Now, and then

An EU report on children’s health has concluded that excessive technology is bad for

Desk (Author's photo)

growing minds and inhibits the development of healthy social relationships. In this week’s edition of The Tablet Laurence Freeman describes a plane journey in which he found himself seated next to two young boys. He understandably feared for his extended period of relative peace and quiet. He need not have done. The boys were wired up from the start, their attention riveted to the small screen on the back of the seat opposite them, to the point that the airline steward had to personally remove their headphones in order to alert them to the fact that there was a tray of food in front of them. It goes without saying that Laurence Freeman was left in peace for the duration of the 8 hour flight.

It is tempting to think that in the good old days, before the advent of mobile phones and the internet, people read good books and had more meaningful personal relationships, that childhood friendships were nurtured in fertile intellectual ground, their imaginations untrammeled by fast food entertainment and reactive electronic games which would lead, presumably, to a shallow reactive take on life in general. As a result, it is easy to lay claim to the idea that it was the youth of those old days who generated all that is good and worth listening to in music, the arts in general and literature in particular, and that society was consequently altogether healthier as a result.

From this viewpoint comes the propensity for socio-historical amnesia with potentially serious consequences for us and for our children and grandchildren. The issue of race is a case in point. There are those who think that things would be better if there were fewer people, a shibboleth which ignores the statistical realities of emigration, as well as of immigration. When it comes to immigration, partial remembering helps to blur the lines of objective analyses when it comes to who exactly are the people who ‘scrounge’ on the health and benefits system. Wealthy tax avoiders are just as likely as anyone else to find themselves, in an emergency, having a life saving operation courtesy of the NHS. Things are not always quite as they seem.

This kind of mind set also ignores the drabness and sadness of life in those good old days, days which for me were epitomized by spam – the meat variety. There were fewer cars perhaps, but far longer and more tiring journeys which, in any case, only the relatively well off could afford. The arrival of the first motorway service area on the M1 could almost be described as a cultural milestone. There were trains, of course, but with them came the fear of finding oneself alone with a male predator in a locked compartment with no outside corridor.

But to return to technology and its undoubted detrimental effects on the young. Being so closely hooked up to whatever is taking place on a screen changes perspectives. It makes those things which were once at a distance not only much closer, but intimately bound up with our inner life system. Everything, including the news, is on tap and available instantly, and when this is not so our impatience, and sometimes irrational fury at being so rudely interrupted by buffering broad band, knows no bounds. We are in fact ‘bound’ by its general chatter which also makes it hard to switch off in the way we used to. This gives pause for thought as we approach the season of Passiontide.

There is a passage in Isaiah (Is.11:1-5) which speaks of a shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse. Shoots usually appear on the branches or trunks of older trees. If we think of the Cross as the symbol of an old tree, and see the one who hangs on it as the life giving source of the shoot, we are reminded of the way all things, both then and now, are enlivened through this one source. The old and the young find their life source in and through that one tortured victim, as they have always done. Through this common life we also see the old tree, the Cross, as symbolic of human history in all its depravity. But the victim is ‘redeeming’ it by ‘binding’ himself to it, by giving it his own life so that it can become a new and young plant without being anything other than what it is.

Remaining connected, or bound, to the life source matters. The two boys on the plane who are connected to their headphones, or bound by them, are a symbol of the now – the way in which we are connected, but need to constantly re-evaluate the state of that connection; whether it either impedes or makes it possible for us to remain bound to that deeper source of life which flows through the old tree.

Staying with the symbolic shoot and tree allows us to make sense of the Isaiah passage in a new way. The suffering of the tortured God who hangs on the old tree (the Cross) is his ‘belt of righteousness and faithfulness’ (v.5). It is his supreme authority fully revealed. Until now his authority has been partially hidden behind clouds, pillars of fire and temple veils. Today, his authority often appears to have been superseded by other barriers to a right understanding of the purposes of God. These can be roughly translated as various kinds of power games, some of them brutal, with regard to religion in general, and the injustices, vainglory and materialist concerns of the Church in regard to Christianity in particular.

His suffering is also the ‘judgment’. In other words, it is the last word spoken to all of us in our own tortured confusion about who we are, the moral quandaries and potential health risks which rapidly advancing technology throws at us, where we are going as a society, the political complexities of any given conflict situation and the future of the planet. In all of these human predicaments, the tortured God we see in Jesus is the judge who knows us and in whom is life, as there has always been. It is up to us to lay hold of it now. 

