Timewarp

While browsing for an image of refugees to use for this post, I have just stumbled on one of those American websites which thinks it has permission to say anything, as long as what it says justifies both its fear and its hatred of all who are perceived as alien, specifically

Muslims, and Muslim refugees in particular. In its paranoia, the site claims that Texas will soon have to submit to Sharia law, that term being understood in its most pejorative, narrow and repressive sense. It also states that refugees disembarking in Lampedusa complain that there are not enough ‘freebies’ and that they also complain of receiving no support from the Italian government – nor should they, the website says.  The rhetoric continues in a far more extreme and barely printable vein, so I hastily deleted the page from my browser history, a kneejerk reaction perhaps.

Fear, even the puerile fear of being thought to take an interest in dubious websites, is what prompts kneejerk reactions, including that of turning off, or turning on, that particular site, or a programme or news item which fascinates as much as it informs.

We are fascinated by other people’s pain, and we fear that fascination. What other possible explanation could there be for the commercial success of the thoroughly nasty in the world of media, books and entertainment – apart from the possibility of there being something thoroughly nasty inside all of us which we both fear and are compelled to revisit?

Some of us are quite addicted to the news. But being a bit of a news junkie is not just a slightly voyeuristic form of conscience appeasement, in other words, wanting to know what is happening to strangers in distant places and convincing ourselves that we care. It is also about trying to make sense of suffering and of understanding ourselves and our own suffering a little better.  

It seems that engaging with the pain of strangers, and of other nations, reveals two things about suffering in general. First, that every person’s suffering, and the suffering of every innocent creature, is connected to the suffering of those who have gone before and, second, that suffering, including the suffering of the earth and of animals, is never pointless, although it may seem so at the time. Engaging with the suffering of others, even in the briefest and most superficial way, reveals how all suffering is connected. But knowing this does not necessarily make us more caring or more generous, because despite the immediacy of the internet and the sense of intimacy which it brings to any violent or tragic situation, the suffering, as far as we are concerned, is still going on somewhere else. It is not happening to me or to anyone I know. It is also compressed into a very short time space, long enough for a brief interview and some film footage. The suffering of others is both immediate and far away, close up and beyond reach, real and unreal.

Paradoxically, this creates a kind of limbo in which we can more or less ‘deal’ with the chaos and breakdown of nations and communities and with the devastation of lives, lives such as those which wash up on the shores of Lampedusa.  But instantaneous information also disempowers. Before we have had a chance to think about the situation in any depth, the moment has passed and another news item is before us, usually wholly unrelated to what preceded it. This in turn contributes to a sense of not being able to hold things together, one which mirrors the fragmentation of the world in which, as the poet W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’.

One way to counter this sense of falling apart is to consciously ‘hold’ all that is going on around us, and the essence of any present moment – its ‘itness’,  within the embrace of God and to allow him to ‘grasp’ it. We hold by simply paying attention to the news, and to the moment being covered, in the presence of God, while at the same time letting go of it. Ultimately, it is the letting go which matters. Letting go is the allowing which comes with acceptance of the way things are and the acknowledgment that we have all played a part in making them so. Once the allowing has been done we can yield the world’s suffering, and our own, to the only one who can prevent an irrevocable falling apart of all things. We accept and then yield into the outstretched arms of the crucified God, who is the risen Christ who loves us and who is always inviting us to keep company with him. It is a way of life.

Out of the ashes

Donesk airport 

Debaltseve is suspended in the buffer zone between Russia and the disputed territory of eastern Ukraine. We see the ashes of Donetsk airport through a drone’s camera lens. We glimpse, online, the face of an old woman. She remembers another war which devastated her country more than half a century ago. A tear glistens in her left eye. Another elderly woman sets about ‘clearing up’, as one online report puts it. She is at work with a dustpan and brush on the doorstep of her shattered house. The ceasefire may yet hold, or it may not, but for a moment we can be present to a nation’s suffering. Being present to the suffering of nations is a way of re-affirming what is good about humanity.

To be human is also to die. Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we consider the stark reality of our own mortality, the fact that we are dust and that to dust we shall return. It is in this sombre context that we are also called to repent. In former times this was done literally ‘in dust and ashes’. Now, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross made from the ashes of last year’s Palm Sunday crosses.

