Some Other Kingdom

Politicians, we assume, are in it for power, as are journalists and those in the entertainment industry who hit lucky and become celebrities. All become, in some measure at least, recipients of our own fantasy projections, which is what makes it OK for us to make blanket assumptions about them and about their motives. So it is not surprising that when they fall they fall hard and, to a certain extent, we fall with them. When people in power betray the trust of those who put them there, the fall is all the harder for everyone. Fallen celebrities, as well as fallen leaders, remind us of their humanity and hence of our own. Their limitations and frailty, when so harshly revealed, also serve as a reality check of sorts for the rest of us. They reveal the way we consciously or unconsciously collude with the fame fantasy, relishing the circumstances which have brought about the downfall of the famous.

Journalists who are currently being subjected to a dose of unwelcome media attention themselves are a case in point, as is a former prime minister who, it seems, colluded with a journalist by advising her shortly before she was due to appear in court for phone hacking and related charges on how she might possibly salvage her reputation, if not her career. But motives are never straight forward and powerful people are not necessarily entirely bad. The Blair-Brooks email exchange had to do with friendship and collegiality as much as anything else. Powerful people are sometimes loyal, occasionally watching each other’s backs, as well as their own.

Nevertheless, those who hold power in politics and the media are accountable for what passes between them, both publicly and privately, because in our society they are the custodians of democratic freedom. They are the ones entrusted with making democracy work in the way it is meant to work, towards the flourishing of the human person, beginning with that of the weakest and the most vulnerable. Politicians are called to enact righteousness. The media is made up of people called to ‘mediate’ truth. Together, and in their different ways, they are the custodians of what we call a civilised society. So looking after the needs of those over whose lives they have some measure of influence or control calls for resistance to the insidious nature of power.

When power becomes an end in itself, it is sometimes too late for those who hold it to come to terms with what they have allowed to happen. Perhaps this is why we so rarely hear politicians and journalists express genuine remorse for the ways in which they have failed the people to whom they are accountable. The ousted, and now fugitive, president of the Ukraine, will almost certainly be a case in point. From what Viktor Yanukovych leaves behind in the way of personal memorabilia, it seems that the power he held legitimised and fed a fantasy life style, as it has done for other deposed dictators who thought of themselves as benevolent father figures or, as in the case of the Ceaucescus,  mother figures as well.

The insidious nature of power also sustains and simultaneously suppresses populations. They are subjected to another version of the same pernicious fantasy, that their leaders are giving them the best possible life in the best of all possible worlds – the one they happen to inhabit. Here, think of the people of North Korea. So when the fantasy is finally blown and the lie proclaimed from the roof tops, the reaction is bound to be violent. People are angry and they are tired of being lied to. They want a new reality, the reality of a freedom which comes from a different kind of power and which shapes a different kind of society, a different kingdom, the one proclaimed by Jesus Christ which his Church is supposed to embody in its own life.

There is a mistaken notion that Jesus was not interested in politics, that his kingdom was purely spiritual and, for this reason, ‘not of this world’. But the central purpose of his coming was to reveal God’s purpose for the world, that its life be powered by the love of God. To this end he was constantly bringing his listeners back to the question of accountability, of holding those in positions of power to account for what they did, or failed to do, for the flourishing of human beings.

His own humanity revealed the inherently relational character of God, the outworking of the love of God in his obedience to the Father, and later in the ongoing and abiding presence of his Spirit. He was therefore as concerned for the well being of society, of peoples, as he was for that of the individual. Far from being detached from political reality, he struggled with people from within that reality, and continues to do so today. He is on the streets of Kiev. He is with the people of Syria, and other parts of the Middle East, who are resisting the numerous manifestations of religious and secular tyranny. He is with all who risk their lives for righteousness sake, including a number of journalists, as well as political and religious leaders. Through them he proclaims that other kingdom in which freedom from insidious power makes it possible for human beings to flourish, and so are made accountable to God for the love they show, or fail to show, in their lives. 

Consequences

‘Be sure your sins will find you out’ reads the ‘sandwich placard’, possibly one of the first set of letters to form a coherent sentence in the mind of the novice reader. There are all sorts of psychological strands to be followed up from this early impression of sin, leading perhaps to a life time’s neuroses rooted in the fear of being ‘found out’.

Guilt, fear and sin are all of a piece. They set us on a trajectory which takes us further and further away from the source of light, the true light which ‘finds us out’, so making healing and forgiveness possible. This running away from the healing light is the basic gist of the Adam and Eve story. It is also what we call conscience, something which nags and needs to be numbed. Conscience sets us apart from animals, or so we tell ourselves, because animals are not endowed with conscience or with free will. They do not make moral choices.

