Socialist Utopia - Or the Kingdom of Heaven?

The artist Ai Wei Wei, when asked on Channel 4 News (September 14^th, 2015) why his art is deemed to be so subversive by the Chinese government, replied that art is dangerous.  “It speaks the truth”, he said, by which he meant the kind of truth which inspires hope and resonates with the deepest longings of the human spirit.

www.theguardian.com

One of the most pernicious effects of self-serving power politics, in any context, is that they whittle away at the concept of hope, making it appear either futile, irrelevant or even ridiculous. Wei Wei’s art is the product of a sacrificial life which has been both sustained and given in a hope which refused to be whittled away through months of solitary confinement in Chinese prisons.

 Hope is often mistaken for a kind of naïve dreaming for a perfect world, a perfect future, but it is quite the opposite of this. Hope is grounded in, and shaped by, the hard knocks of experience. It often pays a heavy price for what it gives of itself, but the product in the end is life because hope, as opposed to wishful thinking, continually defies what is dead and decayed. This is the central message of Ai Wei Wei’s work. It is also the task to which our politicians are called.

Whatever we may think of the re-formed Labour party and of Jeremy Corbyn, its newly elect leader, his meteoric rise from relative obscurity to totemic political significance, is the single most hope-filled event to have occurred in British politics in decades. He will, of course, disappoint, not so much because many of his dreams are unrealisable at the present moment, given the global conflagration which this nation is caught up in, but because he will have great difficulty persuading his own party to grasp the hope he is offering.

The Blairites will have to forgo infighting. They will also have to resist engaging in the kind of pragmatic and publicly pugilistic politics which have made so many people, especially the young, cynical about the whole political process. Corbyn himself will have to guard against old allies, now receiving the reward which they have perhaps been promised, from persuading him to slip back into the seductive ways of ‘old labour’, a utopia which never really existed, even for those whose lives it was supposed to transform.

What then is the hope he is offering? I think it is a new and fresh vision of politics itself, but also a vision which is deeply grounded in what Jesus would have described as the Kingdom of Heaven. The politics of the Kingdom, like all politics, are worked out in the shaping of economic policies. There are some Christians who will blanche at this idea. Corbyn’s proposed policies are perhaps a little too compatible with the Gospel, a little too truthful for comfort. They also sound like the kind of Christian Marxism which has been put forward in the past by such as Thomas J. Hagerty and Ernst Block in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, (to name only two), as well as those of Oscar Romero and others who even today are held in US prisons for their Kingdom orientated political convictions. The Chinese government is not the only one to feel threatened by the kind of truths exposed in the art of Ai Wei Wei.

Other Christians will be wary of a return to the kind of socialism which stifles economic creativity and the passing on of earned assets to one’s children. They would fear the consequences of the kind of heavy handed secularism, and the atheism which is often automatically associated with it, which denies our basic humanity and destroys the life of the spirit.

Jeremy Corbyn ought to be able to speak into these fears. With his natural grace, measured responses to questions both friendly and hostile, and with his steadiness of purpose, he could be a Christ figure for the nation, irrespective of his own religious convictions, or lack of them. But he cannot be this alone, because hope is something that has to be continually replenished from outside, as well as from within. For Christians, it comes with the grace of knowing and being known by God, so that they can become ‘God-sent’ people in whatever circumstances they find themselves. They become bearers of hope – and not simply celebrities, and this is particularly important in the context of politics.

If Jeremy Corbyn is called to be a Christ figure to the nation, he will need the faith and the spiritual energy generated by those who will pray for him. An Eritrean refugee was asked not long ago why he wanted to go to the UK. He replied “because it is Great Britain”. The prayer we need right now does not need to involve words, or any kind of  mindset or formal liturgical setting. It needs to be the embodiment of the hope, directed at God, that Jeremy Corbyn will one day make this nation great again.

Prophetic management for the Church in Wales

The Business Directory defines best management practice as follows: ‘Methods or techniques found to be the most effective and practical means in achieving an objective while making the optimum use of the firm’s resources’.

‘Objective’ and ‘resources’ are key managerial words. If the objective is either irrelevant or plain wrong, and if, as a result of this, human gifts are neglected, or deployed in an unimaginative way, there is nothing substantial to manage. As a result, the organisation behaves like an old garment which has been patched with unshrunk cloth.  (Mark 2:21) It comes apart at the seams and the people it is meant to serve suffer the consequences.