There is something significant about the tactile nature of this small ceremony. It invites us to think of our mortality and of repentance as belonging together, and yet the two are quite separate. Our mortality is an irrevocable aspect of the human condition, but repentance is down to us. It means, as the rest of the Ash Wednesday liturgical phrasing puts it, ‘to turn away from sin’. We have a choice.  For many, turning away from sin sounds overtly pious, not something one would want to rush to church for on a cold evening in February. But repentance is not an ascetic exercise for the religiously inclined. It is essential to the survival of the planet and of the human race, because it restores life.

Repentance is therefore everyone’s concern. It is both collective and personal. Nations are comprised of persons, of human beings whose lives and decisions shape the destinies of families and communities, and of the nation itself. They, and those they influence or control, can reduce a once fine airport to ashes, and with them lies the responsibility for the elderly woman ‘clearing up’ in between rocket attacks. Also, we all ultimately depend for our survival as a species on the planet which we are wrecking through conflict, greed and materialism. Archaeological research suggests that our planet has outlived other species in the past and could outlive us if we choose not to repent.

Nations repent when enough individuals apply enough pressure on those who hold the most power to push them to repentance, to push them to choose life for the rest of us. Part of our own repentance therefore consists in taking responsibility for the repentance of those over whom we have some influence. This is not a matter of applying sanctions, or, as in other conflict situations, of retaliatory bombing raids.

The conflicts we see around us are about the exercise of power, and hence about greatness. Repentance is about relinquishing power and accepting our mortality, our littleness and vulnerability, and that our lifespan and that of our planet is held in God’s. This is where a huge reality shift needs to take place. We have mistaken what is real for what is unreal by allowing collective vanity and self aggrandisement (otherwise known as national identity) to destroy our humanity. The last part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy urges us to be faithful to Christ. What it is reminding us of, though, is his faithfulness to us.

God is not seasonal

When Easter falls early, or the weather is too cold to safely plant the potatoes on Maundy Thursday, the gardening year gets off to a rather ‘discombobulated’ start (to use a favourite expression of my mother’s). But while it is relatively easy to adapt to seasonal disruption where growing vegetables is concerned, the same cannot always be said for other seasons, the ones that mark the year in ways which affect us personally, Christmas and Easter being the two most significant. These two seasons are also connected to the two pivotal seasons of the year, the winter and spring solstices, when daylight is at a turning point. They affect our moods. They also speak of a God who is always with us, in times of both light and darkness.

Christmas will, at least for the foreseeable future, always fall on the 25^th of December, but Easter is a movable feast. This year it falls early enough to create a general sense of disequilibrium, or emotional ‘discombobulation’. We have hardly done with Epiphany when Lent is almost upon us. The Christmas chocolates have only just been finished and yesterday I found a couple of minced pies, somewhat past their sell by date, in the back of a cupboard. I threw them away. They would have been perfectly OK heated up but the season for eating them is over. They do not fit the mood of the moment which is already coloured by anxiety. I am not yet in the frame of mind for Lent. I have been worrying about this for the past couple of weeks.

Anxiety is the first temptation we face at this time of year. It was, incidentally the one which Jesus himself faced initially in the wilderness and which arguably informed that whole experience. Was he really the Son of God? If he was, surely there was no point in allowing himself to starve to death before his work had begun? Perhaps he should just settle for being a famous wonder worker … What to do? He was not ready, not in the right frame of mind for doing the work he was called to, with the sacrifice which it would entail, or so he was tempted to think.  

When it comes to Lent, I am tempted to think that the right frame of mind involves at least wanting to give something up, or do something, which would make me more ‘disposed’ to God, a better Christian perhaps. There is so little time, between the end of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday (about 2 weeks, in fact) for wanting to somehow be different or better. But these puerile anxieties have no place in the overwhelming mad generosity of God’s salvation plan for each one of us which, incidentally, has nothing to do with being a better religious person or anyone other than who we are. God is much bigger, much wilder than our self preoccupied worries can possibly allow us to imagine. He loves us most in our humanity.

