Aloneness

Source: twitter.com

‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the once popular ad. Today, its haunting ambiguity lingers on, inviting reflection on the sociality of the human condition, or the lack of it. Can we, or should we, seek to be alone? Does being alone invariably mean we are lonely? Or is being alone our natural state? After all, we are born alone and we ultimately die alone. In the moment of death we return to that primal moment of separation from whatever it is that we have come from, both physical and spiritual. The last sound we make in this life will be an echo of the primal cry of birth, a cry of protest shaped by desire for something left behind, for some other being. We protest in the face of our aloneness in death as in birth.

To be alone is not necessarily to be lonely, although it is often thought of in that way. To be truly alone is to embrace solitude. Solitude is necessary for human health whereas loneliness destroys the human spirit.

To experience loneliness, a person needs to have known what it is to be left to themselves before they have come to know their true self, as can happen with rejection in childhood. The abandoned child will have left a great part of themselves in the place from which they have been banished and perhaps with the person who has rejected them. Bereavement in early childhood can also be felt as abandonment or rejection, leaving that person feeling inwardly naked and often angry.  Lonely people are vulnerable because they go through life in a state of inner nakedness – as naked souls, perhaps.

Loneliness is never chosen. But solitude must be chosen and then learned. It is a free choice. Unlike loneliness, it does not impose itself and it never cheats those who embrace it. It never cheats them of the joy it promises. It is always its own reward.

Making the jump from aloneness, and the loneliness associated with it, to the kind of solitude in which life gestates and yields creativity in the true sense of the word is not something achieved through will power. Neither can we try to effect solitude, because we are curious to know what it is like to experience some sort of higher spiritual state. Solitude is not about being in a higher state. It is about acceptance of the present moment in the full knowledge that it is as it is, and in the expectation that it is also something deeper and greater. Solitude allows the moment to be inhabited by Love itself, a Love which re-clothes us in the nakedness of our loneliness.

Since solitude is not chosen and yet never fails to deliver what it promises, it is essential that a person simultaneously seeks and waits for solitude to come to them, that they wait for it to happen. This is a question of disponibilité, to borrow from the French philosopher Simone Weil. To be disponible is to be fully available, permanently ‘on call’ to the one who promises. It is a state of mind and heart which can take a lifetime to reach, especially if a person has experienced real loneliness and depression. For one thing, someone who has known the kind of loneliness which comes with emotional banishment is often distrustful of what might seem to be a ‘self help’ method for depression, especially if there is a religious tinge to it. They do not trust religion or its methods. Depression is, among other things, an acute state of vulnerability and abandonment, possibly including a sense of having been abandoned by God.

Re-generative and transforming solitude does not come about through self-enforced loneliness, in the belief that we are dealing with our depression without the need for outside help. It comes about as a gift in its own right. It is the antidote to the causes of depression, although it will not cure depression itself. Depression, we are learning, is a chemical disorder as much as an emotional one and needs to be treated accordingly.

The gift which comes with solitude simply makes it possible for the one suffering from depression, and the loneliness it brings, to step outside that particular state of mind and view it objectively as something other than themselves. Their true self remains inviolate waiting for the gift which solitude brings. So solitude involves being available to having something given to us which is both unconditional and life-transforming.

Solitude changes the way we see things and people. It places them within a wider framework, one which can usefully be seen as having been constructed around them, like a picture surrounded by a frame. This conceptual framework contains us, and our situation in regard to them, as it would a painting. It allows us to see things as they are in the general scheme of things. When we see a person in that ordered context it sometimes becomes possible to meet them in a new and different way and hence to forgive them if we need to.

 People who have hurt us are not integral to who we are. Neither are they part of our loneliness. They exist on their own. They have their particular pain and responsibilities in regard to themselves and others. The gift which comes with solitude makes it possible for us to see such people objectively, and eventually to forgive them without feeling that in so doing we have allowed them to expose us once again in our naked vulnerability.

