The Emperor Has No Clothes

The ‘nones’ (those who when responding to surveys tick ‘none’ in the box marked ‘religion’ but who might possibly tick C of E if pressed) need look no further for a home. Bishop David Jenkins, that prophet of our time, once was heard to declare that God was not interested in the Church. God was all about the Kingdom. It follows that if and when we stumble upon the Kingdom in the context of the Church, we do not need to look very much further to find God. The problem lies in defining the Kingdom, if such a thing is definable. You could say the same thing about the Church. It is not easy to describe what the Church is, still less what it ought to be, if it is to be true to its Kingdom calling.

The original commission to go out and make disciples has acquired a rather hollow tone, given the Church’s history of conquest and forced conversion, not to mention prejudice and plain hatred. But the kernel of truth remains. If the Church is called to be anything at all it is called to offer to the world the peace which only God can bring, the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is even called to embody that peace.  Peace is its garment and peace is the substance of the body it clothes. It is called to give that body to the world, as Christ gave his. The Church cannot simply talk about peace in rather abstract terms overlaid with the clothing of pietism. We need to tend the hurt and resistant body, lest we be accused, like the Emperor who failed to realise that he had no clothes, of being completely naked.

It is the build-up of hurt and the resistance to healing which makes it so difficult for the Church to truly embody peace. As with any physical body, allowing wounds to fester without healing can make them life threatening. Could it be that something like this is happening in the life of the institutional Church? We keep knocking each other’s old wounds without pausing to consider the damage. We are more concerned with allowing our buildings to fall into disrepair than we are about healing the hurts which we have inflicted on ourselves.

At the more traditional end of the Church, we hide complacently behind beautiful but arcane (in the minds of many) liturgy, clerical dress and the kind of managerialism which consists mainly of moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. At the other end, as I have suggested in previous posts, lies a mixture of naïveté and hubris. I do not think that either of these scenarios provides a setting in which the ‘nones’ are likely to meet God in his Christ.

What is needed, before it is too late, is for the Church to take ‘time out’, a couple of year’s sabbatical perhaps, in order to focus prayerfully and pastorally on its relationships, particularly on those which relate to authority and the pastoral care of its people, clergy and laity alike. If the present hierarchical system of governance is to endure, those with the most authority must be subject to those with the least, as Christ was. It is the powerful who must begin this work of peace-making, because peace- making is both the mandate and the sign of true leadership.

Peace-making in the Church will entail the hard practical work of seeking forgiveness and the bridge-building which should follow; hard because it requires that everything that is not of love be burned away. Love must do the burning. This, incidentally, is about as close as it gets to the burning fires of hell. Hell is hell insofar as it is the ultimate conflagration of love vs. hatred. In the life of the Church the gates of hell appear to be impregnable, though, as Christ promised, they will not prevail. The fire of love will ultimately destroy them, even if the Church as we know it is destroyed in the process. The gates of hell are such that they bar human beings from the forgiveness which brings peace, from facing into all the private and collective betrayals, untruths and resistance to the goodness and giftedness in people which it has allowed over the centuries, and still allows, leaving only a hard shell of fear and mistrust, for those who experience the Church at close quarters. This makes embodying the peace of God for the world very difficult for them.

Thankfully, this is not always and invariably the case. There are acts of heroic self giving which pass unnoticed in the Church’s life. Priests who minister in and for the love of Christ, and whose work is largely ignored by the Church’s critics, embody the healing fires of love. Their work endures in the hearts of those whose lives they have touched. Bishops who are true to their calling as peace-makers and as pastors to their clergy do the same.

All of this suggests that it will take time for the Church to be transformed in such a way as to make the ‘nones’ tick a different box, but I am convinced that it will happen. Such is the nature of the faith we proclaim, that we will be changed ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye’ and that we shall all belong together in Christ.

If Music Be The Food Of Love ...