This week Joshua Oppenheimer’s film ‘The Act of Killing’ has been nominated for an Oscar. It revisits the circumstances of the 1965 Indonesian massacre of thousands of ethnic Chinese people. Oppenheimer uses one of the most notorious death squad leaders, Anwar Congo, as one of the film’s main protagonists. In the film, Anwar boasts of his killing exploits. He recalls how the smell of so much blood nauseated the killers, obliging them to resort to a simpler and ‘cleaner’ method, strangulation with wire. In the film, he also finds himself playing the part of his victims, re-enacting scenes of their suffering and ultimately experiencing them for himself at that level of consciousness which we also call conscience. He finally comes to terms with his own choices and with the depravity and suffering which those choices brought about. His sins do indeed ultimately find him out. He experiences remorse.

The Indonesian massacre was not the last of its kind. There have been similar atrocities committed there and in other parts of the world since that time, atrocities which occupy our living room space for weeks on end. But we can distance ourselves from them because they are not happening to us here and now. Switching TV channels, or getting on with preparing the evening meal, if the news coincides with that time of day, gives permission to forget about consequences and the way in which, as human beings, we all share in the choices made by other human beings, both in the past and in more recent times. 

Here in the UK, the weather is a case in point. Who knows when the warming of the planet began to seriously damage the earth's natural infrastructure and affect our way of life today? Possibly back in the early part of the 19^th century, or with commercial air travel. Whenever it was, and whatever the cause, climate change signals that we are all connected with the choices made by others and with the consequences of those choices.  And to complicate matters further, we are not always free to make ‘right’ choices now. If you live in remote parts of the countryside where there are no bus or train services, you have to use your car, even for relatively short journeys.  If you live in a city, it is hard to grow your own food or to be self-sufficient in other ways. On the other hand, if you live in the country, you might be able to feed yourself independently, especially if you eat less meat. You might even be able to extract heat from the land you live on, or have a solar panel or two, thereby compensating for a tiny fraction of the environmental damage caused by others.

Good choices help to re-balance things across society and ultimately across the world. When it comes to the consequences of bad choices, good choices set us off on a new and re-creative trajectory towards the light. Persevering in bad choices has the opposite effect.  It turns us back on ourselves and ultimately shatters our humanity. The shattering of our humanity, whether it is the result of psychological stress which leads people to commit acts of genocide, or prioritising the short term political needs of those wishing to remain in power here at home, all amount to what we call sin. Sin is the disfiguring of creation and of the face of God in others by the suffering we inflict on them through our bad choices. Repentance is about remembering what that face looks like and striving to recover it through the choices we make now. Not such a difficult task if we put our hearts to it.

Loosing the bonds of injustice

The firework logo didn’t quite work for the opening of the Winter Olympics last week. One of the snowflakes refused to become the fifth circle, so the logo was not able to fully tell its story. Its story, which took hold of the imagination of the modern world in the early part of the last century, is one of friendly rivalry between nations and of the interconnectedness which it fosters. It is a somewhat utopian ideal but, so far, it has endured. But friendship between nations is only genuine when it rests on a deeper love for the humanity of all who are party to it so, in the context of the Winter Olympics, friendship is not genuine when it only exists on the level of  a snow show. Perhaps the reluctant snowflake sensed this and wanted to make the point.

The run up to the Sochi Olympics has revealed that the human foundations of friendship, which ought to underpin and add lustre to the snow show, are shaky. In fact, they are completely rotten, as was revealed by the Channel 4 documentary, aired on Wednesday, in which organised packs of men and women are seen ‘hunting’ other human beings because of their sexual orientation. This is being done in a systematic and cold blooded way, reminiscent of the practices of the secret police in the era of Cold War Russia.

What is even more disturbing is that the Russian Orthodox Church has given tacit approval to these activities, not only by endorsing the Duma’s recent anti-gay law, which purports to protect minors from sexual assault, but by pressing for a return to an earlier law, repealed in 1993, whereby homosexuality was a crime and the perpetrators subject to long and harsh prison sentences. The Russian Orthodox Church has also publicly declared that it considers all gays to be potential, if not actual, paedophiles.

No commonality of friendship based on love for humanity can possibly exist between such a Church and those who think of themselves as disciples of Christ. Neither can it exist at the Sochi Olympics until forgiveness for what has been going on in the streets of Moscow, and no doubt elsewhere, is sought.

