No Passing Joy

The less we understand about the mystery of life and death, the more necessary it becomes to frame life’s defining moments through ritual. Ritual and the customs which surround death give voice to what cannot be spoken. They not only process grief, but make it possible for people to meet one another at a depth which is beyond language and find there a common love and a shared hope. It is the shared hope which is so pivotal about the passing of Nelson Mandela, expressed in the opposite of mourning, as joy in the midst of sadness, a celebration of gift in the context of loss. 

Joy transforms the nature of grief itself, but it takes courage to allow this to happen. South Africans are a courageous people blessed with an exceptionally courageous leader who took his nation from a place of darkness to a place of light. The suffering which he endured alongside his people has given an added dimension to the joy they experience now as they remember him. It has also given their grief a substance, meaning and purpose which will sustain their hope for the future. He gave purpose to their suffering, so the grief which they experience now adds, in a mysterious way, to the substance of the joy.

Grief and joy together make for shared hope and, if we will allow it, for enduring love. For love to endure and for a nation to continue to grow in that love, fear has to be continually confronted and overcome. Already, the sceptics are wondering if the Rainbow Nation will survive. Worse still, are those who are adding to the fear by speaking the language of paranoid violence. It takes courage for grief to be channelled in such a way as to allow its particular joy to overwhelm such fears and make hope a reality rather than wishful thinking.

All of these considerations give Christians and people of faith a focus for prayer. Focused prayer is not a matter of asking for specific things. It is more about placing ourselves before God in an attitude of supplication for the kind of enduring love which overcomes fear and transforms nations – and Churches. For Christians, and for the Church especially, praying for transformation faces us with the question of whether we ourselves know how to tap into the kind of joy which South Africans are manifesting in this time of mourning, and whether we are willing to do this. After all, the Church has much to mourn over, much to be thankful for and therefore much to hope for. In the past few months, a bill allowing women to be consecrated as bishops in the Church in Wales and in the Church of England has presented us with an opportunity, an absolute necessity, to allow joy to overwhelm fear, so as to generate real and substantial hope. We are not talking about indulging in a passing moment of happy celebration before we get down to the challenges which will inevitably come in the future. We are talking about holding on to joy and pain at the same time, so as to allow for hope. This can only be done through forgiveness and the re-establishment of trust. So we are talking about allowing unconditional love to reshape our Church.

As with South Africa, there has to be a reason for doing this, and there has to be conviction. Nelson Mandela was convinced that forgiveness and moving forward together in a spirit of joy was the only way to transform a nation. In the life of the Church, women and their supporters need to be convinced that the joy we all experienced as a result of the Governing Body and Synod votes belongs to the whole Church and that it is not only, or primarily, ours. We are not the only people with a right to be joyful. Mandela’s joy was for all his people and his victory through suffering was a victory won with all of them through forgiveness. If, as women, we persist in allowing overt triumphalism to define who we are and how we relate to the whole Church, it will diminish us and our victory will be a hollow one. The celebration of that victory will have little of real substance to bring to the ongoing life of the Church and little of the good news of the Gospel to bring to the world. The good news is about hope fulfilled and joy which endures through unconditional love, and through forgiveness made possible by grace.

From Darkness to Light

There is something totemic about comets. They are bearers of things. They hold in themselves something of the stuff of creation, assuming they survive their close encounter with the sun without being vapourised. They embody something of ourselves, the DNA of existence, perhaps. I have not yet seen the comet Ison and we are not sure when or where our household here in this beautiful valley in South Wales should be on the lookout for it, allowing for cloud cover. There is very little light pollution here, so we simply wait and hope for a sighting of this fiery beauty before it returns to the darkness of deep space. 

While thinking about the comet I thought about Syria and the devastation there, the wounded and tortured children, the complete absence of anything which could make it possible for a society to function with the normality most of us take for granted. Syria is darkness. I also thought about Iran and the talks which have taken place recently in Geneva where leaders have sat down and sought with determination a way out of the darkness of enmity, an enmity which has brought hardship and suffering to a great number of people in all the countries involved. Iranians have endured siege conditions of varying magnitude for over 30 years. Their neighbours, as well as the rest of us, have never grown used to living with the fear of nuclear terrorism.  Both of these situations pertain to the realm of darkness.

