Never Alone

‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7) Passive resistance enacted for all time in active submission. There is something there for all of us.

When it comes to suffering, sanity and survival depend on duality of purpose, on both accepting and resisting whatever situation we are going through personally, or perhaps as a nation. We cannot resist until we have learned to accept reality. I think this is especially true of what we are seeing in Western politics at present. What is happening in both Europe and America is neither a dream from which we will soon wake up, or some kind of game which will end well, even if we are taken to the very brink of self annihilation. It is reality, but it can be resisted. The same goes for our own lives. If we are going through hell, even a hell of our own making, it is still hell. But it can be resisted, rather than simply endured.

Life is not given to us to be simply endured. It is to be lived. But we cannot live, or even endure, without a sense of others being there, or perhaps having been there before us. In the context of neo-conservatism, which is the new fascism, and its subliminal nastiness, we know that others have been there before. Knowing this, we are sustained by the memory of previous generations, of the passive resistance of millions who lived under occupation in the last world war and in the active resistance of those who fought, even if their natural inclinations were to peace. It takes courage and humility to go against one’s natural inclinations when needs must.

 

Something comparable goes on in our own individual hard times. If we have known unconditional love, if we have been the centre of someone else’s world, with or without our knowing it at the time, the realisation of that love and the memory of that person keeps us company. Such memories sometimes consist of no more than a single passing moment of kindness, as the validation of one’s pain, of one’s humanity, perhaps by a stranger. 

The knowledge of this love supplies what is needed when it comes to both accepting and resisting whatever pain and suffering we are currently facing. The effect of that memory is to place us outside the pain, so that we can, for a moment at least, observe it and learn from it. We learn from the pain and suffering in experiencing once again the love. So in it, we also learn to love more deeply and, later perhaps, actively respond to the pain and injustice endured by others. Learning to respond to others in this way is the purpose of life and of all its hard moments.

It is also the essence of what we call hope. Where there has been sacrificial love, love which has perhaps gone unnoticed, there has also been hope. Love makes it possible to believe in a future, for ourselves and for our world. To live in hope is not delusionary. Delusion is more often comprised of a mixture of fatalism and blind optimism which, taken together, amount to very little. They do not require anything of us, or commit us to anyone. 

Fatalism is a kind of passive acceptance which simply returns us to ourselves. It does not enable any life giving connection. It does not feed the hunger of the heart, or assuage the mind’s restlessness. We are still left asking ‘why?’ Optimism, in its thinness, also returns us to this same place of non-acceptance.

The Isaiah passage I have just quoted refers to a deliverer, one who would restore a nation to itself, to what it was intended to be. For Christians it speaks, rather enigmatically, of another deliverer, one who in his own acceptance of suffering meets us in ours, wherever we are and whatever spiritual path we are currently travelling along. He validates our suffering there. He meets us on that path, using the language and thought processes with which we are most at home. 

Where human beings accept this invitation to be at one with him, even if only in a fleeting moment of recognition, they are no longer alone in their suffering. The Saviour of the world keeps company with them.

What's Needed

Fiction is good for the soul. Other books, like the one I’m reading now about girls’ boarding schools, have a rather different effect. This one is what I would call a ‘trigger’. Read Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979 and you will be immediately transported to a time and place where you were made to gargle with TCP or had grazes and cuts swabbed with barely diluted dettol – though admittedly not something described in the book so far.

Wounds healed pretty quickly with the Dettol treatment. I think this book is a healing book, even if painful to read for those of us who endured the boarding school experience at any time during the period it covers. It rekindles associations; the smell of polish and Dettol among others. But far more significant than these sensory associations are the buried memories of toxic relationships which these associations trigger in later life. 

It is strange to think that adult women – nuns in my case – could with impunity vent their internalized anger, frustration, loneliness and perhaps bitter loss on a select few among a couple of hundred girls aged 7 to 15. No physical abuse occurred, but the memory of Sister Dismas endures. She would appear silently in a dormitory, gently stroking the leather strap the nuns wore around their waists as she raised a single dark eyebrow, her attention bearing down on one terrified child, until a frozen silence gripped us all and, in some weird and disturbing way, bound us to her for the rest of our lives. You don’t forget such people.