Perhaps Lent would be a great deal more fruitful, and less discombobulated, if we were mindful and accepting of our humanity and of the humanity of others. Of special concern are those people who have endured a kind of Lent for most of the year, or even for a large part of their lives. Some have long term mental health problems. Others have been recently bereaved. All are living through a time of wilderness and temptation of which most of us have little or no experience. Giving attention, through prayer, or through physical presence to someone who is suffering; loving them, not because we want to be better Christians, but in their humanity, is what Lent is really about. We meet Christ in their humanity, and in our own if we will allow it. So our shared humanity and suffering has much to teach us, if we will only pay attention to it.  

This is how God pays attention to us, regardless of the season. We are loved in our humanity, in what we are going through right now, good or bad. We are loved in our day to day ordinariness, not in the persons we think or wish we could become. God loves us in the full knowledge that we will probably never become that person, nor perhaps should we. The imperfections which make us the persons we are, are also the wounds and bruises we carry around in life. On the whole it takes a life time to learn to tell the difference between what is a wound and what is an imperfection or a ‘sin’ in ourselves, let alone in other people.

All wounds, and the imperfections they generate, are also Christ’s, because he has chosen to make them so. For this reason, the season of Lent is also always Easter. Nothing is particularly tidy or seasonal in the way God relates to human beings. 

Return to centre - the Sunday space

Post-war London Sundays were monochrome in every sense. They are to be remembered for grey buildings, lacklustre parks and gardens, boredom and an all-pervading sense of absence. Sundays had to be got through, not that we were forced to attend church. It was just that there was nothing to do and nothing was happening. Perhaps the post-war Sunday was an overhang from the war itself, a flat calm in the wake of a tornado. I am still surprised at the resistance which Sunday trading encountered from a generation who, logically, should have welcomed its inception rather than viewing it as Mammon incarnate. They should have welcomed it because, if for no other reason, ‘business as usual’ 7 days a week obliges us to question what we really understand Sunday to be for.

In the Christian calendar this particular Sunday (February 1^st¸ 2015) is kept as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The gospel reading set for today (Luke 2:22-40) speaks of the fulfilment of promise, in a moment which a man and a woman who are both well advanced in years had thought would never come. The man had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ, God’s Messiah. So it is a life-defining moment, a moment of truth.

Moments of truth tell us what our lives are meant to be, or, as in the case of this elderly couple, what our lives have been about, what they have been for. They bring everything together. I think this initial moment of recognition, between the old man and the infant Christ, also tells us something of what Sunday is for. It is a space for encountering God. The ‘Sunday space’, whatever form it takes, or whatever day of the week it happens to be, lends depth and colour, shape and coherence to our lives.

Sunday is shaped from within ourselves. In fact, Sunday has always been at the centre of our DNA, as persons who are shaped in and for the love of God. It is defined to a far lesser extent by contextual or cultural circumstances. The Sunday space could be on a Friday or a Saturday, if you are Muslim or Jewish, or it could simply be defined by the constraints of shift work, so it is probably best not to define it at all and not to hedge it about with conditions and restraints. It should be ‘free time’ in the fullest sense.

It is only in freeing Sunday from outdated protestant Sabbath thinking that the idea of Sunday can become a permanent and vital fixture in our lives. As such, it becomes a place for encountering God, one to which we can return in any vacant moment, as well as in moments which are fraught with anxiety or filled with joy. By encountering God, I mean being surprised, or taken unawares, by his sheer faithfulness. The Sunday space, however we think of it, is a space for ‘returning and rest’ to quote the prophet Isaiah. But this in turn begs the question of what we mean by rest, given the times we live in? Sunday can also be the day for doing all the tasks and chores which cannot be done during the week because of other work commitments. Doing nothing is out of the question.

Rest is not about doing nothing. It is not some kind of neutral gear. On the contrary, it has its own dynamic, its own rhythm and pace. It is the paradox of which the prophet Isaiah speaks when he says that ‘in returning and rest, you shall be saved’. Real rest only happens when God is allowed into whatever activity or thought, good or bad, that occupies our attention and draws on our emotional or physical energy. This is the kind of rest which makes the Sunday space truly productive, or regenerative. 

All living things need places and periods of regeneration. The kind of regeneration experienced in our inner Sunday space also confronts and overwhelms what is de-generate in ourselves and in the world around us. It enables us to ‘see salvation’ through the darkness and to return the darkness to God. The infant Christ was inviting the old man to ‘see salvation’ that morning in the Temple. He was inviting him, and us, to re-focus and return ourselves and the whole world into God.  

