A Threefold Cord

Icon of the Holy Trinity
Andrei Rublev (1370-1430)

‘A threefold cord is not easily broken’ writes the sage, Qoheleth, author of the book of Ecclesiastes, a book full of impenetrable conundrums, tensions and contradictions. Much of what he writes resonates with despair and a general sense of the futility of human existence. Qoheleth is a prophet of doom. Or perhaps he is only that kind of prophet insofar as he is a teller of fables.

 Fables must strike fear if they are to convince. Hence, the nightmarish depictions of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19^th century psychiatrist and author of Struwwelpeter, and the fate of Conrad, the ‘little suck-a-thumb’ who falls prey to the ‘great long-legged scissorman’. Also, the morality tales of La Fontaine; Qoheleth would have approved of La Fontaine’s tale of the vain fox who lost his luscious piece of cheese by succumbing to flattery.

Qoheleth is concerned, for the most part, with the falling apart of social and moral infrastructure and with a society’s falling away from God. But he also writes as an individual, for other individuals. So he is a prophet for our times. We live in an individualistic age, where the right of the individual has, for a couple of decades at least, ruled over the considerations of the needs and interests of the ‘other’. These days, individuals who sense that other individuals are claiming the same rights as themselves have also sensed a certain safety in numbers. What we are seeing as the relentless ascendance of the far right in Europe and America is the product of this solidarity of self interest.

We also love brinkmanship and being taken to the threshold in both fiction and television drama, and, more worryingly, in politics and international affairs. News is now documentary drama, preceded, more often than not, by health warnings. Perhaps we are still a little in thrall to Struwwelpeter and, for all our declared freedom of the individual, also slightly in thrall to the vicarious thrill of stern religion. Religious fundamentalisms are invariably coloured with a vermilion streak of violence which can be disturbingly seductive.

This ostensibly religious violence, and the fascination which it holds for a growing number of people (even, one suspects, if they are not themselves overtly religious) also translates into the dangerous ideologies of certain political strongholds, both here and abroad. Religion and politics, when corrupted, make for a dangerously potent mixture. In some cases, there is an almost erotic appeal to the more extreme collective manifestations which it releases. Think only of the recent displays of military and nuclear egocentricity in North Korea, the modern equivalent of Emperor worship.

To state that both religion and politics are prey to corruption is to state the obvious. What is perhaps less obvious is the fact that a serious battle for the ultimate good to prevail in all religions, and in politics, is being fought from the centre ground, both theologically and spiritually. While these two disciplines should, and often do, work together, it is the spiritual which concerns most people, even if they do not consider themselves to be particularly religious. There is a sense that something else is going on ‘out there’ at a more ‘abstract’ level, whatever you happen to believe about God.

Trinity Sunday invites Christians to consider what they really believe about God and, by implication, what they believe their religion should be for the world. But what Christians often fail to pick up on, as they say the Creed on Trinity Sunday, is that belief alone is fairly ineffectual when it comes to facing down religious and political extremism. In fact it can cause religion itself to become toxic. Like any organism deprived of light or oxygen, belief needs the nutrients which come with head-heart thinking if it is to mature into what we call faith. It needs to be informed by intelligent love.

Perhaps this is where the doctrine of the Trinity is helpful, both for Christians and for anyone trying to make sense of religion and of its place in the world of today. The Trinity is a depiction of intelligent love. It is the love of three ‘persons’ constantly renewed and energised within the one ‘substance’. It is not about three divine individuals with a shared common interest.

Christians, and those of other faiths, might say that human beings need to think of themselves and others as made in the image and likeness of God. The Trinity invites us, as persons, to see ourselves as caught up in the dynamic energy of that love. We are caught up in God himself. This is the  love which brings life in its fullest sense to all human beings and which renews the face of the earth. Standing against religious and political fundamentalisms begins with being prepared to ‘stand’ in that love, bound up in the three-fold cord of the Trinity, whatever the cost to the individual.

Where Shall Wisdom Come From?

I missed an old friend’s funeral last week. I got the day wrong. Someone kindly sent me a copy of the service, but it was not the same. It is hard to share in something that has already happened, especially when the deceased person has had a hand in shaping it. My friend had composed his own funeral service so, in a sense, he would have been very much present to it. I miss not having shared in the first few hours of his greater life, and of our collective loss. Loss needs to be shared, and liturgy, any liturgy, needs to be spoken or sung in company if it is to realise its purpose. Funerals are a time for realising a shared loss and, in doing so, bear some of the grief which those who are closest to the person are experiencing. This helps everyone to bear their particular private loss. We are only fully human when we own our grief and joy together.