There were times, when you were still quite young – 8 or 9 perhaps – when you wanted to love these nuns. You might even have tried to hug them. But they did not know what to do with a hug. They had lost the knack. I think they sometimes wanted to return it, but could not, because their straightened lives had accustomed them not to need whatever it is that an eight year old’s needy hug might elicit from them – what needs of their own it might trigger.

Perhaps our own needs as children were channelled into a kind of ornate beauty which stood out all the more because of the starkness of these emotional surroundings. There were the Corpus Christi processions, the silence and safety of the chapel, a sensed presence of something or someone coming through all the Latin and the incense in whom we small girls in our veils (repeatedly darned by the nuns during the holidays) could confide with complete trust. We learned very quickly, I think, that there was no need to say anything or even to think holy thoughts, although I did admittedly once ask to become holy.

My father visited me shortly afterwards (a rare occurrence) to reassure himself that I wasn’t going to become a nun. I wasn’t. Such moments of wanting ‘something else’ for one’s life often come, and then go, in a person’s early years. But they leave behind a sense of need for something like holiness. It might re-surface later, triggered by circumstances or a crisis, or by something evoking what the Corpus Christi processions left in their wake, like trailing incense. It is easy to confuse holiness with ‘atmosphere’. But worse is the way we can render ourselves incapable of recognising holiness, and our need for it, when we come across it in other people, which we do whenever love is returned.

Children feel holiness initially as having to do with being made to feel uniquely significant and wanted. The same is true of the elderly and the vulnerable. So governments, though secular, have a duty to be holy and to nurture holiness in others, beginning with children and all vulnerable people. Their duty does not lie in shoring up the system but in loving the people. The same could be said of the Church.

Governments might begin such a systemic transformation by focusing on schools where there are insufficient teachers, or where teachers are hampered in their duty of loving care by the kind of perverse legalism which forbids them to hug a child or tend to him or her physically if that child is hurt. Governments could focus their attention, and their funding, on hospitals where cuts have rendered whatever medical care they can give ineffectual in the longer term. Or they could look to the real needs of understaffed care homes where loving care is sometimes in very short supply.

As with the convent of my school days, holiness, which is love, is no less available to policy makers or senior clergy than it is to children. Indeed, it is required of us all and is there for the asking. Christ has promised as much.  

What Ever Happened to the Cure of Souls?

Is ‘leadersmithing’ what the Church really needs these days? An article in last week’s Church Times (Comment, Church Times 3^rd March, 2017) has left me wondering about this. 

Leadership, as the article suggests, is becoming more than ever a skill, ideally to be learned in one of those hothouses for training talent-spotted future bishops and archbishops. 'The word 'leadersmith' implies something like 'coping'. It also has a rough hewn edge to it. It resonates with the earth and the workaday business of the factory shop floor. But the sad reality, when it comes to leadership in the Church, is that it is more often about stress of management. Perhaps the emphasis on the kind of skill needed to achieve and then survive in high office in the Church also involves learning how to engage with the kind of rivalry that goes on beneath the surface when career clericalism is revealed for what it really is.

  

While ambition and personal advancement are to be expected, though not necessarily desirable, in the context of secular organisations, is ‘leadersmithing’, really how the Church of God should be shaping its future leaders? I seem to remember Christ warning his disciples against such an approach, offering them instead a young child as a model of true leadership. Perhaps he was thinking of Isaiah 11:6. Admittedly, the child must have been very young, given that most children, once they are old enough to go to playgroup, very quickly learn how to fend for themselves in regard to power and territorial ownership. Chanel 4’s The Secret Life of Four Year Olds ought to be mandatory viewing for those picked for high office in the Church.