St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate is being taken over in what can only be described as an act of spoliation, which the dictionary defines as ‘the action of taking goods or property from somewhere by violent means’. The eviction of its classical musicians, for whom it has become church in the fullest sense, reflects the kind of iconoclastic violence witnessed at the time of the English Reformation when monasteries were sacked, statues decapitated, frescoes and wall paintings obliterated. Now, it is orchestrated music that must be expunged. The musicians who for years have made St. Sepulchre a space for prayer and reflection, are being removed to make room for ‘worship and ministry’. One can only presume that what the musicians offer is no longer deemed to be worship or, for that matter, ministry. The whole unhappy business raises two things which ought to be of concern to all Anglicans, whatever their churchmanship.

Anglicans in this country have for too long ignored or condoned the kind of quick fix which certain manifestations of charismatic, and largely conservative, evangelicalism has thrust upon them. Church ‘plants’, and St. Sepulchre is to be one of them, are in fact a form of colonisation, a process which has already been described as the McDonaldization of the Church of England. McDonald’s and the goods it serves is not only extremely bad for our health, it is also bad for a nation or community’s self respect. The French who only a decade ago were the envy of us all when it came to body image, are now getting fat. Could the same thing be happening to the Church? I think the spoliation of St. Sepulchre’s indicates a very real danger that it might. The Church is getting fat as a result of the McDonaldization of its worship and the commodification of its inner life in God to suit the tastes of the market.

What this danger entails pertains specifically to what the present incumbent, who has instigated the eviction, is about to do to St. Sepulchre’s when it comes to worship and ministry. It implies, among other things, a very narrow understanding of worship itself and, possibly, a very shallow interpretation of both worship and ministry in respect to how Jesus spoke and behaved in regard to these vital areas of Christian life.

In one of the most profound theological conversations in the whole of the New Testament, we are told that worship is authentic when it is done in ‘spirit and in truth’ (John 4:24). Beautiful music, especially classical music and liturgy, and some traditional hymns, releases the mind and raises the spirit to God. It is a truth language.  It is truthful because it is received into the listener’s ‘God shaped space’, to borrow from St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal and scripture itself. It is received in such a way as to allow for an encounter with God. It does not tell the listener anything, or issue terms and conditions for this encounter to take place. It simply opens up a space. Beautiful music is not pure aesthetics, as some may think. It is worship.

Music is therefore a unique and infinitely precious gift, because in freeing the mind and momentarily opening the heart it allows both listener and player to encounter one another within the love of God. It is also essential to ministry, and ministry, rightly understood, is essential to the ongoing life of the Church. Bands, trendy songs and shallow sensationalist preaching do not minister to anyone except the performers themselves. They do not serve. They simply perform. Classical musicians serve. 

The proof lies in the extent to which trendy songs and endlessly repeated cliché choruses do or do not transform those who imbibe them. Do people come away from these events less selfish, less needy, more able to love those they find hard to love or even respect? Are they more lovable themselves? Are they Christ-like in every sense? Are they the body of Christ? None of the methods which purport to make a church successful bear any relationship to what it means to be the body of Christ. They are not evangelism. They are part of a commercial enterprise. They deal in the commerce of spurious success, and they are entrepreneurial in following a set recipe for achieving that success. Beautiful music, especially when it is performed in a church, does not purport to do either of these things and for this Anglicans should be grateful.  

What then can liberal thinking Christians, as well as people who are ‘not religious’ do to prevent the Anglican Church from sleep walking into a place where God in his ineffability is rarely to be found?

Perhaps the future lies with the ‘nones’. People who describe themselves as ‘nones’, when it comes to religion, are extremely valuable to the Church. For one thing, they are capable of being prophetic, because they are, by their own definition, outsiders. Jesus loved outsiders. He did not require them to prove that they had a faith. He knew them and loved them for who they were. He loved them because their faith, and the truth to which it witnessed, consisted in the extent to which they were capable of love, and on this alone did he rate people.

The Church must be a place which draws people to itself because it touches them where they need to both give and receive the love of God. This is its ministry, and it is the ministry of every local church. Worship will only happen when a church has been ministered to with Christ like love and in a spirit of service. It will happen when people encounter something of the sacred, of the enduring nature of the mystery of God in the beauty of their surroundings, and in music. Let there be music at St. Sepulchre’s.  