Perhaps this is also true of a nation’s sense of loss, the kind of loss which is felt as a political vacuum, and which comes with a growing anxiety about absence of vision and leadership in government. The outcome of recent elections suggests that we are a nation floundering in a sea of uncertainty, grasping at the delusory straws of what seems better and safer but which, in regard to Europe, history has shown will surely lead to more division and uncertainty. A Europe divided against itself runs the risk of self destruction, or of being destroyed by others.

As a nation, we are going through a period of collective anxiety about who we are in relation to others. In the UK, this applies as much to our own internal politics as it does to where we stand in regard to our European neighbours. We are full of divisive self doubt. It is this uncertainty and self doubt which is particularly hard to bear in the weeks approaching the referendum vote. Nobody knows what our nation will feel like on the morning of June 24^th , but whatever the outcome, all of us will be anxious. If the Brexit vote wins, its supporters will quickly realise that we will not be returning to an idealised past shaped by national sovereignty and a vague sense of a return to greatness. We will be facing an uncertain future.

If we stay in Europe there is bridge-building to be done, but do we have the political will to do it? And, given that in a democracy nations get the leaders they deserve, have we elected leaders who represent the best in us, and who are thereby capable and confident enough to do the rebuilding and to take that work forward into the European Union itself?

We also share in another nation’s anxiety, as it waits for its presidential election in which we sincerely hope that wisdom will ultimately prevail. In all of these situations, we need to hold together, wanting the best while facing the very real possibility of the worst outcome. This was the spirit which prevailed during the last world war, when Europe and America held together in the best way and for the best reasons. We are facing something comparable today.

Nations are made up of human beings, not of political parties or corporate vested interests, which is something politicians and war-makers seem to forget. Wanting the best for nations is not the same thing as wanting the quickest short term corporate profit, or opting for short term solutions to long-term historical problems (the root cause of mass migration, for example) whatever the human cost. Solidarity between nations does not automatically spell profit, especially if that profit comes at the expense of those not able to pay for health care and for the care and compassion to which they have a right in their declining years. On the whole, short-termism, profit and commercial solidarity do not make for  human compassion or for social justice. They make for anxiety and ultimate social disintegration. So ‘Why should fools have a price in hand to buy wisdom, when they have no mind to learn?’ (Prov. 17:16) TTIP is not a good idea.

So ‘Where shall wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? It cannot be gotten for gold, and silver cannot be weighed out as its price’ writes the prophet, Job. This is the kind of wisdom and understanding which comes with the gentleness and vision needed to hold a nation together in its anxiety, as we hold together in our separate losses. We do this formerly, through liturgies and acts of collective worship, but we also do it privately, through prayer, in which we sense our personal anxiety and fear for the future as part of a nation’s need for stability and peace, holding it all in the embrace of God. This is the wisdom which is needed in government. It will also be needed by all who vote on the 23^rd of June and in the American presidential elections. 

Preparing to configure

telegraph.co.uk

Robotics are the next big thing. According to Bill Gates, they will allow us to access all sorts of aids to living, or apps, which we barely dream of. The trouble starts when the apps become indispensible and then go wrong, as we learn when people’s computers are held to ransom by fraudulent individuals who appear to be operating beyond the reaches of the law for much of the time.

Back in the seventies people were imagining, quite confidently, the day when trying to prevent the robot from continuing to make your bed while you were still in it would be a commonplace morning mishap. Now, it is reckoned that by 2045 artificial intelligence will be on a par with what we currently take for granted as human intelligence, just in time for many of us who will be in 'care' homes by then to be tended by such realistic beings as 'Nadine', a product of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. 

Looking at the bigger picture, if such an artificial intelligence, mathematically configured, were to run away with itself, we could be forgiven for wondering what it would feel like to be caught up in the global equivalent of an infinite version of the bed-making scenario. But perhaps, given the present level of global conflict and what it is doing to the planet, we will have done something worse to ourselves long before the robots take over. On the other hand, they might come to the rescue, once their intelligence overtakes ours, and if we survive that long.

Whether or not we survive the intervention of the robots will depend on the resilience of the human spirit. The increasing commodification of learning, at the expense of art, music, poetic imagination and a compassionate and wise teaching of religion, will ultimately do irretrievable damage to the human spirit, and consequently to the human person, so it should not take the robots long to overtake us. Once the spirit is defeated artificial intelligence will have free reign. There will be no more disturbing moral questions for us to address together in the fellowship of our shared humanity, only programmed ones, selected to enhance the efficacy of the system through the constrained autonomy of the pre-programmed individual.

