Please breathe

Source: Wikipedia

Children and babies cry in an alarming way. Once the crying really gets going, there comes a point when the child stops remembering to breath. He has no conscious method for letting go of the inhaled breath so that the next one can follow. A terrible momentary silence ensues. Were these fits of rage and anxiety to continue to be expressed in this way in adult life, you would think of such a person as suffering from some sort of narcissistic personality disorder in which hysteria can be usefully deployed for recording feelings and preferences and getting other people to gratify them. There are no prizes for guessing what adult in the public eye might fit such a description. For one thing, his inaugural address has been described as the angriest in his nation’s political history.

The question this leaves us with is not so much whether he will or will not follow through with his insane agenda, but how do the rest of us handle the anxiety which his behaviour generates for each one of us personally? I think we begin to handle it by remembering to breathe in a particular way. Most of us are not in a position to urge him to ‘breath’, although we still hope that there are people of power and influence who might still be able to do this, but it is not likely to be you or I. Instead, our task is to behave as we would if we were present at the scene of any other kind of emergency –we begin by making sure we are reasonably safe, lest we become a casualty ourselves, and then start looking around for those in need of help.

Thinking healing into the world politics of the moment works in a similar way and takes us to a comparable place. We have to be present to the anxiety and to the causes of it, without becoming a casualty ourselves. We do this through a kind of ‘breathing’. We begin by breathing in and as we breathe out, we drop down into our deep ‘centre’ – like going down in a lift, or elevator.

 This may sound like a rather introspective exercise, but it is quite the opposite. We drop down into the centre (also known as the ‘ground’) of our being in order to let go of everything we think we are – the layers and layers of false self-perceptions that have built up in our lives so far. We do this for a bit – a few minutes, a few hours, a few weeks maybe – until this ‘ground of being’ becomes our natural space, our habitat.

This is the space of the true self from which we can assess any situation calmly and objectively but also with compassion. In time, through doing this exercise, and ultimately living it, we will learn wisdom, and learn how to use wisdom in a measured way for the good of others and not for the enhancement or reassurance of our old ‘self’.

Learning wisdom is not the same thing as knowing the answers to the world’s problems or even, at times, to our own. It has to do with understanding how the tangled web which is the sum total of what is also called human ‘sinfulness’ has become so utterly intractable. The core of this understanding lies in knowing that any one aspect of human sinfulness – an individual’s lust for power and adulation and his or her indifference to the price which others will pay for it, for example – is potentially ‘redeemable’. By that I mean that it can be transformed, or better still, transfigured into something quite different, something which is in the gift of a merciful God and the outworking of God’s grace.

So, to return to the centering down exercise, we learn to encounter human sin in that deep place without being either anxious or frightened by its enormous implications, or instinctively hating or feeling revolted by its perpetrator. We remember that the perpetrator is bound up in his own darkness, in the addictive nature of his self-idolising behaviour, and we remember how easy it was for something comparable to happen in our own lives, and how disastrous it may have proved to be.

So we allow this dangerous person a little space in our deep place. We allow the light to touch him. We do not do this grudgingly. Quite the contrary. We do it as we beg wordlessly for mercy from within our deep place, so that he can be held by God, as we are. Ultimately, the grace which we make room for, as we simultaneously let go of our false self and of all the artificiality we have needed to sustain it, is felt as light and as a lightness of being. He needs to feel this too. It is the peace which literally ‘overcomes’ the world and governs our individual lives – ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’.

The Meaning of Unity

Groucho Marx was once heard to say something along the lines of “Why would I want to join a club that would admit someone like me?” Many of us share a little of this reticence when it comes to joining things, although we may not express it quite so candidly. The question may even be inverted, so as to disguise its true meaning. Then, it acquires a sort of codex: “I have enough trouble meeting my own needs, so why should I involve myself in the needs of others? How would I benefit from joining their club?” We all, as individuals and as a society, wonder what’s in it for us when it comes to joining things.

There are two underlying problems with this approach to sociality, the one affecting the individual and the other society itself. The selfish individual always ends up alone, and a society disintegrates, morally, spiritually and financially, when its survival depends on mean spiritedness stemming from a fundamental tendency to distrust those it does not understand and to believe that it can manage quite well without them.

As our own society ages, we are feeling the financial, as well as the social, effects of a growing number of individuals who find themselves alone in old age because they have not worked well at their relationships earlier in life. Many of them did not believe they needed to. There are also plenty of statistics pointing to the longer term effects of a disintegrating and increasingly xenophobic society. These have been used to persuade the disenchanted and cynical to reach back to a mythic past when everyone looked more or less the same, knew their place and supposedly upheld the same ‘values’, along with the often cruel social constraints which went with them. They are seldom reminded that it was also a society emerging from the second of two Eurocentric wars.

When it comes to the way we vote on the 23^rd of June, to dream of a future built on selfishness, myth and fear is to build on quicksand. To opt out of taking responsibility for a shared European future, a future whose foundations were laid in the rubble of the second world war, is to build on the sands of despair. To give up on the peace and prosperity which we have created over the past seventy years alongside our European neighbours, is to court the kind of fragmentation otherwise known as ‘meltdown’. Added to this, if Brexit gets its way, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will inevitably experience further political meltdown with possibly dire consequences for all of our lives. The peace and relative prosperity which we have known since the end of the last time Europe went into meltdown, in the form of the second of two world wars, will only be maintained through a collective will to make the EU work. Those of us who vote ‘remain’ are voicing that will.

Christian teaching brings much wisdom to the question of how we vote on Europe, and how we go about rebuilding a fragile but precious kingdom, so that it can withstand future meltdown. The Gospel suggests that the kingdom’s fragility, and the fragility of Europe as a Kingdom modelled on the Kingdom of heaven, is in fact its strength. It can bend to God’s Spirit, if the political system allows it. When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom he is not talking about the sovereignty of any one nation, however that is interpreted in the context of the times. He is not talking about systems either. He is talking about peoples and the kind of faith it takes to believe that it is possible for peoples to work together for the common good.

We have rather lost sight of the idea of the common good, and we often lose faith in a God who wills it. As a result, our politics have become selfish, and those who wield political power do so in a selfish and often arbitrary manner. Promises are broken and policies change to suit party and individual group interests, so it is not surprising that those who promise autonomy and freedom from bureaucracies and systems created by others gain in political popularity. They appeal to those who feel disenfranchised. It seems that is the only kind of ‘freedom’ on offer. Since we have largely forgotten how to relate to God, how to pray, the proponents of this pseudo freedom are on to a winning ticket. Added to this, the general thinness of our spiritual life makes it even more difficult to know who to believe and where to turn when it comes to engaging with this historic vote.

But this year has seen some visionary leadership which may help all of us to vote with greater confidence when it comes to staying in Europe. As a result of Archbishop Justin Welby’s #Thykingdomcome initiative, our nation has been praying that God’s Kingdom may come about on earth in accordance with His will. At the moment we are also praying that the European Cup Final will be played out in the same spirit (A Prayer for #EURO2016) . There is a profound connection between the unity of purpose which many of us yearn for in the context of the future of the European Union and the unity of purpose which drives healthy sport and competition. The ‘beautiful game’ lends energy and drive to an underlying unity of purpose among all its players. It is fuelled by the same divine energy which builds the loving sociality that all peoples depend on for survival. The future of Europe, and the future of the peoples of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, depends on that unity of purpose and on the energy which shapes and drives it.