Herein lies the problem which the Church in Wales is currently facing. What is its underlying objective? What does the Church mean to itself? What holds it together? (These questions carry a health warning, since answering them fully may take some time and create a major distraction from the current somewhat ad hoc management agenda) What would the Church like to mean for those who come to its doors, both in a literal sense and through how such people see the Church living out its collective life?

None of this is to deny some of the well intended initiatives being implemented within the Church in Wales’s management agenda (grants for church related projects and for new ministry area initiatives, along with renewed public affirmation of lay ministry being two of the most significant) but there is nevertheless the feeling that we are still primarily a clerically managed organisation. Some of my previous blogs on the Church in Wales will remind readers of why a clerically managed Church which is trying to behave like an organisation is not proving popular. So when it comes to best management practice we have a problem as an organisation which is unclear about both its method and its objective. As such, it is a problem about being Church.

The first thing which needs to be faced in this respect is that, on the whole, people who might think of coming to church, possibly for the first time, are not looking to join an organisation, even if they are not sure of quite what it is they are looking for. When their uncertainty is met with a corresponding uncertainty within the Church itself, they sense that the Church is drifting. And they would not be alone in sensing this. The Church is drifting, not only in a material sense but, more importantly, in the sense of its own specific corporate calling. The Church is corporate (and not a corporation) insofar as it is the corpus of Jesus Christ alive in his Spirit.

Early on in his public ministry, Jesus preached a sermon in which he announced his calling and, in so doing, reminded his hearers of theirs. (Luke 4:16-19). He was also reminding them of God’s promise and purpose for them as God’s people. Predictably, they found this so disturbing that they drove him out of town. However, his words were not meant to inflame, at least not in a destructive sense. They were a reminder of what the Church is intended to be, aflame with love for all God’s people. So his words merit being briefly and broadly re-figured and applied to the life of the Church here in Wales:

Jesus is telling his congregation, and all of us, that we are his. So we can read as follows:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. Rise to meet it and be worthy of it because in and with me, you have been anointed to bring good news to the poor. You have been given the grace to be more than yourselves by speaking and living for those you exist to serve, and to succour them in their times of need – whatever the circumstances and whatever it takes. This should  be your primary concern, even if it costs you your status, your stipend or your personal reputation. Any considerations which get in the way of announcing the good news to the poor should be dismissed as irrelevant, if not damaging.

You have been sent in my abiding Spirit to release the captive. Captives include all those whose gifts are ignored (because you either fear or do not value them) or who are excluded or marginalised on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, or of any other consideration. The proclaiming of the good news begins with proclaiming it to each other, as you ensure that none of these practices of mind and heart find a place in your midst. You proclaim the good news first by living it.

You are also to bring recovery of sight to the blind, as you let the oppressed go free. Recovery of sight begins with recovering your own sight. It means seeing yourselves as God sees you, not as you imagine yourselves to be. You are therefore called to be ‘transparent’ to God, in what you say and do, both individually and as the corpus of Christ. The one informs the other. When you become transparent to God, you will become transparent to his truth and righteousness.  Only then will you be able to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, of his loving kindness and mercy, at a time when many people feel very far from him. Such transparency takes courage. 

A nation's shame

Christ separating the sheep from the goats

Judgment, along with the idea of eternal fire and separation from God, is not a particularly fashionable sermon topic these days, except perhaps in the context of certain dubious religious sects. But Jesus speaks of it on a number of occasions and in the starkest terms. In St. Matthew’s gospel we read of a time of sifting and separation between ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ (Matt.23: 31-46).

Goats were the sin-bearers in early Jewish tradition. The animal had the sins of the community symbolically heaped upon it and was then driven out of the town into the wilderness, from which we get the term ‘scapegoat’. 

The scapegoat story from the old testament has left us with some top-heavy theologies of atonement which derive from a deep need to blame someone else for what is wrong with our lives, our relationships and our world. In the old testament, the scapegoat represents a collective need for a retribution which purges rather than forgives. This old covenant theological inheritance was transposed to the cross and remained unquestioned by the Churches for centuries, so contributing to a great deal of psycho-religious illness. [1] 

Such a view of Christ’s atoning action on the cross also skews the way we think about ultimate judgment and the reward or condemnation which is to follow. In the story of the sheep being separated from the goats, we are being shown two classes of human beings, and two qualities which pertain in greater or lesser measure to every person on earth.

Jesus puts it quite simply. There are those who love and who live out their lives, to the best of their ability, in love. They may not think of themselves as Christian. Indeed, as it is told in the story, they are not aware of ever having met Christ. In other words, they make no particular connection between compassionate actions, including compassionate politics, and loving God. In the moment of judgment they are told not to be too concerned about this because their attitude of heart has effectively done all the ‘faith’ work that could ever be needed. They are already in paradise. They are ‘in their element’, which is the element of Love itself.