Human intelligence is shaped from within the human spirit for better or for worse. Unless righteousness, compassion and the will for genuine peace can be programmed into artificial intelligence in such a way as to allow these essential virtues to grow exponentially with the developing robotic functional intelligence, it is hard to imagine what the world will look and feel like beyond 2045. What kind of uniform preconfigured politics will reshape the way we make moral decisions? and what will we yearn for, if anything? How do you program righteousness? How do you program hope?

It is the human spirit which yearns for righteousness, in other words for God’s own justice and loving kindness, but if that God-ward yearning has been factored out of the artificial mind, will we even know that this has happened? And will it matter? I think it is the last element of this postulated scenario which is most chilling – that the question of humanity’s belonging to a loving God will simply not matter. Hope will have been effaced in a single stroke, or minor equation perhaps.

There are parts of the UK where Polish immigrants are the new life blood of their local Catholic church. For them, the Christian faith is a life-sustaining continuum. In it, they carry their history, their sense of their humanity and their hope for the future. They wonder how it is that British people seem to have forgotten God. Perhaps they have something to teach us.

Hope and Glory

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, but the Churches have yet to agree where it belongs on the calendar. Perhaps this somewhat ludicrous difference is a kind of prophetic blessing. The ‘postponement’ of Easter on certain Church calendars reminds us that Christians can live with at least some differences. Our household postponed its own Easter celebrations – those which involve hunting for chocolate across several acres of soggy terrain, eating quantities of Easter cake with homemade marzipan (so much better than the shop stuff), and lamb not done the traditional way, for once, but spiced and slow cooked Ottolenghi style. We postponed all this because we had church commitments, as did our friends who came to stay with us.

Having taken the Good Friday service, and with Easter Sunday yet to come, I was particularly glad of the emotional space provided by Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday provides a chance to find our equilibrium in the context of the emotional swing which hurls us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday provides time to prepare for Easter Sunday without having to shop and cook at the same time. The preparation on Holy Saturday corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath, so we can also think of the women who had earlier prepared spices with which to anoint the body of the Lord once the Sabbath had passed. We need a Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not just to shop, cook and prepare the egg hunt, but to make sense of where the Church and our society stands in this ‘in between time’, in relation to the Easter event itself.

The Saturday space, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, allows us to think of the world in the light of how all things will be when Christ comes again. I have long felt that Holy Saturday is better suited for ‘end time’ reflection than the Sundays preceding Advent. There is a sense of Christ’s absence about it which invites thought about how he will return ‘in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Christian creed puts it. This sense of absence is important. It gives us time to bring the suffering and dying of Christ into the light of his rising again and, in so doing, try to make sense of the world through the prism of these events.

Tradition holds that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell. While his descent might also be construed in his words of desolation and abandonment spoken from the Cross, he also descended into hell later, as the creeds declare, in order to grasp poor, despairing Judas by the hand and to offer him the kiss of peace in return for his kiss of betrayal. The hope offered to us by God in Jesus would not be hope if it did not travel beyond the reaches of despair.

While we were having supper on one of the evenings when are friends were with us, conversation turned to politics. We were generally agreed about one thing, and that is that the world is a pretty grim place and that it is hard to see where it will all end. Various end time scenarios were postulated, but that was about as far as the conversation was going to take us, until our youngest guest (aged 11) took us to task. What, she asked, did we think we were about? Had we nothing better to offer her generation than a generalised imminent doom scenario? What was she supposed to make of such talk?

Our young guest was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with an abrupt change of subject, or with being told not to worry her pretty head about such things, as if all would be well in the end. So we had to pick up where we had left off and posit something like believable hope. The conversation did not last much longer, but it did invite us to consider in our own minds how such hope, or the lack of it, relates to the kind of despair which Jesus experienced on the Cross and from which he later rescued Adam (the symbol of our humanity) and Judas.

The hope offered to the world in the risen Christ is not like any other kind of hope. It does not depend on vague belief in God, or on vague belief in anything. It is not a straw to be clutched at. Hope lives in the worst imaginable scenarios, past, present and future, and in any degree of despair in the life of any one human being. It is the hope of glory.

Glory pertains only to God. All other forms of glory, and the seductive and temporal power which they bring, are a poor imitation of the glory which pertains to God alone. The delusional desire for this counterfeit glory, and the seductive nature of power itself, accounts for the scarcity of true leadership in the world and in the Church of today. But hope sustains the human spirit because it proceeds from the glory of the ongoing life of the risen Christ. This is the Christ who speaks into the empty politics of the world and of the Church, as he spoke to the grieving woman who had brought spices with which to anoint the body of the one she loved, and found an empty tomb. 