Enmity is darkness. It is a state of being in which we actively refuse to see or acknowledge others, as they exist and suffer in their own darkness. It is a situation without hope in which we are thrown back upon ourselves and back into ancient hatreds. The darkness of enmity is as near to hell as it is possible to imagine.

Darkness can engulf even the best of situations, where good is the overall objective, as when the lights go out in a room while a doctor is in the middle of a life saving operation on a battle field or in a disaster zone. There is no one to turn the lights on again, or no power available and no more anaesthetic with which to complete the operation without the patient suffering unbearable pain. Confusion, corruption and lawlessness. Another state of darkness. The world is in this kind of darkness. 

Last night I attended a very beautiful Advent service in one of our local parish churches. It began in darkness out of which came the sound of voices singing out the world’s longing for the coming of a Saviour, for light in our darkness. The sound of the voices embodied light, if such a thing is imaginable. It embodied the light of hope. Hope was made real, tangible and sacramental, or holy, in a community coming together in this ancient building, as others have done before them for thousands of years, to bear witness to the reality of the light which is Jesus come into the world. He has come, and will come again, not to magic away all suffering but to take away enmity and despair. Despair is the real darkness, but it has not overcome the light. Because of the coming of Christ, and his taking into himself our human nature, it never will.

Reality Check

Looking back on last week, the best that I have seen of television has invariably majored on violence. This does not include sport, which I seldom watch, although if there was a regular slot for Clydesdale horse racing, of which I caught a passing glimpse early on Saturday evening, I would certainly make an exception.  The power and grace of these gentle creatures. The earth trembled as they galloped past.

Human beings have a fatal attraction to violence, and to its seductive power, an attraction that is outside their control and of which they are therefore afraid. As I look back over the past week in which violence, both fictional and real, has figured quite significantly, I wonder whether this state of denial of our fear is really a healthy approach to the reality of a violent world and of our own violent inclinations. Take the 50^th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. For one thing, it is hard to separate the reality of an event like the shooting of a President from the reality of the films which have been made about it, some of which were also shown last week. 

Which of the two categories falls under the heading of ‘entertainment’?  Entertainment helps to take us out of ourselves and to draw a line between reality and fantasy. We need films, as well as documentary drama (and how are we to tell one from the other these days?), to help us understand ourselves better and to come to terms with the ‘real’ violence on the evening news. Films take us out of ourselves long enough to test the boundaries, and reinstate them if necessary, between fantasy and reality. But we also have to face the reality.

Put in the simplest of terms, we have to separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ while remaining as far as possible objective and unbiased. Pre-digested news, as well as films and drama, help us to do this. Quality news reporting and intelligent drama oblige us to look for motive, as well as meaning. The motive for violence, on whatever scale it is occurring, is tied to what a person or ethnic community holds to be right and important, so there are layers and categories of good and bad in all violent situations and these can change as circumstances develop. Things are seldom simply good or simply bad, simply right or simply wrong.

Fictionalised violence can make it difficult to move away from an over simplification or abstraction of this reality and to know how to think about it, how to judge it and then confront it in such a way as to effect real change for the good. The reality of violence in places and situations of conflict is happening to real people in real time. But this is also where film is helpful.

Facing violence in different contexts, both real and fictional, is essential to collective self understanding. It is the collective, and not just the individual, which makes it possible to make sense of the violence we see all around us, because we are in it together. We are all perpetrators and victims of the human tendency to violence. Perpetrators are those who are caught up in the violence done in their name to others, even if they are not actively engaged in it. They are also victims of the hatred which that violence perpetuates. But hatred can ultimately be defeated by the collective will, as the city of Dallas, once known as a city of hate, demonstrated on Friday.

When it comes to the reality of violence, and all violence is real, being in it together makes it harder to go on hating. It makes it harder to allow hatred to poison human relationships between faith communities, across the barriers of gender prejudice, between generations. These are all potentially violent contexts. They are contexts in which human sin operates in generating hatred in all its nuanced manifestations. This is a reality which has to be faced privately by every human being in whatever context a person exists, but it also has to be faced together.

We can only face the reality of violence and human sin by being in relationship with a loving and merciful God who embraced the human condition as a victim of violence from the moment of his Incarnation. We face it with him, and he faces it with us, in our individual lives and as members of the human race, as perpetrators and as victims. In the coming weeks of Advent we might begin to face this reality while watching the news or a film. 

