under the critical regard of the giver. His blessing holds us to account, both personally and as members of a free and democratic society, for all that is going wrong in our world. We are held to account in the blessing because it bestows an even greater freedom.

The freedom given to us in the blessing of the risen Jesus is a freedom to be known by God as his own children, the brothers and sisters of his Christ. But it is not lightly given. If we look closely at the painting we see faint traces of suffering on what remains, nevertheless, a vulnerable body. Neither is the blessing easy to receive. We look at the painting and receive the blessing as we acknowledge in ourselves the suffering of millions whom we have never met, as well as some who we may know well and whose suffering we may have contributed to. We look, hold all the suffering and allow the blessing to fall on victims and perpetrators alike.

This program of blessing is the only program available to us for world peace, and for the future of the planet itself, because it derives from ultimate justice. The blessing bestowed by God in the risen Christ changes the way things are because it changes the way we see other people. It challenges us to a radical re-think of how we view other human beings, often as they appear to us from within highly charged contexts.

It obliges us to accept the blessing of the risen Christ on all. This includes all governments and leaders, all policy makers, all members of Isis and Al Khaida, all Palestinians and all Israelis, all Kurds, as well as the newly re-elected Turkish government, and all who have lost land or livelihood to greed and the short-termism of industrial exploitation. The blessing falls on Russia and its allies (including Bashar al-Assad), all refugees and victims of torture, all perpetrators of torture, all who we love, all who we find it hard to love, and any we may hate.

Only when we have allowed it to include all these categories and individuals can it fall on ourselves. So the blessing is a judgment of profound understanding. It changes the way we see things. 

News overload

‘Drilling down’ has become something of a conversational catchphrase. I am not sure that conversations are particularly enriched by it, perhaps because drilling is too easily associated with dentists and oil wells. But the intent, the suggestive purpose, of the phrase does have something to offer when it comes to news overload. It is the depth, not the aggressive drilling which, seen from a different perspective, may have something to bring to the way we initially react to the conflicts and environmental catastrophes with which we are faced on a daily, if not hourly, basis. We brace ourselves for the news as if it were the dentist’s drill.

But there is a better way to play a part in healing the world’s pain than simply bracing ourselves for the next disaster. As Christians, we engage with the suffering of others by ‘deepening’ rather than resisting or ‘drilling down’ into it. Deepening is not the same as drilling. It involves dropping into and allowing rather than resisting. We deepen into the world’s suffering, and begin to participate in its healing, by first allowing the initial shock wave of the latest news feed to flow into us and through us, without trying to block or defer it by turning off the computer or television.

Two days ago, as I alighted briefly on CNN’s cable news channel to be instantly faced with the word ‘devastation’ written across the screen in capitals, I was tempted to do this. It was a typical news overload moment in which I could either have switched off, in every sense, or skimmed over the headline paragraph out of passing curiosity. But neither of these evasive tactics was an option. Instead,  I needed to ‘deepen’ into the Nepal earthquake, and the devastation it has wrought, by dropping down into its own darkness.

'Abseiling'
leisure-activity.co.uk 

This is not quite the same as ‘drilling down’. Dropping down is not a search for some pre-defined end, or even for a solution to the problem. It is a matter of letting go of one’s own initial resistance to the suffering of others by ‘abseiling’ down into their suffering and into all the circumstances which surround it, or which may have caused it. Abseiling, as defined by Wikipedia, is ‘the controlled descent of a vertical drop’. The abseiler has to both let go and hold on.  

When it comes to engaging fruitfully with the world’s pain, we are in a position to do something comparable. We let go and drop down into it in terms of our own inner life, this being the only life we can call real. Taken together, our other inclinations and habits of mind generally return us to an over familiar but far from complete, or real, self. They do not constitute life in the fullest sense because they invariably return us to that same place, what is of most concern to ourselves.

Following our inclinations and habits of mind, including switching off when we reach news overload, seldom enables us to be more deeply connected to others. This is not helped by the internet which makes all things instant, and thereby ultimately superficial. In an age of ‘friending’ and ‘unfriending’, depth is what we most need, and depth requires trust. Abseilers take a calculated risk while trusting completely in the competence of those around them.

For Christians, life in its fullest sense involves trust. To trust others means knowing ourselves to be connected to them, wherever they are, and taking them with us as we drop down ever more deeply into the life of Christ – the Christ who ‘abides’ or who, in the words of the New Testament Greek, ‘goes on living’ in each one of us, the Christ whom we are always seeking and always finding, but who seldom provides answers or ready-made solutions.

This is how Christians think of prayer. Prayer is a three way process. We take the world’s suffering, and the suffering of those known to us personally, into our inner life. We bring it with them into the presence of Christ who already abides with us there. At the same time, we allow them to hold us in their own darkness. We do not know that they are doing this, of course. But we trust that God sees the entire situation from a different and far more comprehensive vantage point, which is that of eternity and of his own divine and fathomless mercy. It is in this mercy that we too are heard and forgiven. In it, we will ultimately see ourselves most beautifully reflected in the faces of strangers.