Power and being childlike are, of course, incompatible. Furthermore, power is seldom accompanied by authority. With a few notable exceptions (Barack Obama and Pope Francis being two of them), powerful people are often more childish than childlike, especially when their grip on power is threatened. More than one world leader springs to mind in this latter regard. These people have little genuine authority. They are an example of how childishness, if not outgrown in childhood, becomes dominant self interest in later life. Dominant self interest, and the envious rivalry to which it too often gives rise, does not elicit respect or bestow the kind of authority needed for true leadership.

True leadership brings with it the authority which comes with transparent love for the people a leader is called to serve. This is what Jesus meant by being childlike. A leader who has this quality will be instantly recognisable and trusted because the nature of their love is essentially sacrificial. For clergy, whatever their rank, sacrificial love is what is entailed in what used to be called ‘the cure of souls’. It remains the essence of our calling today.

Having the cure of souls involves commitment to God. In other words, it involves all the time that it takes for a person to be able to see themselves and others as God sees them. In terms of how they perceive themselves, this will inevitably lead to a ‘refining’ sacrifice. The cure of souls involves the refining of one’s own soul first. For one thing, it will demand that the ordained person be prepared to let go of all that they hold to be important in terms of their career in the Church.

Career clericalism is arguably one of the aspects of Church life which most undermines the work of mission and evangelism. There are few things more incompatible with the good news of Christ’s gospel than a distant and overly busy bishop who has little time for his or her clergy – or the priest who, when the peace is being shared, is too busy looking to see how many people are in church that Sunday to make eye contact with the person in front of them who is in need of a small moment of their undivided loving attention. Those who turn to the clergy for wisdom or understanding may want to speak of their hidden fears in regard to the state of the world, or to someone they love. They expect to see, or sense, the loving kindness of God working through the priest or bishop. They expect to see the face of Christ in that person. Sometimes they do.

 

The Giving Up of Lent

orcgg.org

When it comes to Lent, at home, we are a mixed economy household. There are some who have grown up in the catholic end of the Anglican tradition and others who are more protestantly inclined. For the former, Lent is a season in the Church’s liturgical year. It is a season for growing in love and in knowledge of God. Giving things up, or fasting, is meant to aid and abet this process. For the more protestant among us, and among our friends and acquaintances, Lent barely figures at all. It is Good Friday that counts. Easter is a bit of an afterthought.

In the excellent Anglican theological college where I trained for ordination, I knew someone who had never heard of Lent. At first this seemed surprising, in an Anglican College, but it was also quite salutary. It obliged me, as a more catholic Anglican, to wonder why we are doing Lent at all.

Perhaps such uncertainty is to be expected on Shrove Tuesday, as I write this post. It is the last day for coffee, chocolates, wine, or whatever.  Who knows what lies ahead in the way of tortuous self recrimination and personal goal striving? I read somewhere that a job contemplated is a far greater challenge than a job just begun. This is certainly true for writers and bloggers. It is also true of Lent. Once you get past the first week or so of giving up, it starts to resemble habit and the job gets easier.

The down side of this easing of the yoke is that guilt takes over. If it’s becoming easier then it’s not really giving up at all. It’s not a genuine fast. So we now find ourselves in a position of aiding and abetting the one thing Lent and Good Friday itself is designed to quash for good – personal guilt, along with a form of Pelagianism, the belief that we can get better if we try hard enough.

My more protestant friends, on the other hand, live much of the time with a sense of unworthiness and with the conviction that there is little or nothing that they personally can do about it – except repent. Some of us who are more catholically inclined will save their formal repenting until Shrove Tuesday comes round. Shrove Tuesday was traditionally the one day in the year when you were ‘shriven’ or received sacramental absolution following private confession to a priest . More protestant Anglicans do this shriving more publicly. When done formerly it amounts to confessing and repenting of manifold sins and wickednesses, something which users of the Book of Common Prayer do quite often.

So where does this leave our mixed economy household, when it comes to the meaning and purpose of Lent? There is something to be said for both approaches. On the one hand, the more protestant members feel that spiritual exercises should be undertaken solely for God and not involve a covert agenda of personal improvement. Furthermore, such exercises should be neither defined by, or limited to, a particular liturgical time of year. At the catholic end of the kitchen table, we welcome these seasons as given by God for our general well being, as well as for growth in the discipline of prayer. Ideally, whatever is given up should lead to deeper and longer periods of prayer and to the giving of alms. But it is also perfectly OK for them to lead to the betterment of our own physical health as well.