Ironically, the ‘goats’ who are, figuratively speaking, in the same element, suffer and ‘burn’. This interpretation of the story suggests that the burning fires of hell are not those of hatred, but of love. If you are a person who, for whatever reason, refuses to love, you quite literally ‘burn’. You burn when the pure refining fire of love starts to make itself felt, first as shame, then as what used to be called ‘compunction’ and, finally, as the capitulation of love to Love. So the sheep and goat story is an allegory for the ultimate and eternal judgment which awaits us all with respect to our attitude to refugees.

At present, we as a nation, and the government which we have elected to represent us, should be starting to feel the ‘burning’ of this refining fire of God’s love in regard to our refusal to accept our fair share of refugees and asylum seekers. This, of course, entails obvious risks. Might they not deprive us of our livelihoods – ‘burn’ them perhaps? Become a burden to our social services and health care – ‘burn’ them also? Threaten our ‘way of life’ by ‘burning’ and completely consuming all that is selfish, hypocritical and destructive of life and the human spirit in the love which they will bring? The answer may be ‘yes’ in a small measure to all of these fears because their very presence will ‘judge’, or ‘interrogate’, our common life, so providing the political sifting which this nation, in its shame, so badly needs.

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[1] For more on this see my Making Sense of God’s Love: Atonement and Redemption (SPCK)

Who will teach us?

One of the pushchair wheels is about to fall off. Then she will have to carry him, along with

Getty images

the plastic bag with their remaining bits of food, a couple of clean nappies, a precious toy belonging to her eldest child and what little money she has left. The bag feels as if it might split at any moment. Then she will not have a spare hand for the smallest of her other two children who are already tired. They only got off the train at the Macedonian border half an hour ago. They slept on the train, thank goodness, and so did she – a bit. But they still have a mile to walk and it is blisteringly hot. Some say the guards at the next border will be helpful, but there are widely differing reports about this. They press on.

None of this is imagined. It is simply a logically predictable expansion of about 30 seconds worth of news footage glimpsed last night in the background while the commentary was going on. It represents what is now being called the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war. One woman in a million with a name and a story.

How do our names and our current stories relate to hers? Perhaps our particular circumstances, though different, are in their own way as extreme. So we don’t have much emotional energy left for this woman and for the millions like her. Suffering is just suffering, after all. But if you were walking alongside her on the way to the next European border she would listen to your story, and her suffering, with all which that entails, would meet you in yours. That is perhaps why we need her in our country. Incidentally, she is highly qualified. She is the head teacher of a key school in a Syrian border town.

She also brings a different wisdom, one to which we have grown less accustomed, but which makes us fully human. It is a wisdom which is only acquired through sacrificial love, the love which will leave this woman having to carry a heavy toddler once the pushchair breaks down.

The refugee crisis indicates the extent to which we get our priorities wrong when it comes to the real value of other human beings. We do not understand what makes for the well being of our own communities, still less of our nation which is, after all, made up of human beings all of whom have, in some measure at least, experienced suffering and loss in their lives. On the whole, we seem to be content to be less than human, pressing on, but often in the wrong direction and for the wrong reasons.

Few of us have been refugees or known real persecution. Much of what most of us suffer are things we dare not face about ourselves, including our complicity with the causes of other people’s suffering. These feelings are buried alive somewhere in our deepest collective psyche, waiting for the moment when we learn, or fail to learn, acceptance and forgiveness as individuals and as nations. Who will teach us such a precious lesson if it is not those who have suffered and endured what the woman who is walking from the train to the next border is currently enduring? More specifically, in the case of the UK, who will teach us such things if it is not those whose suffering we are partly responsible for, but who believe enough in our goodness as a nation to want to make a new life here?

On forgiving the dog

Author's photo

This morning I got up to find that our large dog had used my salad bed – the one I keep for newly transplanted seedlings – as a play area. His activities, I realise, have nothing to do with moral decision making, or even with naughtiness. He was simply trying to express the inexpressible – his uncontainable joy. I do not think he knows why he feels as he does, nor does he care. So it is perhaps understandable that he should be puzzled by my somewhat over the top reaction. I am furious with him and tell him so in no uncertain terms. He lopes off, indifferent to my shouting. I have to accept that he will do it again next time the gate is left open.