Passiontide 2016 - Seeing you

Betrayal is anachronistic. It is all about lies, and yet at the heart of the moment lies a kind of truth. Whatever form betrayal takes, the person being betrayed experiences something like shame – naked exposure, perhaps. In the moment of betrayal that person is defenceless, without ‘cover’ of any kind. They look and feel foolish because they have trusted. It is their own trust which makes them feel defenceless and ashamed as much as the act of betrayal itself.

The one betraying, whatever their reason for doing so, must justify the lies involved and the pain caused by more lies. They must justify it to themselves, so that the betrayal seems in some way ‘necessary’ and therefore not of their choosing. ‘I had to do it’ they will say. ‘I had no choice’. Apart from justifying the moment, or the act, they must maintain their integrity, at least to themselves by distancing themselves from any direct responsibility for the damage they have done, and thereby exonerating themselves from being held in any way accountable for it.

All of this is the stuff of politics, of international relations, of the life of the Church and of our own experiences of betrayal, as victim or perpetrator. One could say that it is a universal principle, but it is also complex. Take, for example, corruption or betrayal in institutions whose integrity we need to take for granted, we need to trust; the fiddling of party election expenses (and in some countries the election process itself), police pay-offs for saying nothing in the context of organised crime relating to the grooming of young people for sex, the treatment of people held in police custody (especially if they are black), the power games and personal betrayals (both public and private) of government, sexual exploitation and cover up by the institutional Church along with the countless glossed over betrayals of loyal and faithful clergy who have served it in good faith, often for years.

Betrayal leaves us dealing with truths we would perhaps rather not face because in the moment of betrayal we see ourselves and others differently. Two such moments occur within a very short space of time in the final hours of the life of Jesus. Neither came as a surprise, but that did not make the betrayal easier to bear. The first took place in a garden at night where one of his own friends shopped him to the religious police. His friend identified him with a kiss.

Betrayal so often comes masquerading as love. ‘I did this or said that because I love you.’ Or ‘I behaved in that way, but you know I really love you.’ Both are lies, of course. We do not harm others because we love them, no matter how justifiable the action may seem to be at the time. We do not abuse trust by exposing another to pain.

Judas was trying to force Jesus’s hand politically. He was prepared to take the risk of his suffering (which Judas may have imagined would somehow be averted at the last minute) to turn Jesus into what he ‘should’ have been. It was about control and manipulation. The control or manipulation of others, especially those who trust us, is always betrayal. In the moment of the kiss Judas knows that Jesus also knows the truth of the situation, and the truth about Judas. He has known it for a long time in allowing Judas to be what he was, a pilferer of the common purse who had his priorities all wrong. 

Then there was the incident in the courtyard later that night, or possibly early the next morning. Peter, nicknamed ‘the rock’, the one who could be trusted, denies ever having known his closest friend. This moment, held in the meeting of their eyes as the cockerel crowed for the third time, also held every lie that has ever been told for the sake of saving one’s own life or reputation at the expense of the life or reputation of another.

The two moments I have just described are seminal. They are the soil in which the reversal of all betrayals germinates and takes root. Both reveal divine love at its source. They also reveal what that love looks and feels like. It looks like vulnerability and trust. In these two moments Jesus invites us not to look away, not to hide from our betrayals, or from the lies we have lived with for years, but to look quietly and bravely into his eyes, not asking for anything, but simply allowing ourselves to be seen. The rest will follow.

Passiontide 2016 - The point

Having got this far without whatever it is we have decided to forgo these past few weeks, we may now realise that we didn’t need it all that much in the first place. We may no longer even like it, as I discovered ten years ago with sugar on grapefruit.

Two things emerge from this; first, that with the exception of serious addiction, getting a grip on a habit or familiar comfort food isn’t that arduous an undertaking, once we get used to the idea, and, second, that not having it has bought us a certain freedom. The freedom comes in two shapes. We will be free in respect to resuming the habit or food (come Easter day) but it will not have mastery over us, and we will be free to choose what we really want – which may only amount to some other comfort food or habit to replace the one we gave up for Lent.

The trouble with this kind of freedom is that it deceives us into yet another variation on the guilt theme; if it was that easy to give up chocolate, why did we not do something much more demanding and difficult (as well as giving up chocolate)? Herein lies another great deception. We are deceived into thinking that nothing we have done in the way of self control, or even of prayer, adds up to anything and that we are as rotten as we ever were on the morning of Ash Wednesday, and will ever remain so. From this follows the question "So what’s the point?" The answer to this question is quite simple: There isn’t a ‘point’. Lent does not have a quantifiable point. It is not about achieving goals. Rather, it is about a different kind of freedom, freedom bestowed in failure and non-achievement.