Insignificant as these theological meanderings may seem, I think our mixed economy household represents a sort of stumbling onto the real meaning of unity among Christians, and invites reflection.

Whether or not Lent is formerly observed, we could use the season to reflect on how God ‘holds’ us all in love, in both our feeble attempts at fasting and in the integrity and reverence which goes with not wanting to use the season as an excuse for putting in extra time at the gym or cutting out alcohol. Instead, we could pause in loving reverence for God.

We need more reverence for God in our lives, and not only reverence for God, but reverence for the earth, the food it yields and all who labour to produce it. We also need reverence for each other. Perhaps there are ways we could give up ‘giving up’ and start ‘taking on’ instead.

We could ‘take on’ the other members of the household in small acts of patience, or in unsolicited kind words. We could ‘take on’ the refugee, if not physically, because circumstances might not permit this, we could do the ‘taking on’ financially and by bringing their helplessness to God while recognising that we can do nothing to change ourselves or their situation without God’s grace.

We could ‘take on’ God in the shocking realisation that God ‘takes us on’. In no way does he ever give up on us. He does the same for those with whom we profoundly disagree or dislike – perhaps with good reason. What kind of giving up – or ‘taking on’ would such an attitude of mind require of us? This question alone ought to keep us busy for the next forty days.

In Our Right Minds

We are only fully human when we forget to take ourselves seriously. The same goes for solemn occasions involving large numbers of serious individuals. In fact, one could argue

that serious individuals coalescing  into solemn enclaves create what we call a self interested and self sustaining system. Systems are not fully human, and this week’s Church of England Synod gathering was an example of how inhuman systems can ultimately be their own undoing..

For one thing, it revealed, if only for a moment, that a person’s underlying fallible humanity will occasionally slip through the cracks in the system and reveal itself in broad daylight as, for example, when an individual makes an all too human mistake. Truth is often revealed through paradox, as when a bishop acting through some kind of subliminal divine prompting, presses the wrong button when the crucial vote is taken, thereby making the system look a little more human and, as a result, even more ridiculous than he himself must have felt on realising his mistake. I have some sympathy for Bishop Christopher Cocksworth. He was technically challenged (something which happens to most of us from time to time) so that for a moment his humanity broke through and led him to inadvertently do the right thing, even though he apologised for it profusely later on.

Perhaps all great changes in history begin with such minor mistakes. In this case it was a kind of inversion of Benjamin Franklin’s ‘for want of a nail, the battle is lost’.  Such mistakes at least reveal the thinness of the glass casing which keeps the system together in a spurious kind of unity, requiring that the humanity and integrity of the individuals involved be trussed up and kept out of sight.

Bishop Christopher Cocksworth’s all too human mistake also invites us to question at what point does the system as a whole cease to be human? At what point, and why, did it cease to function in the way it was ordained to by its founder? The purpose of the Church, and the authority given to its bishops, being surely to preserve and cherish the whole human race, beginning with its own members, as the embodiment and revelation of Jesus Christ.  Somewhere, the system has overtaken and enslaved, or ‘bound’, the true Church.

This being the case, I think it is safe to say that many of us would like to see a Church whose authority system has been turned upside down and inside out by its founder – for its own greater good. In other words, many of us would like to see a commitment to loving service of all God’s people which begins with the de-systemisation of power. A humble questioning of the nature and purpose of real authority in the Church might be a good place to begin.

One of the symptoms of systemic power at work in the Church is the idea that power is to be exercised primarily in the interest of maintaining unity, something of an anachronism when we remember that the Triune unity, on which we base our Christian faith, is one of inter-relatedness and dynamic, or continual movement into a deeper knowledge and love of the other.