Only connect

My current computer screen saver is Giovanni Bellini’s Christ Blessing, as shown on my post of February 10^th.  I am returning to this picture because it holds my attention in a particular way. With our slow internet connection, there is always time to contemplate it, even if contemplation is abruptly cut off by the arrival of emails and other distractions emanating from the ‘real’ world. By contemplating, I mean looking through the picture, rather than looking at it. To contemplate this picture is to look through it to the Christ who is inviting the viewer into relationship with him, and into a different way of seeing the world. Looking at the face of Christ makes me wonder sometimes which world is the most real – his or the one I seem to inhabit, as most of us do, via a computer.

 

Computers and social network sites, as well as blogs, leave us in a kind of limbo when we are not on them, which is why it is so difficult to turn them off. It is as if we inhabit two worlds at once, in which we deal with what feel like different realities. What kind of inhabiting is this? and what kind of reality am I contemplating as I look at the face of Christ while waiting for the computer to get going? It seems to be a liminal place. I am standing on a dividing line between two worlds, two realities which interface with one another. In contemplating the image of Christ blessing I sense it reaching in to the world being opened up not only to me, but to millions of others, through the computer. When the screen saver goes, an interruption occurs as the computer releases a different real world into the mind space of its user.

But the image of Christ blessing is not so quick to fade. My screen saver remains with me and serves as a reminder of that other real world. The memory of Christ’s hand raised in benediction now confronts the host of alienating images and stories which shape themselves around not only my own consciousness, but also around everything which the computer may have to offer, its potential for both good and evil. The computer is a re-incarnation of that allegorical tree of knowledge portrayed in the book of Genesis. We need to eat carefully of its fruit.

The computer takes us to dark places and, potentially, to a general darkness, although not  always one which is specifically ‘religious’. It is important to differentiate between general darkness, the darkness of ignorance and materialism, and that which seems to pertain solely to religion, as many people understand it. Those who distrust religion will often associate it with the kind of darkness which comes with the preaching of hatred and murder. This particular darkness is encapsulated in the image depicting the Arabic letter ‘nun’, for ‘Nazarene’, as it is used to single out Christian homes for the intimidation or destruction of those who live in them.

The task which faces all of us, if the world is to survive the current tide of religious violence, consists in bringing together these two images, the one of Christ blessing, and the Arabic letter, and allowing them to confront one another. It is challenging and, at times, frightening work. Firstly, because it requires that we come to terms with the idea that the light, as we see it in the Bellini painting, and as we sometimes sense it in the deeper reaches of our own consciousness, has not been overcome by the sinister darkness associated with the letter ‘nun’.

Secondly, it obliges us to also look at our own inner darkness, those feelings of doubt, fear and anger which surface from time to time and for which there is often no obvious or immediate explanation. This process of confrontation begins with our accepting and coming to terms with the light which we also carry within us. It is the light of God’s presence, the working of his grace in our lives, to the extent that we allow it. Allowing grace into our lives is a matter of making ourselves available to God. It is what the writer Simone Weil called disponibilité.

Being available to the work of light brings us to the outer limit of what we think of as our ‘selves’. In so doing, it faces us with a particular kind of emptiness, one where the ‘self’ that we understand we are, including all its dreams and desires, loves and hates, has to be literally ‘forgotten’.[1] This is what Christ meant when he talked about ‘dying’ to self. In the moment of forgetting, or dying, we are invited to drop down into darkness, the darkness of not having answers, of not knowing, and at the same time of trusting in the light which literally ‘lightens the world’. This whole process of forgetting, dying and trusting leads to a new kind of knowing and seeing.

There is a connection to be made in the process of  knowing and understanding on one level with that of not knowing or understanding on a deeper and more significant level. We are talking about the inhabiting of two worlds, or realities. At the deeper level, we don’t need to know things in the same way. We don’t need to have made sense of why the world is as it is, or to have come up with solutions. All that is required is that we maintain a connection between the light, as we see it in the holy face of Christ, and all that is chaotic, violent and dark in our world.

On the whole, this work of connecting is best done by individuals who are prepared to be open to it for most of the day. They will find, in any case, that once they have made themselves ‘available’, being open to the work of grace will become a way of life, although it will not prevent them from carrying on with life as they have always lived it, with regard to what they do for a living, their marriage or relationships and all those in between times when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular.

The vital work of engaging with darkness, while remaining in the light, is a matter of remaining connected at a deeper level with the light we see in the face of Christ, who confronts and overcomes the darkness in the world around us.