Tacloban's Emanuel

The last human sound to be heard on earth will not be a whimper. It will be a cry of protest - "Why?"

“Why?”  is the great levelling question, whether you have a faith or not. Perhaps it is also the question which starts us out on life. The newborn infant’s cry is rarely a whimper. More often, it is a cry of protest, demanding an explanation. Why has the infant been thrust from the comforting darkness of the womb into the noise and light of an alien environment? Why this enforced submission to the hands of other human beings? Perhaps she is also protesting at what she knows to be the beginning of a difficult lifetime, the protracted end which leads to death. 

At moments of intense trauma, particularly those of birth, death, fear or loss, the question is always “Why?”  Anyone who has allowed themselves to engage with what has happened to the people of the Philippines (and there are probably many who have not), will be asking it still. Whether or not they think of themselves as  people of faith, they will be asking this question of God, either directly or indirectly.

We only really ask “why?” when reality kicks in, when we experience trauma ourselves or because someone we love is going through hard times. Direct experience of the suffering of others, even if we are not there to share it with them, proceeds from love. So when we allow ourselves to be touched by what is happening to the people of Tacloban and its outlying regions, we are loving them as deeply as it is possible for one human being to love another. We are asking with them for a response to the question “Why?”

 A response is not an answer. It does not solve problems or provide definitive explanations. When asked of God, it does not even allow us to apportion blame where blame seems to belong. Instead, God’s response to the pain and the loss of the Philippine people, to its cause as well as to its effect, is that he is fully present to both.

The only surviving buildings pictured in some of the many photographs to come out of Tacloban are a church and a sports stadium. Both are places where people normally gather, but the church has a special significance. People are sleeping there, being cared for with the very limited resources available – and they are praying. They are probably asking “Why?”, wondering what God’s purpose can be in all this, as if God had caused it all to happen as a kind of cautionary tale pointing to the human destruction of the environment. Those who are suffering in Tacloban do not need to hear cautionary tales. It is the rest of us who need to hear them. What the Philippine people do need, however, is the sure knowledge that God is fully present to them, that he is literally ‘tenting’ with them, to use the biblical expression from the book of Exodus. He is totally bound up in their situation. He is with the children, the anxious and exhausted parents, the elderly, the relief forces, all those still waiting for food, water and medical supplies. 

The name Jesus is a translation of Emanuel which means ‘God with us’. God’s presence with the suffering is not just a comforting idea. It is a reality voiced in the “why?”, a question which refuses to make do with platitudes or pious clichés, a question which insists on response. Jesus is both the question and the response. His life is so bound up with ours that it is impossible to separate them. Wherever we are, there is Emanuel, God with us, and wherever he is, there too are we, both in this life and in the next. 

From the Edge

News Flash!

My new website From the Edge,  www.lorrainecavanagh.net , is now live.

From the Edge is for people who are on the edge of the Church.  It’s especially for those who are thinking of returning to faith, or to church on a regular basis, and don’t quite know where to begin. It is also intended as a useful resource for those in pastoral or outreach ministry.

From the Edge  will continue to grow and provide thought provoking and prayerful material in addition to this blog The site also links to all my published books, including my latest, Beginning Again, which is my first venture into publishing for Kindle.  If you are interested, please consider buying it and, most importantly, don’t forget to post a review on Amazon!

Please share this with as many people as possible and especially to anyone who is either thinking of picking up their faith again, or exploring Christianity for the first time.

Remembrance

Television commercials are becoming an art form.  Some are more intelligent, and certainly more visually appealing, than the programs they sponsor. The fact that I seldom remember what the program was, let alone what it was about, but that I do remember the ad, is evidence in itself. At the same time, the commercial is often too clever by half, forced along by a relentlessly throbbing sound beat which barely has a chance to finish before the next one, with an almost identical rhythm backing, takes its place. All of this makes it difficult to grasp what it is that is being advertised, or to hang on to the basic substance of the program itself. 

The beat, the pulse, the clever graphics of TV commercials, convey something of what life is supposed to be like now – short term, fast moving, with no holds barred. Everything is possible, we are told, anything is achievable if we move to the beat and pulse which drives prosperity forward. Too bad if you can’t keep up, whatever the reason.