This is the knowledge which admits to itself that it understands, empathises or, to use today’s vernacular, ‘gets’ who that person is. ‘Getting’ something about someone means touching on the truth of that person in a way which can only cause us to love them more.  When persons, powerful or not, have been swallowed up by the system they themselves have created, they need the rest of us to minister to them in the deepest sense. Ministry is about being as Christ for the other, irrespective of their power status or lack of it.

So we look at the powerful from the same vantage point as that which enables us to ‘get’ what it means to be powerless and marginalised. The powerful, as we see them in formal synod settings, or fail to see them because much of the real work goes on in closed meetings, are as needy as the powerless, but in a different way. Their minds need ‘re-clothing’, so that when they come to sit at the feet of Christ, like the man described in Luke 8:35, they need not feel ashamed at having lost touch with their own humanity because they have literally ‘come to their senses’. It is their senses which need re-clothing.

The senses, understood in this way, are what lead us to take reactive measures, to act ‘instinctively’ towards those who are on the margins of our common life, not because we fear them (although we do sometimes) but because their freed humanity threatens the personal security which the existing system affords the powerful. This is at the heart of the controversy which currently divides us. The security, and the system itself, depends on doing things in the way they have always been done, including adhering to outdated Church law and to habits of mind which come with lifeless, loveless ways of reading scripture. All of these things are done by appealing to authority and thereby asserting power. The extraordinary outcome of this week’s Synod suggests that power only comes with real authority and real authority, as Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, is given from above. 

Heat

In the early morning light, a kangaroo appears in the paddock across from the house we are staying in, here in Australia. We are told to expect kangaroos at dawn and then again at dusk. A whole troop (the collective noun for kangaroos) appears later in the afternoon – and I miss it. I spot the single but miss the collective. At night, it is the ‘collective’ of the grass bull frog which makes itself heard from the creek nearby. You feel the effect of the frogs’ composite existence, rather than see it. The single and the composite are constrained at this time of year by heat and sudden chill, by light and almost light.

We went out yesterday. There was heat, intense, heavy, bright, with only the occasional breeze for respite. The heat slows you down. It forces you to attend to the moment. There is neither time or energy to pass too quickly to the next, or to dwell too long on the previous, and on the past. Everything is held, almost imprisoned, within the heat and this present moment, including the tragic young woman who, for a while, shared our picnic space.

The heat, which has increased today, served as an initial reminder that she, and millions like her, can never be entirely of the past, even though she remains a memory. Her parting words to us were “Bye. See you again, maybe”. I doubt that this will happen, and yet her words and the memory they evoke, will endure as a present moment, a reminder of the heat of the Australian summer and of our responsibility for all whose lives are made winter by their memories.

She talked a great deal about her life but she was not in a condition to make herself understood and yet having to pay attention to her, to the memories which had brought her to this moment and to this place, made the incoherence of her speech comprehensible. She needed to be heard, but had grown used to being ignored. She had probably been homeless. Quite a few homeless people are billeted to this outlying area of Melbourne. She needed to be understood without feeling pressed or in any way accused.

I kept my sunglasses on, so as to avoid direct eye contact. Sunglasses were a kind of prop for me, the listener, buying me a bit of personal space. I could respond to her sideways on, so allowing the jumbled flow of her words to bypass me without, I hoped, causing her offence and without obliging me to engage with her in a direct way. Direct eye contact means that we move into another person’s space, if only momentarily, and this obliges us to take responsibility for them, whether we like it or not.

Taking responsibility for someone who is suffering begins with allowing the suffering person to occupy our inner space, or consciousness. In the case of this tragic young woman, allowing her to occupy my inner space initially meant ignoring the impulse to physically distance myself, and those I was with, from her, which we could have done by choosing an alternative spot further along the river to have our picnic. It also required that each of us resist the urge to ‘protect’ my small grandson from some vaguely perceived malign influence.