Acceptance is the essence of forgiveness. Most healthy relationships depend to a certain extent on our acceptance that things happen and will probably happen again, but that does not change the fact that the person or animal is loved. We live, in our dealings with all sentient beings, in an in-between state, between the initial impact of words or actions, both good and bad, and the absorption of that impact into the general stuff of life. Sometimes there has to be an additional outworking, if the damaging word or action is significant enough to merit it. It is a process of acceptance leading to forgiveness.

But in the case of the dog and the lettuce bed, acceptance does not preclude first trying to persuade the animal, by all means possible, short of physical violence, that his action is unacceptable. The difficulty here lies in the fact that he has little sense of rules and boundaries, such things being defined for him almost exclusively by fences and gates. If these are left open, it follows that as far as he is concerned there is no rule preventing him from being where we would rather he didn’t go.

It is also useless to expect him to empathise with one’s emotions. Anger (a rare occurrence) or crossness followed by tactile expressions of love and forgiveness are all that our labradoodle has known when it comes to naughtiness. Love and forgiveness are part of the general stuff of his life which, in relation to us, is either warm, pleasant and well fed, giving rise to a general sense of radiant, and at times over exuberant joy. Or it is ‘not quite right’.

The latter he cannot understand because dogs, no matter how much we anthropomorphise the species, do not have the necessary emotional intelligence to make sense of how they feel, and consequently how they behave, in relation to human beings. In other words, they do not make moral choices, moral choices having to do with the direct impact our words or actions will have on others. Furthermore, and hard as it is for us dog lovers to accept, they probably do not ‘love’ us in quite the way we assume. They are, first and foremost, creatures of habit. Good things should happen at certain times and if they don’t, we are the first to know about it.

 But still we love them as persons in their own right and are grateful to them in ways which are impossible to express, except as a kind of prayer uttered through the tactile affection we have for the dog. Dogs, and all animals whose lot it is to share directly in the lives of human beings, have a particular personhood which is their gift to us. So, given the uncomplicated way we appear to love our dogs, which is in part a projection of their uncomplicated way of expressing their feelings in regard to us, why is it, many would ask, that our relations with human beings cannot be so simple?

Perhaps the answer lies partly in what our expectations are of others and the extent to which we are prepared to give the best of ourselves as human beings (which differs in nature to what animals are able to give) to them irrespective of their words or actions. Giving the best of ourselves consists in being truthful first to ourselves and subsequently in our dealings with others. Again, it is a matter of acceptance, but a far more demanding acceptance than that which we resign ourselves to when it comes to the misdemeanours of dogs, because dogs do not make moral choices.

Human words and actions, even ones which are immature or of which we are only partly aware, involve moral choice. There is always an ‘intent’ of some kind. Conscience, which we all have and which animals do not, although we often relate to them as if they did, ought to tell us the true nature of that intent, including actions and words which may or may not be motivated, in part at least, by what we perceive to be love. We should not limit our love for each other to the way animals ‘love’ us. Our love needs to be worthy of our humanity.

Examining one’s conscience on a daily basis is vital to a healthy emotional life. The purpose of such an exercise is not to induce guilt but to foster wisdom. So it is not just my intent that is being examined. It is also a search for truth and meaning in others. This involves searching for where their intent in any given situation or exchange is really coming from, so that together we can move forward into a new place in our relating with them. In discovering it, and in the movement which follows, lies the forgiveness and the new life which is promised to us in Jesus Christ.

Ambassadors for peace - #iranisgreat

Instagram photo by Sam Cafe 

The best ambassadors are rarely emissaries. They act and speak for themselves. Cristian and Audrey Ivan’s van, which was so clumsily broken into by the police last Monday, is emblazoned with the words ‘Iran is great’. The Ivans speak from experience and the good news emblazoned on their lorry also serves as a salutary reminder not to judge a people by their government.

The Ivan family, who have recently returned from Iran, have found Iranians to be the best of people. They were shown great hospitality and kindness in the towns and villages which they visited and, as a result, have seen in the Iranian people the best of what it means to be human. As a former university chaplain who has known a number of Iranians, I can vouch for the truth of what they say.

Perhaps the family was naïve to think that their van, parked in the centre of London, would not attract attention from a nervous public and an overly conscientious police force doing, after all, what they are paid to do, which is to protect the public from terrorist attacks – and to ask questions later. The officers were over hasty and, so far, there has been no apology forthcoming from the police. But this does not justify the rest of us pointing the finger of righteous indignation at the officers in question, because such instances (and there have been others with fatal consequences) are a vivid manifestation of the cynicism and xenophobia which inhabits our collective consciousness.