Instead, we are vulnerable to Love itself, which is not the same thing as saying that we become prey to our emotions, seeing ourselves and others through the mist of our own indulgent tears. The riches of solitude are the riches of Love incarnate, love which is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, hard, tough and resilient. It is love as we see and know it in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Goodness

Yesterday, I was told about a sudden and unexpected family

'The Lady in the Van' Independent.co.uk

reconciliation. It stayed with me all day. Later, I watched the early evening news and then an excellent film, The Lady in the Van – Maggi Smith at her best. The film was about goodness, as was my friend’s story. Both were good news in the fullest sense. They held, or contained, the events of the day. They held them together.

My friend’s story was a quiet interruption of the treadmill rhythm of world events, the continual downward thrust of life. The same is true of the story about the man who took in the van lady, in the film – and also in real life. Both are an interruption of the normal course of events. In each of these situations something good is working into the less good aspects of human nature, and thus of life as we know it.

This good must be energised by something or someone, in order for it to work. Something must enliven it, like the goodness of the created world, whatever scientists may say about the universe creating itself out of nothing. Goodness is not a created thing. It simply is. It works in the immediacy of the moment.

Something that works must have a purpose. Goodness is worked as love, which is its purpose. This is not to say that it has demonstrable reasons for working, especially in situations where goodness seems unwarranted and therefore incomprehensible to most of us. The neighbours in the film, all good people in their way, did not know how to respond to unwarranted goodness, goodness which goes beyond ‘doing the right thing’.

Goodness proceeds from something, or someone, greater than the person who is doing good to someone else. It effects a transformation. A single good act done without duplicity, or kind word spoken sincerely, effects permanent change, even if its permanence seems hard to believe in at times. Its effect does not even depend on another person’s willingness to receive it. Neither does it wait on gratitude. It is unconditional.  Goodness, or caring, as Alan Bennet tells the social worker, is about dirt, to put it politely. Or, as seems the case with the family I was told about, something which comes under the heading of revelation, a moment of truth or understanding about the way things really are.

This suggests that goodness derives from some form of original truth. Something is given which enables someone to recognise that another person or situation is in need of unalloyed goodness.  Recognising this need can take a person unawares. It effects change in the most cynical mindset. Perhaps goodness, and the change it effects in both giver and receiver, has to do with prevenient grace, the goodness lying dormant in people, the God-shaped space in their inner being.

Perhaps the good person understands at depth the reality of that grace, or re-creative goodness, which also lies waiting in the mind or heart of the suffering or angry person. They sense that it is there, waiting to be touched into life and transformed by the author of all goodness, through whatever they are about to do or say to that person.

At the same time, the purpose of any good act or kind word can also be obscured by the sometimes pre-conceived view of the person saying it. Good people are not always likeable – think of the whisky priest in Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory. Good people seldom think of themselves as good, especially when being good takes them way over their tolerance threshold for ‘doing the right thing’.

The purpose of goodness is to bring ‘life in all its fullness’ to others, or to awaken them to what they are missing when grace, as it is sourced in Love, is refused or ignored. This was the purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Authority of Silence

A political vacuum is dangerous. In the context of the American elections, the vacuum is not simply an empty space waiting to be filled by the person most adept at grabbing power. It is an empty space waiting to be filled by whatever that person is. Presidents are generally

source: blogs.wsj.com

remembered more for what they were than for what they did. Political power, especially in America, depends to a great extent on personal charisma and the chimera it projects and, as we are seeing in the current election debates, chimera, rather than considered argument, produces instantaneous, if short-lived, effects on an audience which wants to believe what it has been persuaded that it is seeing on the podium – not who it is really seeing. The power hungry persona fuses with the face of that person as potential leader, so that it is hard to tell the difference between the two. This is why many of us are willing the American people not to succumb to the momentary and ephemeral taste of power at the cost of making a politically inexperienced narcissist the most powerful person on earth – which is what he dreams of becoming.

To will something to the good is not a purely mental discipline, if only for the fact that no single individual or group has that kind of ‘will’ power. It is also the reason why so much that passes for faith healing, and which ends in failure or is proved to be fraudulent, is confused with the kind of ‘willing’ which we call prayer, and which transforms people or transfigures the way things are seen by all interested parties. This is the kind of transformation and enlightened vision which we urgently need to take effect in the politics of today, in America and elsewhere, and it is the duty of every person of faith to enter into this work.