Today there will be a pause in the frenetic beat of the average week day morning, possibly of sufficient impact to slow city traffic for more than a few minutes. Wherever an Act of Remembrance takes place, it will be a moment for being present to its unfamiliar stillness in the beat and throb of life. Most of those taking part will be briefly present to a particular event which they are blessed never to have experienced for themselves. So it will be an act of remembrance rather than remembering. Remembrance is a deep collective state of mind which takes us beyond memories and unites us across generations.

Being present to the conflicts of the past, as they are epitomised in the Great War, is not quite the same thing as remembering. It is more of a bringing the past into the present and standing in it, sensing its own relentless noise and beat. In the remembrance of the terrifying beat of conflicts past, we are made one with previous generations who fought conflicts in the belief that in doing so, they would mark the end of all conflict. We are grateful to them and humbled by their courage and extraordinary generosity of spirit. Those who have died in more recent conflicts are part of their number. They are who we might have been. They are all one generation because all have laid down their lives for us in our generation. 

This moment of silence and of remembrance does not compel us to do something, to respond to the deep pulse of the moment by adding to the existing noise around us. In fact, it reminds us of how little we can do to either prevent war or to make wars end in a way which will lead to lasting peace.  It compels us to know and experience in the silence of the moment humanity’s need for forgiveness. ‘ Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy’ translates into the faith language of all who are caught up in conflicts today. The act of remembrance is one of solidarity with them, as together we ask for mercy and forgiveness from one another and from God.

The Meaning of Life

Our lives, from the moment of conception, are a search for connectedness. We begin as one germ of life seeking to connect with another. Out of the two, a human being is created. Not any human being, only that particular one, in all his or her particularity.  The particularity of the human person, and of all sentient beings, is not simply uniqueness or ‘specialness’. Being ‘special’ is a rather bland term which appeals to our personal insecurities but says little about the value of life, or about the real self.

The idea of particularity resonates with intention, God’s intention to create a person, a species, a world, and universe upon universe, in an ongoing process whose mysteries we have barely begun to penetrate.  When scientists do touch on these mysteries they are connecting with something already known, already brought into existence by love itself. They are discovering truth in a particular way as they reveal something they already knew to be true. This is not only about proving a theory. It is more like the kind of discovery the artist makes when he or she stumbles on  truth, the only way an intuition can be communicated in words, or colour, or stone.  Creativity belongs to science, art and the realm of faith. It is about connecting with something already known but which we need to discover again and again. This is a very powerful need, peculiar to humans, or at least that is what we assume. Human beings need to know the meaning and purpose of their lives and of the whole of existence in a definable way.

Thinking about this, I wonder if the house martins who nest under the eaves above our front door aren’t involved in a similar urge to discover and make meaning. Their obedience to the call to return here each year, in order to nest and raise their young,  is perhaps a kind of reconnecting with meaning. They fly due north in a direct line from the shores of North Africa to the same spot in the same valley in South Wales.  They fly a ‘life’ line. If, as a result of climate change (caused by our human interference) they find, perhaps next year, that there are no insects, because it is unseasonably cold when they expect it to be warm, they will not survive. The life line will have been broken. It will have been broken in two places, the first physical, and the other perhaps spiritual pertaining to the realm of meaning and purpose, as God has ordained it for house martins.

Perhaps this sense of purpose and meaning keeps migrating birds in flight, as it does human beings whose lives are held with theirs in the ongoing life of God. For human beings to be at peace with themselves, their lives need to have meaning, direction and purpose.  Their lives need to be energised so that they can make meaning from within the greater life which they share with God. This is the life of the Holy Spirit which energises all existence and from which come wisdom and understanding.

The bible tells us that wisdom is of the highest price, the most valuable of all treasures and that it is to be desired and sought above all other things. Wisdom is God’s own energy ‘working’, literally ‘energising’, all of life. Wisdom begins when a person realises that they are more than a collection of cells, or an accident of nature, but that they belong in the wider ambience of the love of God. Wisdom comes with the realisation that our lives have a purpose which is worked out in and with the lives of others, including the lives of birds like the house martins. When we pause for a moment, aware of our connectedness with the created world, we are more alive than we were perhaps five minutes ago when we were absorbed by our own self and its immediate short term needs and desires.  Jesus told his disciples to go out and make other disciples, not because he wanted a huge personal following, but because he had allowed them to discover and understand something which makes the difference between life and death. It involves knowing that in Christ we are fully alive. In him, we are deeply connected to one another in God.