Black Dog

There is a French saying ne pas être dans son assiete, which roughly translates as ‘to not be fully in one’s own plate’, as when pasta, badly served, overspills onto the table. It’s a great way of describing the general sense of being all over the place which I think many of us experience from time to time. It is not something we can easily ‘snap out of’, as sufferers of anxiety and depression, in all its manifestations, will know. Not being fully in one’s plate is a debilitating state of mind, especially if you are a writer, teacher, or someone tasked with preaching sermons or providing leadership.

There are other names for this state of mind, like ‘writer’s block’ or ‘black dog’, not that the two are identical, but they invariably feed on each other. I find they do the same in the course of the average day, since all days are potentially creative, whatever kind of work we do. Things get put off when we are blocked. We feel tired. We live for that cup of coffee, or something worse. We are not fully in control. There is something random and anarchic about the way we go about the day and the way we apply our thinking, if we are able to think at all. At the same time, we are absolutely static, inwardly ‘blocked’, so that there is not even the dubious thrill of the roller coaster effect, teetering on the creative high before plummeting to the depths.

The way we are feeling prevents us from doing anything specific. It paralyses, and makes it impossible to do what, theoretically, we should do in order to get back on track and motor forward. There are different methods for achieving this forward momentum. Personally, I find that methods only work for a while, and that when they no longer work you are back on your own, dealing with the black dog, or with writer’s block, or with the inability to dream up a sermon if that is what is required of you.

I have slowly learned that what is needed in all of these situations is a deep and inexhaustible energy in which we can trust, something which we can draw on simply by owning our desire and need for it. Whatever work we do, but especially if it is creative work, we must continually return to its creative source.

But this is impossible if we have not first learned to accept and believe in ourselves as gifted, or fruitful, full of life and hope even if, right now, it feels that we have ground to a complete halt. Knowing ourselves as fruitful is not the same as feeling reassured by relative success. Success will often come at the price of the work itself, because to be sure of success means being willing to think of one’s work as a commodity designed to satisfy consumers and fit the mood of the moment. This is as true in the context of preaching sermons as it is in any other creative work.  In our own low moments it is tempting to simply generate the kind of work, or preach the kind of sermons, which will satisfy the criteria for success or popularity. But we may end up hating ourselves for doing so, and then hate the work.

We are only fruitful when we write or say what gives people permission to flourish as the persons they were created to be. We are fruitful when we free others into their gifts so that they can use those gifts, and their lives, in the service of the truth which makes us free. For this to be possible, we have to trust our own giftedness enough to wait on it, even in the depths of depression and self doubt, because it is often there that we meet people and offer them hope in their own dark depths. We offer them hope because we have visited the depths ourselves.  We have learned to forgive and accept ourselves there, so we are in a position to help others do the same.

A good way to begin this process of self acceptance is to get into the habit of returning to any period, or even a single moment, in our life when we knew ourselves to be utterly valued, that our very existence was a blessing to someone else. It is important to re-own such moments without feeling guilty that we are doing so, because guilt is itself a denial of love.

Loving and forgiving one’s self is the hardest kind of loving there is, especially if you have not been equipped for it in early life. It is often much easier to remain in the depths of depression and self doubt, simply because they are familiar depths, whereas acceptance and forgiveness open up new horizons, new roads to travel into the unknown. The unknown is frightening because discovering it will inevitably involve getting to know ourselves as we really are, and accept our giftedness. We are gifted in and through the love of God from whom all energy for creative work, and life itself, proceeds.

Morning

Source: nedhardy.com

What gets you out of bed in the morning? In a way, I find this question harder to answer as I get older. It has to do with old habits wearing thin. The things that used to get me going are either no longer relevant, or no longer exist. When it comes to relevance, after 43 years of being together I’ve finally had to accept the fact that my husband really does not like hot tea, so to trek back upstairs to bring it to him the minute the pot has brewed is a waste of time and effort. I now pour it and leave it for him downstairs. Then there’s the other reality. The children have long since left home and now lead lives of their own at some considerable distance from ours. The only reason for getting up early for their sakes has to do with fitting in with international time zones. This we manage to do at other times of the day.