The transformation of politics, in both secular and religious contexts, will come about not by concentration of the mind but by our becoming the means for God’s grace to inhabit the political and spiritual vacuums of these times. We do this by being fully present to God in our own emptiness. Our emptiness is not a vacuum. It is the stillness of our inner silence in which we know God.

Stillness and inner silence enable us to be present and attentive to the American presidential election, to all the people caught up in the debates, to the rhetoric which both enmeshes and confuses them, to the duplicity and sheer nastiness of politics in both the world and the Church, and to where we may sense a possibility for goodness. It is about allowing all these things to inhabit our inner space without allowing them to overwhelm us.

Our inner space is the default position to which we return moment by moment in the waking day, and it is where we meet Christ. We are not overwhelmed by the people and situations which we draw into this space because the abiding Spirit of Christ is already there to meet them. Our task is simply to return them to him.

The task of returning brings with it a certain authority, which is not the same as power. Power disfigures the human heart and blinds all possible vision because it is driven by human greed and egocentricity. It is something to be taken, often from others. Unlike power, true authority is never grasped or clung to. It is always given. Those who receive authority will relinquish it if the Giver requires it to be returned. Hence, true authority is always exercised in open handed, and open hearted, freedom. The people who have true authority will often be seen as a threat to those who simply want power.

In the moment of ‘returning’ ourselves and others to the Christ who inhabits our inner space, we are given authority to enter into the work of peace building. So ‘returning’ is  crucial to halting the global turmoil which we are currently witnessing and to ultimately transforming it. To return does not mean to escape from. We do not return to our own private space and hide from the world. Our space belongs to all who suffer or are deluded by the blandishments of those who want power over them. In the moment of returning to Christ we are also returning to him the victims of the powerful, including those we ourselves may have victimised if we have been powerful. The moment of returning others to Christ is a moment of the most profound love any human being is capable of. It is a moment of transformative grace.

This is why the word ‘return’ is also used to mean repentance. When we ‘return’ the politics of North America, or the war in Syria, or the horrific abuse of women both at home and abroad, to our inner space, we are repenting with them, for their situation and on their behalf.  In our inner silent space, and for this ‘returning’ to be possible, we are given the authority to work simultaneously on multiple time trajectories, the present moment, the immediate and historic past, the immediate future in which a child’s life may be hanging in the balance in a bombed out hospital in Aleppo, and the longer term future of the world and of the Church, both historic and eternal. On all these time planes we are given the authority to enter into God’s own transformative work, provided we do not allow our inner silence to be overwhelmed by the noise of a world in turmoil. 

The Grammar of Education

Latin has a way of sticking to you, if you learned it at school. Far from being a dead

Source: theguardian.com

language, at least in the minds of those who have particularly unhappy associations with the context in which they were taught, it is very much alive. For one thing, it has shaped a good deal of the English which we still speak, as well as the more classical Latinate languages like Spanish and Italian. Bits of it can also remain lodged in our consciousness in their original form.

Take, for example, the two cognate verbs, dicere and ducere. Conjugating them in parallel, as we were taught to do as an aide memoire, makes a pleasing jingle – dico, dicere, dixi, dictus alongside duco, ducere, duxi, ductus – if I remember rightly. The first, ‘dico’, means ‘to say, tell, speak, or name’ and sits neatly alongside the second, meaning ‘to lead, consider, or regard’. The word ducere is the root from which is derived the word ‘education’ and it resonates with, or perhaps evokes, the meaning of dicere. In other words the two are not only cognate but, in a sense, inseparable.

People are educated, in the early stages of schooling, by being ‘told’ things, by having them ‘named’. But this is only a means to an end. The purpose of education is not simply that a person should absorb enough information to pass a test, or later to qualify them for a job, but that they should use what information they absorb in their early years, as well as what is learned later in life, to inform the way they ‘regard’ the world, other people and themselves, or how, in whatever capacity they find themselves in, they ‘lead’ it.