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[1] I am grateful to Maggie Ross for many of the ideas which inform this post, especially that of  ‘forgetting’. See her recent book Silence: A User’s Guide, (DLT)

If I don't believe Jesus is divine am I a Christian?

http://www.atlantametropolisphiloptochos.org/

 “Who do you say that I am?” Perhaps this question, which Jesus puts to his disciples, is one which we ask about ourselves in the minute we are born. ‘Who am I?’ If we were to time-travel back to that moment, which some claim to have done, our first cry must surely be a shaping of this fundamental question, asked of those who first lay their hands on us. We will go on asking it for the whole of  our lives.

The newly born is giving voice to the acute loneliness of the human condition. In what capacity then does Jesus ask it of his disciples? It seems that its significance lies in the asking as much as in the expectation of an answer. The question seems to come with a particular authority, the authority of one capable of reconciling the God-forsakenness, the loneliness of the human condition, with the love of God. Jesus asks the question so that he can supply those who love him with the answer, the answer which will tell them who they are.

Just as the newborn child reaches out and rejects those around her in a single trembling gesture, so the human race continues to reach out and simultaneously reject the things which make for life and peace. This rejection and reaching out manifests itself simultaneously in greed, cruelty and the lust for power over others, combined with love for one’s children, the desire for a better life and a deep, mostly inarticulate, longing for meaning. This suggests that we should listen to the question on more than one level.

There are a number of theological areas to explore when it comes to understanding the paradox of human nature. Most of them have to do with the nature of sin and salvation, understood on the one hand as alienation from God and alienation from one another and, on the other, as the reconciling of all things in Christ. But they also return us to the question asked by the infant into the absence or nothingness which he experiences at birth just as he becomes, biologically at least, autonomous, no longer part of his mother’s life sustaining system, of her body, mind and, yes, spirit.

There is a time dimension to the question as well. Jesus asks it from within a particular historical context, at a particular time, but it is also the fulcrum on which the whole of human history turns and on which this present moment (as you are reading this blog) rests. If it spans time, if it moves with the dynamic of history itself and yet confronts us in this moment, it obliges us to hear and respond to still more questions.

Was Jesus more than human? Was he, and is he, God consenting to and embracing our humanity? Working on the basis of a unified sphere of history, a ‘then’ present in the ‘now’, a future which is also already being realised in the present, is it possible that he is embracing us even in this moment and will continue to do so ‘unto the end of the age’, as he himself put it?

Here we start to drop down to that level of understanding which invites us to sit loosely to the kind of a posteriori claims about God based on a certain way of reading history, science or philosophy, or of any intellectual pursuit which allows itself to be contained within a limited conceptual framework, and thus licenses assumptions which need to be re-questioned. Or which simply invite silence. Christ’s question is not an invitation to concur with a theory arrived at over time, although history, and what a particular history was leading to, was a significant defining element for his disciples.

The question was not a test, and it is not a test now.  Neither was it addressed exclusively to future Christians, or to the Jews of his time, or to the followers of any one religion at any one time in history. Jesus was outside time, and outside humanly organised religion, while allowing himself to be held within both. As Messiah, he did not fit in with the assumptions of his day or concur with its expectations, anymore than he does now. But then, why should he? The love of God revealed in the person of Jesus was, and is, infinitely more exacting of us than our limited expectations of him could possibly allow for. This is perhaps why many people who met Jesus rejected him – and why others worshipped him.

Incidents of spontaneous worship recorded in the gospels help us to see the significance of the question which Jesus asks of his disciples and of us. They offer a new intellectual dimension which is that of deep knowledge, better known as faith.  Christ’s divinity takes us straight to the kind of life with which we identify salvation. Indeed, the words ‘life’ and ‘salvation’ are etymologically linked.

So this is a universal, cosmic and at the same time uniquely personal question which invites more than mere opinion. It obliges response. It is an ‘I’ to ‘thou’ question, as the philosopher Martin Buber might have put it, requiring a willingness to respond and commit to the moment, and to the person we encounter in Jesus Christ.

An encounter with Christ involves hearing the question “Who do you say that I am”, from that place within us where we seek meaning, even if we do not know that is what we are seeking. So, for Christians, it matters how we answer the question, just as it did for the disciples. Theirs was not a qualified opinion. It was a declaration of his divinity embodied in response, that he was the Son of the living God. They had not worked it out. It had been ‘revealed’ to them. In other words, they understood, or knew, in the moment of his asking that they too had been understood and known by God. To be a Christian is to know that we have been understood, known and accepted by God in Jesus.

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.