But I still get up an hour earlier, and I still have a reason for doing so. For one thing, there is the silence, both external and internal. We live in a silent place. In other words, silence is consistent. It is a given. There is no ambient traffic noise. There are no times of the day when we are even particularly conscious of noise, apart from the change of predominant bird cry. Buzzards are very active at the moment and the swallows have not yet started marshaling the troops for the long flight south. They will get noisier when they do so in a couple of weeks time. Also, we have cut down the old elder in which the crows used to nest, as well as fight with the magpies. Their departure has made the silence almost palpable.

External silence has the effect of quelling internal noise. In the first hour of the day the busy mind is subdued. It has not yet woken up to mundane preoccupations, although it is not asleep either. In fact, I find that it is more awake than at any other time of the day. It is open, in every sense of the word. For me, the first hour of the day is a time of openness to the Real Presence, but it is not a mental vacuum which I expect God to fill. Instead, I find that I am involved in a kind of three-way dialogue between the mind, the senses and God. But rarely is anything said. Instead, the heart is allowed to have its own mind, to speak from its concerns and from its fears.

Today, it spoke of North Korea and the US, and of the threat to our very existence which the leaders of these two nations represent. The mind, and my personal fears, being quelled, I was able to sense the impact of the situation on its most helpless victims, the ordinary people of North Korea. What came to mind was a picture of its baby-faced leader peering through what seemed like an old fashioned pair of binoculars while two of his adjutants stood by. One wore an army uniform. The other was dressed in a thin fleece type jacket. The army character looked thin. His companion was emaciated. Their leader was wearing a warm well cut heavy coat. He looked very well fed.

The memory of this picture, seen either on line or in a newspaper, speaks to me of the deeper evil, and of the most pressing danger, which is at the root of this crisis. It is the total disregard for other human beings which comes when two narcissistic leaders are sated or infatuated with power. No doubt if these two leaders were to disappear, others would replace them, so the solution to the crisis does not lie in praying that they, and the danger they represent, will simply go away. In fact, when we are engaged in the kind of three-way dialogue I have been describing, the idea of a ‘solution’ to the crisis of potential nuclear holocaust recedes a little. We realise that something more than a solution is needed, because a solution would be no more than a political construct designed to get these two leaders out of the impasse they have created and so allow the rest of us to breathe a sigh of relief, at least in the immediate present.

But whatever calming devices are deployed, in respect to the two antagonistic leaders, they will not make a jot of difference to the suffering endured by tens of millions of North Koreans. Their suffering will not be diminished, even for a moment. The silence of the early morning tells me that it is their suffering which matters most when it comes to any kind of meaningful solution to the Korean crisis. There is no particular logic for thinking this, and it will appear naïve to many, but for those who know the value of silence, engaging together in God with the suffering of ordinary North Koreans is vital spiritual work. If you have read this far, please reserve an hour of mentally uncluttered time to join me in this work.

Dreaming Up a Church

At school, when it was too wet to play lacrosse (O happy day), we did country dancing in the gym. One of the dances involved going to the back of the line and partnering the last person on it, so that you would both eventually end up at the front. I think the dance was called ‘Strip the Willow’. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I am right in my recollection of ‘Strip the Willow’, or even if I am confusing it with another dance, the basic pattern has stayed with me as a blue print for ecclesial life; how the Church could yet be, and how this new joyous way of being could liberate it into becoming the kind of Church which the Lord of the Dance might like to be a part of.

I think he probably is a part of it. It’s just that the Dance has moved on. Reels and country dances have a way of moving on by shifting the focus and altering the plane of action, so transforming the action itself. It is this shifting and re-focusing which the institutional Church needs to allow itself to do, if it is to keep dancing with its Lord, and if it is to survive at all. I say allow, because the movement is not a plan to be decided upon by those at the top and then enacted by those at the bottom as best they can. It is not a strategy for keeping going. It is the energy in which the Church should live and move, the energy which it breathes and then releases into the world. Or which it wilfully refuses to breathe because it is afraid of the risks entailed.

This is not as abstract as it sounds, any more than the Dance is itself an abstraction. Nevertheless, it does require some right side of the brain thinking, to acknowledge and borrow from a much more complex line of thought.[1] The Dance is a pattern, a collective creation, energised by the measure of its music which is its heart beat. The music is too fast, too compellingly joyous, to allow for strategy, for watching one’s back lest a fellow dancer fill our place unobserved. The Dance is not a competition in which one person or group feels threatened by another. Fear plays no part in it.