Consider the current debate over a return to grammar schools. Is it really a return? I am not an expert in the field, but I would have thought that it is difficult, if not impossible, to return to the way things were done in former times when it comes to education, or even to how we structure the school system itself. We were ‘told’ things differently in those former times and there was a great deal less to tell, or else it was told wrongly, in the light of advances that have been made in virtually all the academic disciplines. Society functioned differently too. As a result, and with the wisdom of hindsight, we are now aware of the sociological effects of creaming off talent, both for those who might find themselves in the new grammar schools and those who will not.

It would be interesting to know if people sense the same kind of social limitations where the best sporting or musical talent has been creamed off. Do the ‘not so goods’ who are left behind feel more motivated? Do the talented who have been creamed off feel a sense of partial isolation? 

Good independent schools often model what society ought to look like, as do good comprehensives, because the achievement emphasis is less on streaming, or creaming off, and more on building the individual’s confidence as a person who is part of a community which is being educated, in the fullest sense, to be the society of the future. They are ‘told’ in order that they may ‘regard’ the world and others with greater wisdom, or at least that is what we wish were happening.

Would it not be better then, in sport, as well as in the classroom, if the gifted were taught to ‘consider’ or ‘regard’ those less gifted as being themselves a gift? Imagine if all faith schools were taught that those of other faiths, or none, were the most precious of God’s gifts to the rest of humanity. In this ideal community all would be educators, preparing themselves and others to realise their gifts, as and when they emerged, in such a way as to bring hope and healing to society. It sounds like the kingdom of Heaven for which we are taught to pray; that it might come about in the here and now.

The Issue at Stake

‘Poore man, thou searchest round to find out death, but missest life at hand.’ Writes George Herbert in his poem Vanitie. But even the poet needs language. Poets need language for their own ‘searching round’ to establish the truth of things, a recognisable meaning which poet and reader can discover together. But language changes with time, as new meanings, and often the social mores which shape them, emerge.

Some would say that the English language (and possibly others too) has been impoverished by twitter, instagram (along with its lookalikes) and the smart phone. These have, of necessity, had to make a language of their own in order to save space, time and money. The same often goes for journalistic and academic writing. The acronym rules, the assumption being that everyone knows, or will remember, what the series of capital letters stands for. The reader supposedly fills in the missing letters and knows at once who or what is being referred to. The same goes for texting and abbreviated twitter posts. You ‘get’ the meaning– or perhaps you don’t.

What is left unsaid can hold a wealth of meaning. This usually happens when a word which could be translated in a number of ways has no complementary word or phrase to give it its correct value and to place it in a commonly agreed context – in other words, ‘what we are talking about’ in any verbal exchange. Take, for example, the word ‘issue’. It can be a verb or a noun, but it is the increasing use of the word as a noun which I think is of special significance. You have an ‘issue’ with someone. Or someone else has ‘issues’.

To say this begs a number of unanswerable questions. Assuming that we are still talking about nouns, what is the thing, or object that one person can ‘have’ with another? And, not to take it to the absurd what, then, does that person mean when they say that someone else has unspecified ‘issues’? I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the question, and with the person asking it. They are signalling that something (the ‘issue’) which is making another person unhappy or angry is, in some measure at least, also making the one who made the observation unhappy, anxious or angry – or possibly all three.

I do not wish to sound pedantic, but the nitty gritty of this question interests me because I think that many conflicts between individuals originate in the abuse or misuse of language. A word like ‘issue’, unqualified, leaves too much to intuition and guess work. Intuition and guess work are subject to the imagination and that in turn can be defined by, or subject to, circumstances. If, for example, I am accused of having ‘issues’, or if I accuse someone else of the same, does the accusation in fact have more to do with my own immediate circumstances and/or relationship with the person in question? Or is it entirely ‘their problem’?

The fact is that we are bound up in a common history, the history of the human race. All language is contextual. The most passing remark is traceable to other conversations and to the relationships and contexts (social, religious, economic, to name only three) which have shaped us. But this is not the end of the story, because the purpose of language is very much tied to God. God brought order out of chaos. He ‘spoke’, metaphorically, into chaos and darkness, and he continues to do so when we use language to heal and re-create. Language exists to enlighten in the fullest sense, to bring order and understanding into human emotions and into the destructive chaos to which they can give rise, war being the most destructive of all.