It is easy for many of us to feel we can approach the coming season of Lent with a clear conscience with respect to violence towards gays. But should we not look a little further and ask ourselves whether our so called loving attitudes to gay members of our churches really are loving? Do they derive from the kind of friendship shown by Jesus to all who asked for it? Jesus tells his friends that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfil, or complete, it.

For us, this means that he has not come to abolish morality but to fulfil all that morality requires in love, thereby making morality complete. He also tells them that their righteousness, or morality, is to exceed that of the Pharisees who are themselves strict law keepers. Perhaps, until now, they had been grateful to the Pharisees for being moral on their behalf. Is there not a small part of the Church’s heart that is grateful to the Russian Orthodox Church, and to other denominations, for their so-called moral stand on homosexuality? Does it not, if we are honest with ourselves, buy us all more time to carry on tolerating gays without actually loving them? 

Another branch of the Orthodox Church has been a sanctuary for those who bear witness to the cause of freedom in the Ukraine. On Saturday, November 30th, 2013, the Kyivan Patriarchiate branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church opened the doors of one of its monasteries to protesters who were under fire from the police. All through the night its monks prayed while exhausted human beings slept on the floor around them. Someone described the scene as ‘mystical’. And so it was, not because of its aura, but because of the palpable sense of Christ as ‘sanctuary’ in that place. For a moment, the monastery revealed the Church as the place where, as the psalmist says, ‘God’s glory dwells’ (Ps.26:8). The idea of sanctuary is the glory of God and the Church's soul. 

This Lent all who call themselves Christians, as well as those who don’t, might think of visiting their nearest church (out of hours or during a service) simply to be there for a few minutes, mindful of the people in our world and society who desperately need sanctuary. Perhaps visitors will leave that particular church willing to give real sanctuary to those they claim to love, but in fact only tolerate. In doing so, they will fulfil the fundamental law of Lent laid down by the prophet Isaiah and by Jesus himself ‘to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke’. (Isaiah 58:6) 

Good Solitude

I thought I would be spending last week alone, but I was wrong in so many ways. Living where we do, I am never completely alone. For one thing, the weather presses in on every side, including through the aging windows and bits of the walls where we have left the dry stone of the original lambing shed more or less as it originally was. There are, I have to admit, occasional draughts. When there are gales, as there have been this week, they bring new and exaggerated sounds, like rattling twigs on the roof, or sudden gusts caught in the eaves as the wind changes direction. But, surprisingly, it is neither cold or damp. Cold draughts and damp houses make a person naturally defensive. Not only do we put on more and more layers, usually to little effect, but the cold causes a certain tensing of mind and body against our surroundings and sometimes against other people. One cannot be pliant and receptive to what is good and beautiful in any situation when one is cold. The same goes for extreme levels of wet.

Being alone requires that we be inwardly pliant, so that we can bend to whatever nature, or life, is hitting us with, rather than put up rigid defences. We are seeing this kind of courageous pliancy towards both nature and life in the way the people of the Somerset Levels continue to endure weeks of isolation and flooding while also facing the prospect of ruined summer pasture. Their resilience is an example to all of us this winter. Fortunately, where I live, the weather does not compare with conditions on the Somerset Levels. Even so, over the past week I have found that being present to the weather as it is, rather than simply wishing it would change, requires a certain kind of emotional pliancy towards solitude itself. For this to be possible one has to be able to tell the difference between fertile solitude and barren loneliness and take appropriate action.

Engaging with solitude is an active decision to work with the present set of circumstances. The kind of vigorous weather we are currently experiencing sharpens ones perception of things. We sense a greater energy at work which can destroy or regenerate on a spiritual as well as on a physical level. It also reminds us of our connectedness to one another. This is the connectedness which shapes meaning and gives purpose to our existence. The extent to which human beings remain bound together will depend on their working together on both levels, the physical and the spiritual, within this same energy or power. 

For this to be possible, given our human tendency for disintegration and destruction, this recreative energy, or power, became as we are – but without our will to destroy and murder. It was ‘made flesh’, made human. It assumed a name, Jesus, Emanuel, God with us, life giver and saviour. The Christian understanding of the word ‘salvation’ is rooted in the word ‘life’.  In Jesus, the Word, or the power, reveals a will, a desire to go on recreating in and through humanity wherever human beings are willing to let the Word become flesh again in their own hearts and lives. 

Life in its fullest sense begins in the minds and hearts of those who are vulnerable to God. The will to know God requires a certain kind of solitude, but solitude is not a matter of separating oneself from others, but of allowing oneself to be more closely connected to them. Extreme weather conditions can focus the mind in a new direction, by reminding us of the way we are bound together within the myriad connections which hold the created world together. So our understanding of where we are in our lives and of how the world may yet survive in the face of wholesale environmental destruction depends on the deep connectedness which exists between the Word, the creative activity of God holding us and all things together. 