Fear has become what we are as a nation and as a society. We sense it in our politicians and it is fed to us on an hourly basis by the media. The Ivan family are great ambassadors for peace because they confront collective fear head-on in the way they are educating their children and in believing in the good which lies somewhere at the heart of every human being, because every human being is made in the image and likeness of a God who is love itself. 

The Ivans' life style suggests that they wish their children to receive the kind of education which will equip them to see the good and the beautiful in others, irrespective of their governments. It would appear that they also wish to affirm a deep desire for global peace which, if we stop to think about it, is what most of us also really want. 

Abuse - Righting the wrongs of history

It seems that another head is about to roll in the ongoing scandal of high profile men accused of the historical abuse of children and women, even though the person in question has yet to be indicted, still less proved guilty. These periodic revelations, whether or not they turn out to be true, affect the way we think about high profile abusers. These men have become totem figures representing all abusers, including those we may have known but still cannot perhaps name, even to ourselves.

Naming and shaming abusers (including those whose cases are still pending) validates the suffering of their victims. Having ones suffering validated is more than a matter of being believed. In cases of historical abuse, finally being believed will probably do little to remove the shame a victim still carries with them. In such cases there is invariably a subtext of one kind or another largely put in place to help others, rather than the victim, come to terms with the truth about the abuse. There is the idea that the abuse took place so long ago, when times and social mores were different. This particular subtext generates a fear of the damage which speaking the truth about historic abuse could do to surviving family members, the same fear which prevented the victim speaking out at the time.

The fear of shaming others, including the abuser, is in turn bound up with the need to prevent other family members knowing the extent of one’s own shame, lest they deliberately or inadvertently add to it. The fear of being shamed in the eyes of family or friends is overlaid with guilt. This includes the guilt the victim might feel about negative feelings towards other family members who may have been complicit in the abuse through wilful ignorance at the time, or through denial in later years. And there is the fear of being called delusional which only adds to the shame. So we have a vicious circle of shame feeding on guilt, producing more shame. For the victim of historic abuse, these feelings coalesce, and are compounded over the years, often with catastrophic results for their relationships.

All of this suggests that we need to think carefully about how the naming and shaming of totemic high profile abusers is done, and just as carefully about how those who cannot name their abusers now feel in the light of these revelations. How can such revelations of historic abuse by high profile figures help all the other anonymous victims on the road to healing?

When it comes to historical abuse, those who have had a Christian upbringing, or have come to faith later in life, may have been conditioned to think of healing as of secondary importance, that it will come about in time. Think of the old adage about time healing all wounds. These victims of abuse will have been conditioned to believe that it is forgiveness which matters most in the eyes of God and that it is therefore their duty to forgive – and forget. This false portrayal of the meaning and purpose of Christian forgiveness is itself a form of abuse. It is  manipulative, designed to make the victim accept the past and whatever damage it is doing to their life in the present, thereby allowing everyone else to feel comfortable in their own ‘forgetting’. The process is so subtle that both the victims and the perpetrators are often unaware of it.

Reconciliation processes between and within nations over the past fifty years have taught us one important lesson with regard to healing and forgiveness, and that is that no one can embark on the process of forgiveness without first having paid attention to their need for healing. In the context of abuse, the need for healing extends to the abuser as well, if that person is still alive, but it is especially needed where damage continues to be done to the victim by the web of untruths which maintained and further contributed to the abusive situation in the first place.

The South African reconciliation process revealed very clearly that forgiveness, and the reconciliation which follows, comes about when truth has been spoken, heard and acknowledged by all parties to the abuse. In the case of historical sexual abuse the reconciliation process should also include recognition of  the damage to a victim’s honour, and hence personhood, which abuse and subsequent cover-ups bring in its wake. It is only when their honour has been restored that the victim will be emotionally strong enough to forgive the wrongs of the past without having to forget them.

This kind of un-forgetting forgiveness allows us to see our abusers as capable of good. Un-forgetting forgiveness enables a certain transparency in our relatedness to others, including those others we only read about in the newspapers. Forgiveness born out of the strength which comes with truthful healing allows us to see, or remember, what is essentially good in that person, and what is true about them. This is the person we shall find ourselves sitting next to at the great feast being prepared for all of us by the God of mercy.

The reality of Christian forgiveness consists in living in joyful acceptance of the outrageous promise of God’s total acceptance of us all, a promise made to victim and abuser alike, in the giving of his Son to the world.