This vaguely perceived influence is what defines our fear of the ‘other’ when it comes to suffering. Our own unease about the woman in front of us was a microcosmic rendering of the xenophobia felt towards millions of homeless people, refugees, or any person or group who make us feel threatened because they are not quite like us. We feel threatened because in some cases we have been allowed, and even encouraged, to think of them as dangerous. But most significantly, they make us feel threatened because we do not know them as persons. This ignoring of their personhood renders us powerless to help them in the immediate moment.

Later, when the heat finally became too much for the woman (she was wearing a leather jacket and torn leather trousers), I was saved from my feelings of inadequacy in the face of her brokenness by her simple parting words,  “Bye – See you again, maybe”. One of the most damaging effects of our fear of other people who are suffering is that we can miss out on their redemptive words and on the hope they bring.

Please breathe

Source: Wikipedia

Children and babies cry in an alarming way. Once the crying really gets going, there comes a point when the child stops remembering to breath. He has no conscious method for letting go of the inhaled breath so that the next one can follow. A terrible momentary silence ensues. Were these fits of rage and anxiety to continue to be expressed in this way in adult life, you would think of such a person as suffering from some sort of narcissistic personality disorder in which hysteria can be usefully deployed for recording feelings and preferences and getting other people to gratify them. There are no prizes for guessing what adult in the public eye might fit such a description. For one thing, his inaugural address has been described as the angriest in his nation’s political history.

The question this leaves us with is not so much whether he will or will not follow through with his insane agenda, but how do the rest of us handle the anxiety which his behaviour generates for each one of us personally? I think we begin to handle it by remembering to breathe in a particular way. Most of us are not in a position to urge him to ‘breath’, although we still hope that there are people of power and influence who might still be able to do this, but it is not likely to be you or I. Instead, our task is to behave as we would if we were present at the scene of any other kind of emergency –we begin by making sure we are reasonably safe, lest we become a casualty ourselves, and then start looking around for those in need of help.

Thinking healing into the world politics of the moment works in a similar way and takes us to a comparable place. We have to be present to the anxiety and to the causes of it, without becoming a casualty ourselves. We do this through a kind of ‘breathing’. We begin by breathing in and as we breathe out, we drop down into our deep ‘centre’ – like going down in a lift, or elevator.

 This may sound like a rather introspective exercise, but it is quite the opposite. We drop down into the centre (also known as the ‘ground’) of our being in order to let go of everything we think we are – the layers and layers of false self-perceptions that have built up in our lives so far. We do this for a bit – a few minutes, a few hours, a few weeks maybe – until this ‘ground of being’ becomes our natural space, our habitat.

This is the space of the true self from which we can assess any situation calmly and objectively but also with compassion. In time, through doing this exercise, and ultimately living it, we will learn wisdom, and learn how to use wisdom in a measured way for the good of others and not for the enhancement or reassurance of our old ‘self’.

Learning wisdom is not the same thing as knowing the answers to the world’s problems or even, at times, to our own. It has to do with understanding how the tangled web which is the sum total of what is also called human ‘sinfulness’ has become so utterly intractable. The core of this understanding lies in knowing that any one aspect of human sinfulness – an individual’s lust for power and adulation and his or her indifference to the price which others will pay for it, for example – is potentially ‘redeemable’. By that I mean that it can be transformed, or better still, transfigured into something quite different, something which is in the gift of a merciful God and the outworking of God’s grace.

So, to return to the centering down exercise, we learn to encounter human sin in that deep place without being either anxious or frightened by its enormous implications, or instinctively hating or feeling revolted by its perpetrator. We remember that the perpetrator is bound up in his own darkness, in the addictive nature of his self-idolising behaviour, and we remember how easy it was for something comparable to happen in our own lives, and how disastrous it may have proved to be.

So we allow this dangerous person a little space in our deep place. We allow the light to touch him. We do not do this grudgingly. Quite the contrary. We do it as we beg wordlessly for mercy from within our deep place, so that he can be held by God, as we are. Ultimately, the grace which we make room for, as we simultaneously let go of our false self and of all the artificiality we have needed to sustain it, is felt as light and as a lightness of being. He needs to feel this too. It is the peace which literally ‘overcomes’ the world and governs our individual lives – ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’.