For this to make sense, we have to recognise our own inner need to be ‘held together’. We get a glimpse of this need in times of depression. Depression often feels like ‘falling apart’. But inner falling apart, or disintegration, can also lead to inner wholeness. By this I do not mean simply feeling good about oneself, or being in a generally happier frame of mind, but recognising and owning our need for healing, the healing of the person and of the earth as they are profoundly connected in God.  

But the Good News Is ...

Thinking I could time it between sleet downpours, I have just returned, freezing and drenched, from walking down our lane to post some letters. I set off optimistically. It is that time of year when, even allowing for freak weather conditions, there is an occasional hint of something better in the sky, a moment of pearly blue or of iridescent sunshine breaking into the grey.

Such moments happen in the lives of nations too. Hope dares to show its face when, in attempts at conflict resolution, powerful people shift their positions in regard to one another, be it ever so slightly. Such moments can change the whole landscape of international relations, and hence the lives of millions. We have glimpsed this happening at the Geneva peace talks where, on Saturday, parties to the Syria conflict momentarily changed their seating arrangements. First, the government representatives and their opposite numbers sat on opposite sides of the table, across from one another. Then, briefly it seems, they sat side by side before moving into separate rooms to consolidate their positions and make their separate cases to the UN mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi. While these manouevres may prove to have been a diplomatic sleight of hand, or simply happened by chance, is it too soon to think that they might also be a landscape-changer?

The government’s ceding (or offering, depending whose side you are on) of the right of passage out of Homs for women and children means that although women and children are still currency for use in other people’s power games, everybody seems to have remembered, if only for a moment, that they are also human beings.

It is the remembering that matters because remembering is about returning to a familiar place, a better one perhaps, or seeing a familiar face, once a friend but now an enemy, and wanting a new and better, more truthful and compassionate life with that person. When a line of blue appears while it is still raining, one remembers Spring. It is not a moment of eager anticipation about longer warmer days about to come, because winter is still too much with us, but of remembering what the lanes and fields look and smell like when the light changes and there is a suspicion of warmth in the air.

There is a difference between right remembering and simplistic nostalgia. Right remembering orientates people towards truth about the past, making for the possibility of a new and different future, a new reality in the present. Where Syria is concerned the future remains uncertain. Winter is still too much with us, with a worst case scenario in which Homs could yet become a new Srebrenica. Hope is not really hope if it loses sight of present reality.

So we, and the Syrian people, hover between seasons of light and darkness, and between conflict and healing. As these talks continue, which all people of faith pray that they will, there is the faintest possibility of some kind of new beginning for this troubled region. It would be beyond our wildest dreams if this were to happen, but wild dreams and the will to heal are bound up in hope and worked out in a determination to stick with, and believe in, the work of a holy God.

About Dogs

A couple of weeks before Christmas our old dog, Molly, had to be put down. She had enjoyed a good life in every sense. She was good and she made our lives good. Dogs seem to be gifted with ‘goodness’. Perhaps other species are as well, but seldom in such an uncomplicated way as dogs. Dogs know about trust and they know how to endure, for the sake of those they love, all kinds of unwarranted and unexpected situations. For Molly, one such situation entailed being in a car with her owner for more than 10 hours in freezing temperatures. A few inches of snow had fallen on the M11, back in  2003, causing gridlock, but together they endured the situation by sharing a sleeping bag which he happened to have with him in the back of the car.

Dogs oblige you to share your life with them, whether or not you realise it. Sharing one’s life with the dog (and they leave us little choice in the matter) is not like the sharing involved in any human relationship. There is a certain amount of ‘taking for granted’ which is OK between us and dogs, but which might not be OK in other family relationships. The reason for this is that dogs only understand what they choose to understand.  They only understand what adds to the sum total of the goodness of the arrangement which you have with them. This is what I have discovered through sharing my study with two dogs.

Over the years, we have had seven dogs and, with the demise of Molly, we have just acquired an eighth, although he is still with his mother and two of his siblings for the time being. I have agreed with my husband that the new dog can be based with him, in his office, but I doubt the arrangement will last. I do not think that he realises, as yet, that no amount of complaining will persuade a dog that his or her presence can at times be unpleasant, from a purely odorific point of view. Or that sudden barking is both uncalled for and distracting, as is snoring, loud lapping of water and other licking sounds. But I would not be without them. Their goodness, despite the practical drawbacks of having them in the same room, aids the creative process.