Women bishops and the Church of England - from death to life

In the week that the arch-traditionalist Revd. Philip North refused Episcopal consecration from ‘tainted’ hands, including those of his own archbishop, we also see the Revd. Libby

Lane consecrated as the first woman bishop in the Church of England. ‘What a piece of work is man’ – forever trying to square the circle in order to keep the show on the road, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor.

The Church, in its effort to keep going in the face of tacit or open misogyny and homophobia, has become a squared circle and is in danger of grinding to a halt. Wanting to please everyone all of the time, in the interest of maintaining a spurious unity, leads to a standstill situation.  We are trying to keep going without first having done the hard work of reparation, the servicing of the Church which involves listening, hearing, understanding and loving one another unconditionally. This is what brings life and enables real unity and, later, forward movement.

However, there is a sense in which trying to please everyone all of the time does enable a little forward movement to begin. It does so when the desire and the collective will is for a shared life in God. This is not bland piety. It is the hard reality which faces us when we place our humanity ahead of our concerns for the institutional church or for the individual’s professional advancement in that institution. Our humanity consists in who we are as persons before God, and as we are known to one another.

As far as I know, Bishop Libby Lane was not a ‘key player’ in the inside deliberations of who would be the first woman bishop for the Church of England. She is, to many of us, an unknown, a King David figure. The young David was sought out and anointed while he was in the fields tending the sheep, over the heads of his elder brothers. Like David, she is a bit of a surprise.

Bishop Libby Lane’s consecration is a major step in the right direction when it comes to forward movement, but more is needed – not just more women bishops, but a re-humanising of the Church and a re-ordering of its priorities, priorities which until now have consisted of the upkeep of safe and predictable career paths mainly intended for men. We need more surprises. But, paradoxically, hope may be on the way, through the unlikely source of management. Driven as we are by internal politics, the professionalization of the work of priests, and by management-style mission agendas, the human beings caught up in these processes may yet rise up and protest. Hopefully, Bishop Libby will be one such human being. Meanwhile, we in the Church in Wales, which voted for women bishops but has so far failed to deliver, hope that new life will appear through a new management initiative, the creation of ministry areas.

Management thinking, and the creation of ministry areas, justifies itself on the basis of cost effectiveness and vague talk of mission and the empowerment of the laity, by which it means the people who come to church. All of this is alright as far as it goes but it does not go far enough. It is the people who do not go to church, because they are put off by misogyny, homophobia and clericalism, who need to be empowered. Many are understandably cynical but there is also good will out there, as I find when I happen to be wearing a clerical collar while shopping or paying the toll fare in order to cross the Severn Bridge. I get an encouraging smile where others perhaps do not. 

The smile and friendly word is not about recognition of status. It is about recognition of God’s unconditional love, made flesh in his Son, operating within the contexts of day to day life and made visible in the Church’s ministry. The Church, and people wearing clerical collars, irrespective of the colour of their shirts, exist to make that love known and, more importantly, experienced, by all whom they meet, including those who may not go to church or who do not think of themselves as religious. The essence of mission is therefore not what we say or do, but what we are. The task of managers in the Church consists therefore in making it possible for those they manage to be recognisably what they are called to be which is Christ in the world.

This is also what empowerment is about. To empower is to liberate. Good management is a liberating process. In the Church, it ought to enable those who minister in God’s name to recognise and fully ‘comprehend’ the pains and joys of others. This comprehension, or ‘holding’, is part of God’s ongoing work of creation and salvation. The two words are rooted in the Greek words for ‘life’.

For Christians, the work being done in all of us through the Holy Spirit, whether or not we go to church,oHo is about real life and practical action, so it is not enough for those who minister, whether lay or ordained, to be nice people with a sense of humour. They need to be people whose humour comes from an understanding, a connectedness with a God who laughs with us. The parables of Jesus were not told as grim morality tales. They were often jokes, and jokes only work when they are told from a place of empathy, rather than one of cynicism and judgement. Humour is central to salvation. Gloomy religion and solemn clergy do not speak of the salvation offered in the person of Jesus.