If we are to take the Christian Gospel seriously, we cannot avoid the question which Jesus continually asked of those who challenged him, ‘How do you read?’ There is no quick or easy answer to this question. It also obliges the one who prompted it to take a measure of responsibility for the answer, in other words for the other person. So the word ‘issue’ begs still more important questions. We cannot use it in relation to someone else without seeing the bigger picture, beginning with the part we ourselves play in the other person’s ‘issues’. Using short-hand language is a way of opting out of the painful responsibility we must take both for what we actually say and for how it is heard.

One of the signs that we are becoming more aware of this is that words which were once used to describe people who are in any way ‘different’ are now unacceptable. Today’s social mores oblige us to think before we speak. We are accountable for the way we both ask and answer the question ‘How do you read?’, and that is the issue at stake in politics and in all human exchanges.

Anonymous saints

Source: dougmcfarlane.blogspot

There is some disagreement at present concerning whether or not Mother Theresa should be canonised, whether she should be awarded the heavenly equivalent of a knighthood, or something better perhaps. But I find myself wondering what difference it makes to anyone whether she is declared a saint or not. She certainly led a life worth living, and helped others to do the same, and she gave to the dying a dignity they had never known before. But I have known saints in more ordinary and less exacting circumstances than those to be encountered in the slums of India. Does the canonisation of Mother Theresa validate the goodness and the invisible sacrifices made by countless saints – parents as well as those who give their lives looking after other people’s children, care workers, people who do the jobs we don’t want to know about, let alone do? Does it validate their anonymous holiness?

We cannot really talk about saintliness without talking about holiness. We presume that those singled out for canonisation were holy because that must surely be the primary qualification required by the Church for sainthood. But it would not occur to some of the saints I have known to wonder whether or not they were holy, apart from those whose profession as priests obliges them to do so. In a way, these fall into a category of their own when it comes to qualifying for sainthood.

So, in order to do justice to unknown saints both past and present, we perhaps need to find other ways of talking about holiness, ones which don’t sound pious, and at the same time don’t circumvent the quality of holiness which is essential to sainthood. Piety, which is often mistaken for holiness, does not make the idea of becoming a saint very appealing. For one thing, pious talk about holiness and sainthood usually revolves around misguided notions of humility.

Humility, which is the mark of holiness if not of sainthood, is one of the least understood virtues. Humility is a virtue to be desired (even if reluctantly) rather than acquired through sheer personal effort. It is a gift, not a qualification. It enriches the life of the one who has it as well as the lives of others. It is also frequently abused by those who talk about it most. The humility of Christ, his particular love for the poorest and least important members of society, and his own ultimate fate, gives a hollow ring to any talk of humility. Too often such talk goes hand in hand with the exercise of power.

Humility presented as a covert agenda for keeping people in their place (in whatever context and however that is understood today), also feeds equally misguided notions of the meaning of sacrifice, and some pretty dubious interpretations of the meaning of ‘holy poverty’. Poverty can only be holy when a person chooses it in order to enrich the lives of others, as many anonymous saints do today, and have done for centuries. Poverty’s other holy dimension lies in choosing not to allow materialism to get in the way of a person’s single-hearted love for God. Poverty is never holy when it is imposed by the greed or selfishness of others. Humility is not a virtue when it is really no more than compliance with unjust norms and expectations. The same is true of sacrifice.

None of this is to say that the virtues of humility, poverty (when it is chosen) and sacrifice (when it is freely made) are not the attributes of a holy person. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is quite the opposite. A person who is truly holy, and therefore humble, will know their own gifts and the riches they have to share, and they will be grateful for them. The key to humility and holiness lies with gratitude. To be truly humble is to be grateful to God for what we are, for being as we are and for the things we have with which to be a blessing to others. We take for ourselves only what is necessary for the happiness which God desires for us and we never take it at others’ expense.