What makes the Dance a living Church, as opposed to a fearful and disconnected institution, is the will to love, at least for the duration of the Dance itself, in other words on this side of eternity. It moves in tandem with the changes, chances and inexplicable suffering (seemingly allowed by God) of this transient world. Given such a fluid, and at times frightening, situation, there is little time to do anything other than love. This is another skill which the institutional Church seems to be in danger of losing. The momentum of its collective inner life is slowing down because it has forgotten how to love. So it is losing the measure of the Dance.

Part of the problem, indeed most of the problem, is one of separation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel puts it well ‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”'. (Matt.11:16) One half of the dance, the clergy hierarchy (especially those at the top of the line), has become dislocated from the other, from the people who the clergy exist to serve, the people at the bottom of the line who are ‘playing’ and ‘mourning’. So it feels to those who are either at the bottom of the line or outside the Church altogether, that the clerical hierarchy is doing its own thing, its own private dance, one which is completely detached from the people, despite the fact that the people are the other partners in the Dance.

What practical solutions can we offer to save the Church’s true life in the Dance? We could begin, perhaps, by breaking the existing clerical caste system, which is still redolent of class and privilege, though not restricted to either, and which is currently stuck in a mould, or cast, of its own making.

The cast reveals striations of love which have become set in stony hearts. In order to break these hearts – and they do need to be broken, so that those called to be bishops, priests and deacons, can relearn to love their people, the people at the top end of the line need to link up and partner with those at the bottom. This is fundamental to the sacramental commission given to them. We love in and through our sacramental ministry, particularly in the celebration of the Eucharist which we take from the altar to the world.

In terms of ecclesial life, such a partnering would require two ‘givens’; the first that no ordained person should be doing a desk job and the second, that every ordained person should be mentored, or partnered, by a lay person. All clergy would be non-stipendiary. In regard to mentoring, we would begin by drawing on the skills, life experience and wisdom of older lay members of our churches, who might well be paid. These older members (aged at least 60, but preferably older) would mentor those clergy from whom current leadership expectations are the greatest; in other words, bishops, archdeacons, area deans and/or ministry area leaders. These expectations ought, one hopes, to diminish as the existing hierarchical structure is gradually dismantled. We could begin this dismantling process with all clergy being elected or sponsored by the members of their church (as happens already in some denominations) and bishops being elected for a fixed term by clergy.

But what, the reader is now probably asking, is to be done about the running, or management, of the fabric of the institution, its buildings, real estate and pension schemes, to name only a few? To which the answer might be, is it too hard to believe that there are not willing, and perfectly able, retired people who could do this (remunerated) work? Perhaps someone reading this post could make some practical suggestions in this area. Meanwhile, let’s dream of a Church which recognises and honours its Lord when He turns up unexpectedly, hoping to join in the Dance.[2]

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[1] I am indebted to Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emmisary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, London (2009)

[2] This post is a development of some of the ideas I shared in an interview with Mark Tully for the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Something Understood’ July 16^th, 2017

Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. As with all good fiction and drama, you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously, I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be oneself.

Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only watched the first three episodes of Broken. I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing. Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in translation, so to speak.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the ‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed. Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers with him – again.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. There are other paths of suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in this particular case.

All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain, although it may numb it for a while.

The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also tied to a particular poem, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.

All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent. They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we see in Broken, they are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying, or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured.  God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made whole again in his brokenness. 

Armageddon - or possibly not

Source: BBC

I was still at my convent boarding school when the Cuban missile crisis peaked. They were thinking of ringing our parents to ask them to take us home. Maybe it was the end of the world. We were told to pray, not that we really understood the scale of the threat in relation to ourselves, still less to the wider world. We did sense something unusual, though, about the school possibly having to close down in the middle of term, so it was vaguely frightening, even if the fear was sugar-coated by the prospect of an extended half-term break.

I cannot say that I was truly afraid of what might happen over Cuba. My earliest memory of fear was on my stepfather’s boat. I was about five and the crew would play at dangling me, screaming and kicking, over the side. That was real fear. Real fear, the kind that grips and paralyses a person happens when the threat is direct, immediate and personal. All three apply to the individual and to the collective in equal measure. Those who have experienced war will recognise this.