All of this brings me back to the kind of hope which Bishop Libby’s consecration offers both the Church and the world. There was a spark of real affection and humour which passed between her and those around her in the moments which followed her consecration, and a sigh of relief when the lone protestor failed to ruin it. We hope, and we pray, that this affection will prevail against all that is barren in our Church. We hope that the laughter will overwhelm the cynicism, that it will bring life and hope out of a death situation which has lasted for far too long.

Random acts of joy

A couple of nights ago we skipped the news and went to the circus instead. How frivolous and irresponsible was that at a time like this? the little voice counselling doom and despair kept telling me. How could anyone allow themselves to be distracted from the brutality going on around us? Places like Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, all of them controlled to a greater or lesser extent by the forces of evil at work in IS, al-Quaeda, Boko Haram and the various splinter groups, not to mention corrupt governments, working with them to a greater or lesser extent. Is it right to forget for a moment, by going to see Cirque Beserk at the Hackney Empire, that women and girls are being enslaved and that whole peoples are being subjected to a medieval nightmare?

Guilt and doubt are the great killers of fun because fun allows us to forget. It affords a time of respite. This is why banning fun is the essence of evil. It is also why poisoning religion by banning fun has long been the stock in trade of the evil one, and of his agents. The evil one, far from being an allegorical figure with horns and a pitchfork, is more like a virus which attacks us where we are most vulnerable, beginning with that aspect of human nature which we call spiritual, or religious, or our human consciousness. Consciousness or, to put it in religious terms, conscience, is where we differentiate between right and wrong, between what makes us fully human and what dehumanises or depraves the human spirit.

To begin with, and for most of us, the evil one works most effectively through counsels of doom and despair, accompanied by the voices of accusation and deception. In the very moment of full and uninhibited enjoyment of Cirque Beserk, I am accused of cowardice and moral turpitude as I sense the enemy questioning my enjoyment of such a distraction. Surely my attention should be fully taken up with the suffering and deprivation going on in the world? This private deception plays itself out within a wider psychological context. We are a chronically anxious society, deceived, as individuals, into thinking that if I do not hold up the world like Atlas, it will be overrun by these dark forces and it will all be my fault.

For this kind of deception to be effective, so that evil can take hold and do its malicious work, all signs of uncomplicated, selfless and at times even ‘pointless’ joy, or fun, need to be eliminated. It follows that joy, or fun, is probably the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal in the context of what is often referred to as ‘spiritual warfare’. Spiritual warfare is what all people of good faith, irrespective of their religion, are engaged in at present, even if they would not necessarily call it by that name.

Spiritual warfare centres on joy because joy is of the essence of creation itself. Evil, or the evil one, attacks the goodness of creation and of human beings by first destroying joy. If God is love, and if all things have their being in him, he rejoices eternally in their goodness. He ‘sees’ that they are good, to paraphrase the beginning of the book of Genesis. In this joy over the goodness of things, and of people, he also ‘comprehends’ darkness. In other words, he takes darkness into himself and transforms it through the love which is constitutive of his own being. Joy works through love and sustains all things. Human beings are entrusted to work God’s love into the world through joy – or what we call fun.

This is what happens in the circus. Circuses are contexts in which fun is given at great risk and at great personal cost. The woman hanging upside down on a rope some twenty feet above ground depends on the knots she will have tied herself and on the three pairs of hands holding the rope at the other end. The tumbling acrobat, if he misses his appointed landing spot, could be seriously injured, or even killed. We hardly dare watch him – and yet we do, not because we relish danger for its own sake but because we, like his colleagues waiting with a safety mat in case he misses his landing spot (I won’t spoil it by saying more), are willing him to be OK. We are also laughing with him and with his colleagues when he executes the act with flawless grace. The relentless joy of rave-type circus music, sustains the process and adds to the fun in the most surprising way.

And then there is the clown. His act is rooted in 17^th century Commedia del Arte, a popular form of street theatre in which human nature and human folly are portrayed through stock characters. The clown shows us to ourselves and gives us permission to laugh kindly at ourselves and at human folly. Laughing at ourselves without feeling guilty or afraid cures self deception and all the deceptions which we cherish about those who we fear or dislike. It allows love to happen.  