Yesterday evening the house martins came early to drink from our pond. The nights are already drawing in and the birds are limbering up for the great flight south. The ordinary annual routine goes on. The house martins, just by being birds, are grateful for it, and rejoice in being what they are as they drink on the wing from the pond. They are governed by seasons and wind direction. Their life’s value, or worth, lies in their unquestioning trust in the source of these routine occurrences, on which the survival of their species depends, and there is something about their gratitude for the ordinary which speaks of humility and holiness. Our lives are shaped and sustained, in large part, by routine and by the ordinary. It is up to us to allow them to be made holy.

When it's somewhere you know

  

Castello de Rocca Sinibalda www.grupofost.it

Disasters wrench apart the most gentle of memories. Amatrice, Rieti, L’Aquila, the hidden villages of Belmonte and Roccasinibalda, all places I have known – the last one especially – with its great castle rising from a rock, towering over the valley, its village nestled around it, all dwarfed by the Abruzzi hills. The castle was once my grandmother’s and I spent many a languid summer there in my teens. Rieti and L’Aquila were our nearest towns, half and hour's drive away. I have not yet been able to establish whether the castle and its present occupants are safe.

But these are, on the face of it, trivial anxieties compared to those suffered by someone like Ahmed who lives in asylum accommodation in Stockton.[1] He spends what little available money he has on keeping his phone topped up, so that he can check on his family still in Syria. He learns daily of their deaths and of the continuing obliteration of a town he loves. He dreams of returning, and of completing his engineering degree.

I know Ahmed, in that part of human consciousness where a person knows another person, or place, without ever having met them, or been there. His situation is as much a part of me, perhaps more so, because of what may be happening to the village of Roccasinibalda and to its 15^th century castle. The difference lies in Rocca being only a distant memory, brought to life perhaps by passing associations – like hearing Italian being spoken, or the smell of pinecones on a hot day. Ahmed’s memory is shared by millions of refugees in the reality of every present moment, in all its loneliness and grief.

Amatrice and Aleppo, Ahmed’s town, have something in common. Suffering, like sickness, is a great leveller. We hear in the news that some who were pulled from the rubble of their houses in Amatrice, miraculously unhurt, instantly became rescue workers alongside those who pulled them away from certain death. This happens on a daily basis in Aleppo. It is perhaps happening at Rocca. As yet we have no news. The village must be inaccessible by road in present conditions.

Amatrice, Aleppo and Roccasinibalda invite careful consideration of what we mean when we say that we are praying for someone, or for a particular place. If prayer is ‘answered’, I do not think that the ‘answer’ always comes in the form of a request granted. If it did, all natural disasters like earthquakes, as well as unnatural ones, like the barrel bombing of civilians, would be instantly reversed, as though life were a film which we could wind back, editing out the bad bits.

I think it is better to think of prayer as pertaining to a dimension which is beyond our own time frame and yet very much a part of it. Prayer takes us beyond the present and embraces both past and future, the known and the as yet unknown, in a single moment of ‘knowing’. In the case of Roccasinibalda (if it has been affected by the earthquake) and Aleppo, a place which is remembered identifies us with the place known by another person who we do not know. Ahmed and I meet in these places, and in this particular dimension, to a certain degree.

So prayer is a multiform, multilateral process, one in which all parties, including God, grieve and yearn, but for which there is only one source of healing and redemptive grace. Some disasters, those which touch us personally, quicken the heart with an anxiety and longing for there to be at least some good news, some reassurance that the people or the place we have known have been spared. Prayer affirms our belonging to God and to the whole human race, past, present and future. It is more mysterious, far more subtle and complex than wish fulfilment (waiting for good news) or denial (not accepting responsibility where we should). It involves entering into God’s love, being part of the ‘engine against the Almighty’[2] which drives us to God and is also driven by divine love.

Through prayer, we take responsibility (not blame) for suffering, as God did in his Son. We become part of that universal salvific act and hence also part of the new creation which springs from it. Taking responsibility is not about blame, and still less about retributive punishment. It is about allowing oneself, and the people and places we care about, to love and to be loved by God. Both can be painful.

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[1] Any resemblance to a person of that name in similar circumstances is unintentional

[2] George Herbert ‘Prayer’