But there is another variant on fear, which is the vague fear we have all learned to live with. It has its peaks and troughs. Right now, given the situation in North Korea and the leadership vacuum in America which has helped to ramp it up, you could say that it is peaking, perhaps like the Cuban missile crisis with which I am sure it is already being compared. And there are other fears swirling around, most of them having to do with the instability of financial and property markets, along with climate change and the medium to long-term effects of Brexit. Added to these are the ‘plagues’ said to presage the end of the world, the zika virus, if you live in South America, being one of them.

All of these fear triggers have, in one way or another, happened before, with huge cost to human life and happiness. As a result of them, many people have ceased to believe in the existence of an all powerful God, still less a merciful and wise one. They will say that those who persist in believing in such a figure are clinging to some kind of psychological prop which enables them to get through life and to manage their fear. But getting through life, whatever it throws at us, by simply managing fear, is a thin substitute for a life lived in, with and through God, as it was lived for us in Jesus Christ.

What we are given in Christ is an altogether different way of managing fear. It is the last thing most of us would think of doing in frightening situations, although with wise leadership and a less frightened electorate we might limit, or even prevent, most of the fear situations which face us today. Instead of succumbing to fear, we are told to keep our inward eye firmly fixed on the embodiment of truth, the Word made flesh, the Christ walking towards us on the turbulent water. This is the ‘way’ and the ‘life’ that enables us to deal with fear.

If we return to the Armageddon-like representations of the current North Korea nuclear threat, one thing is clear: There is unfinished business, and North Koreans, who are ruled through fear, are not allowed to forget this lest they cease to be quite so fearful. North Korea is technically still at war with the US over the carving up of the country and the ensuing Korean war. No peace treaty was ever signed. This possibly deliberate oversight has led to a great deal of loss of face for the ruling dynasty of the north, beginning with the present incumbent’s grandfather. Powerful and morally weak leaders find it hard to cope with loss of face, except through violence.

In the context of Korea, Trump has added to the existing problem of loss of face by upping the ante in regard to violent retaliation and thereby provoking the already angry Kim Jong Un who, like Trump, is a powerful and morally weak leader.  Narrow readings of religious texts do nothing to allay our fear of the end of all things being brought about through the hubris and stupidity of President Donald Trump, and the hubris and cleverness of Kim Jong Un. In fact, it is being exploited in certain religious contexts for political power-driven purposes. The exploitation of fear through religion is a long way from the kind of life Jesus was talking about when he spoke of himself as the ‘the way, the truth and the life’.

What then can Christians learn from their own Leader about managing the world’s fear? Many of the key exchanges which take place between Jesus and powerful people, as well as those who fear them, are contained by the words ‘You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you’. In other words he calls us to convert fear to something resembling the honouring of the enemy – you might call this love, although perhaps not immediately. I think Jesus may have been talking about something resembling ‘chivalry’, which is not an exclusively masculine virtue, incidentally. Rather, it is a sense of the need to brace oneself for the best we have to give when it comes to the things we fear. Those who lived through the second world war, if they are reading this, will remember what bracing oneself for the best one has to give entailed. So will the doctors and muslim taxi drivers who rushed to the scenes of the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. I think that they were able to call on something within them resembling chivalry, or honour, perhaps even love.

All of this may not seem to relate directly to what we are feeling about the possibility of a nuclear attack by north Korea, unless we can conceive of a way of ‘centering down’ to that place of goodness and honour which lies somewhere within even the worst of us. Centering down to the best that lies within us does not involve an introspective search for the good in ourselves. It is more a case of being available to it, should it suddenly emerge and surprise us. Coming to terms with our own goodness can be frightening at times.

When it comes to managing fear, in relation to ourselves or events in the wider world, this is only possible when we are willing to allow our fear to be ‘converted’, or turned into something else, by God. We do this in and through our life in Christ. We do it collectively as the Church and privately as every single individual who secretly wrestles with fear. We do it by wanting, more than anything, to see our fears, both public and private, finally overcome by the peace which comes with courage and must ultimately end in reconciliation.