The clown is therefore one of the great healers of the human spirit. He is the Christ figure in our midst. He appears in every random act of joy, in shared and generous fun where all kinds of risks are taken for the sheer goodness and beauty of the moment, and in laughter that is entirely devoid of malice. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Je suis Charlie Hebdo - The truth of the matter

I have started to notice when a few weeks go by without a plane crash or terrorist attack taking place somewhere in the world.  Perhaps this is because we are now so conditioned to expect the unexpected that we are permanently braced for the worst. Being permanently on red alert is also a way of telling ourselves that we are not really afraid, that we are ready for whatever life throws at us, including random acts of murder. Various levels of ‘terror alert’ help us to do this.  

Those who commit acts of terror aim to exercise power by generating a climate of fear. Terrorism is terrorism, after all. Generating fear is the way people who crave attention, recognition, or even worship, get their megalomaniac ‘fix’. In the case of Jihadism in its current manifestations, megalomania is delusion dressed up as religion. It is not true religion.

True religion is about having a deep relationship with a loving God, both individually and as God’s people, in the sure knowledge that all people are God’s and that all are equally valued and loved by him. False religion is ultimately about the worship of oneself and forcing others to worship the person I call ‘me’, often because the false ‘me’ is driven by self hatred of one kind or another. False religion, and the megalomania it engenders, often appears in personality driven worshiping contexts pertaining to any one of a number of religions, just as it does on the global political stage. It becomes dangerous and violent when driven by lust for power and the desire for control over the lives of others, even if this is not recognised by the person or persons concerned. True religion begins with renouncing power and control over other people.

Truth exposes delusion and so does true religion. But this exposing can work both ways, like a double edged knife. Insofar as true religion, and the truth through which it speaks, exposes dangerous delusion, it also exposes our own fears and ourselves for what we are, both privately and publicly. The truth does this by naming and shaming those who threaten us and, in so doing, by naming and shaming our own fears, hatreds and delusions. Once we have faced these inner wild beasts, we can lay hold of them, understand them and deal with them. We can even laugh at them. We can understand and laugh at our fear of being attacked by crazed religious extremists. Political satire, whether or not we always like or agree with it, helps to make this possible.

Cartoons are really drawings in the sand. For some, they can be powerful solvents of toxic fear. But while they may come across as  temporary things, quickly forgotten and easily erased by the artist, they also leave an indelible mark on the collective inner consciousness, the place where hatred is engendered through fear, the one feeding continuously on the other until they erupt in violence. The artist who draws in the sand deals in powerful subtleties. He or she reveals both truth and delusion.

There is an occasion in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when a woman is brought to him who has been caught committing adultery, a flagrant breach of Jewish law and of the bounds of respectability. When asked who should throw the first stone, he responds with a question and with a drawing in the sand. The question and the drawing clearly belong together. The question pertains to a collective and private fear of judgment and to the delusions of power and of being beyond reproach cherished by those who believe they have the right to judge and condemn others. “Which of you is without sin?” he asks. “Let him throw the first stone.” Jesus knew the truth and saw the delusions which come so easily to those who wish for power, or who perhaps already have it.

What did each person see written in the sand as he dropped his stone and turned away from the woman? It was probably no more than a single word, or a quick line drawing unmasking a delusion about the kind of person he was, or about what he secretly wished he was. The delusion and the desire had made him single minded, even fanatical, in the practice of his religion. False fanatical religion expressed itself in a desire to punish someone else for his own self hatred.

We are seeing something like this being worked out through the language of religious violence today. The criminal so called Jihadists who act out their fantasies in Paris streets and supermarkets are really no more than disillusioned people who are full of self hatred. They must be stopped, wherever they are, both there and further afield. But simply stopping them, with force if necessary, will not diminish their hatred or their fear and it will not diminish ours either.

In order to finally rid ourselves of the fear and the hatred which feeds violence, we have other work to do. We have to use the other side of the double edged knife to exorcise the sins of injustice committed against Arab people in the past century and in which we have all played a part. Violence and hatred will only be fully quelled when we have taken away the deeper and perhaps only partly recognised ‘drivers’ of the current violent episode. This is the wider and far more significant truth which cartoonists need to be drawing in the sand.