It is also a constant reminder of how God’s own goodness is revealed in the sheer doggishness of dogs.  As a result, talking to the dogs leads into prayer and prayer sustains creativity, although the dogs are quite unaware of any of this, believing that one is talking only to them in an oddly passionate and grateful way. Their response is to lie back, paws in the air, lips slightly flapping to reveal some magnificent teeth, and eyes half closed in something resembling bliss. Since Molly died I have started reading poetry to our remaining dog. She is enthusiastic but, sadly, quite uncomprehending, although she listens and stares intently. I sense that she is trying to make up for her friend’s absence, and for her own loss, by being even more of a dog than she already is, out of loyalty and devotion. She met the new dog yesterday and seemed more or less indifferent to him which is a sign of approval, of the relentless forward movement of life and of the goodness of God.

Justice, Mercy and Smacking

On Saturday, the Guardian reported that a woman who was filmed smacking her overwrought five year old ‘at least four times’ on the backside has been sentenced to a six-month community order. The chairman of the bench declared that she had to be “punished”. (The Guardian, [National] Saturday, 11^th January, 2014)

The worst thing about corporal punishment is that it degrades and humiliates the victim. But the ‘punishment’ meted out by the court to the child’s mother was also degrading and humiliating, and all the more so for having been brought about by her partner’s secret filming of this particular incident, which he claimed was one of many.  Humiliation heaped on humiliation seems to be what this punishment was designed to inflict, made all the worse for being reported in the press. We can only imagine what all three of the people involved – the parents and the child – will be having to deal with emotionally over the coming months, as a result of the humiliation inflicted through it, if they want their child to emerge from the experience undamaged. 

The remorse and recrimination which will surely follow begs the question: does the public and prolonged humiliation of the perpetrator really make for healing and for the transformation of this particular dysfunctional family relationship, especially the one which exists between the mother and her child? I am not arguing that the courts should uphold indiscriminate smacking.  My point is that when a mother (who is beside herself with stress, and possibly other emotional and physical issues) smacks a five year old who is in the extreme throes of a tantrum, she should not be criminalised.

Smacking is becoming taboo. With taboos comes hypocrisy.  Smacking is not something you talk about very much, especially if you have resorted to it from time to time. In the context of family relationships, we can be one thing in public – gentle and loving parents, while being another in private – people with human emotions which can get out of hand and do real and lasting damage if forgiveness and healing are not allowed to take place between those involved.  Furthermore, violent actions are seldom entirely the fault of one person, although this in no way justifies them. We are all responsible for violence because we are a violent society; to the extent that when we are not actually engaging in violent actions or speech, we are being entertained or titillated by violence through what we read or watch.

 Taking a mother to court for smacking, especially in this particular instance, suggests that we are all caught up in a degree of hypocrisy concerning this area of domestic violence. The hypocrisy stems partly from the confusion which exists between the generations regarding the way corporal punishment is to be used, if at all. Thirty years ago smacking was permissible, though not regarded as particularly desirable. Before that, corporal punishment was frequently meted out in schools and occasional incidents of smacking,  in a normal family environment,  were quickly forgotten. There is also the deeper implication of collective fear and self doubt about the extent to which our own fascination with violence makes for a vicarious enjoyment of seeing that, in incidents like the one described in the Guardian, ‘justice has been done’.

It is this which has made the article in question newsworthy and which gives all of us permission to condemn the mother’s regrettable actions while at the same time failing to question the real motives which may have lain behind the partner’s filming of the incident. Of course he was concerned about the child’s safety and well being, but part of that safety and well being must surely lie in taking responsibility for the mother. One cannot help but wonder what else had been going on that day, and perhaps for many days, which caused this woman to lose control of herself in dealing with a five year old’s tantrum? And what other complex political motives lay behind the court’s sentencing?

In all of this I am reminded of an incident in the life of Jesus when a woman ‘caught’ (today there would have been hidden cameras) in adultery, the worst of crimes in the socio-religious context of the day, was dragged before him for a ‘verdict’ before being stoned. But his verdict came as a question “Which of you is without sin? Let him be the one to cast the first stone.” The woman’s accusers were quite probably adulterers themselves, but that is not the only sin of which they were guilty. They had other reasons for wanting to publicly denounce and humiliate her. Some of these stemmed from the fear of having to come to terms with their own double standards, and duplicity. The woman served as a scapegoat for those thoughts and actions of which they were ashamed, so it mattered to them that someone else be ’punished’.  Is there not something comparable going on in the case of the woman sentenced to six months unpaid work for smacking her five year old?