By now, we may just begin to realise that whatever has been ‘achieved’ with regard to habits and food foregone during Lent, has done nothing to make us nicer or more holy people. This suggests that the most we can expect of Lent is coming to terms with who and what we really are. Having done this, we will begin to realise that the purpose of Lent lies in freeing us into a place where we can ask ourselves, without fear or shame, what it is we really want.

As we move towards Holy Week we begin to allow this life-determining question to be framed, or held, by the tortured Christ stumbling towards the place of his execution. Who is he? And what does he want? What makes him do it? What is the point?

Again, there is no ‘point’, except that the event of his death, and this particular moment of stumbling agony, is also God’s answer to our own question. It is God’s total identification with our failed efforts and distorted perceptions of ourselves. Some of these have been imposed by other people and all of them invariably lead to more ill perceived ‘failure’, so we are left with the reality of an endless cycle of failure and self recrimination. It is the shape of our life.

So what do we really want? Our inability to even consider this question, let alone try to answer it, can lead to the hopelessness which only addiction can assuage, addiction to work, to violent or dysfunctional relationships, to youth and beauty. For the time being, these addictions counter despair, the despair which comes with being in captivity to material things like achievement, or to a self-created persona, and to all kinds of falsehood. These have mastery over us. They also embody the chronic loneliness from which we hide through addiction and ‘comfort’ food.

So the ‘point’ for Jesus lies in meeting us in the secrecy of our loneliness and of our various ways of being in denial about who we are and what we really want. He stumbles along with us in all these states of mind and heart, including whatever our despair tempts us to do in any one moment. Whatever we try to do or become during Lent only serves as a reminder of this central truth. 

Lent 2016 - Not in control

As I walk the fields around my house on this clear, cold and stunningly beautiful afternoon, I am reminded that God promises to those who love him something like the joy I am experiencing. I also know, as I watch the doggish joy of our Labradoodle who is hurtling towards the bushes at the far end of the field, where squirrels are bound to be, that this joy is universal. Somehow, the dog, in his doggishness, experiences the joy implicit in the promise made to those who love God; ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived’ (1Cor.2:9)

I also know that others walking these fields may have quite different feelings, feelings which have nothing to do with joy. This knowledge concerns me, because the situation seems unfair. Loving God is, after all, a gift in itself, and God, we are told, does not have favourites. So how is it that some can soar to such heights of joy in the seeming ordinariness of walking a dog while others may remain indifferent to the moment, or are simply burdened by sadness? I have known such sadness myself when walking the fields, sadness attributable to life, the state of the world, or to nothing in particular. I have tried to be joyful in these moments and failed. Mindful of the suffering of millions, I have also tried to be less joyful in those other moments. Again, I have failed.

All of this pertains to the way we think about Lent. Is Lent a season which permits joy? Or is it one for moderating our response to the blessings of life? Many of us tend to do the latter for much of the time, because we like to be taken seriously and serious people do not run down hills exulting in the joy of the moment.

I think there is something almost blasphemous in refusing joy, and in the idea that joy is somehow unseemly in Lent, because joy is of God himself. To be joyful is to allow ourselves to be taken out of the emotional straight jacket we wear for much of the time so that our constricted selves can be blessed by the love of God. To refuse such moments amounts to telling God that we know what is best for us better than God does.  Such knowledge, and the will to implement it, amounts to what used to be known as pride, another of the cardinal sins, for which see a previous blog post.

Pride is about control, the control of other people or animals, and the unforgiving self control which tells us that we can manage our own salvation. The salvation offered to us by God in Christ consists in the freedom to be joyful. It is almost a condition for salvation itself. We are to ‘rejoice in the Lord always’ (Phil.4:4). Rejoicing in the Lord will inevitably involve loss of control, or the surrendering of what we think will make others, including God, take us seriously.

Here, there is a paradox. It lies in the Cross, which was the most serious event in all time but which consisted in God allowing himself to be shamed, to be not taken seriously. In the Cross and in its shame, we are taken seriously as the flawed and fragile human beings that we really are, human beings who believe that their fragility and imperfection can be strengthened or remedied through the kind of self control which makes us resistant to forgiveness.

The need to control stems from the fear of being forgiven. Forgiveness brings freedom from old ways of thinking about life, about other human beings and about God. It frees us into new and wide open spaces, in which we see the world and creation in a new way. It is a cause for joy.