Good Receiving

Being with children in the immediate aftermath of Christmas is not as demanding as many might suppose. It is challenging, but also re-creative, a short period of helping them to find a sense of equilibrium, or peace, following the highs and occasional lows of the build up to this celebration of abundance. Where children are concerned, it is a case of channelling excitement into directions which are going to prove ultimately rewarding. There is, for example, the matter of personal property. This is not just a case of respecting what belongs to someone else, but of respecting ‘things’ as they are and for the sake of the one who gave them. We learn the significance of things, and hence of gift, from a very early age, so we try to teach children that things matter, not only because of their intrinsic worth, but because they are signs of the love shown to us by the giver. This leads us into the deeper meaning of Christmas itself, because what we have really been celebrating and entering into in all the flurry and busyness of the season is the incomprehensible scale and nature of God’s love.

It is easy to blame the retail and advertising industries for playing on our human tendency for excess and greed, and thereby supposedly distracting us from what Christmas is about, but the real challenge to our own self righteousness in this respect is to allow our natural tendency to greed and excess to be transformed. When this happens, and it is down to us to allow it to happen, Christmas becomes a time for connecting with a goodness, often deeply hidden, which exists in ourselves and in human nature – that we want to bless those we love and be blessed by them. This blessing of one another connects us directly with God’s desire to bless us in Jesus. It is up to us to decide to receive that blessing. 

When it comes to the giving and receiving of presents, two things are significant – why we choose a particular gift for a particular person and how, if at all, they will make use of it. The first part of the equation is complex. If we give something because we like it ourselves, are we therefore giving it because we would like to own it? Or are we giving it, even though we may not like it at all, as an expression of solidarity with that person? Are we saying “I know you like these and I have found one which I like too, so I give it to you as a sign of my love and solidarity with you in who you are”? Even a ninja monster can have a certain attraction, but it is not the toy itself which is significant. It is the ‘knowing’ and empathising with the one who will receive it that matters. The ‘knowing’ smile I receive from my grandson as he plays with the ninja  builds an even stronger bridge between the two of us. The giver is blessed in the one who receives well.

The knowing smile exchanged between us is the ‘knowing’ smile given by God to those who are prepared to risk receiving Christ as a gift in their lives. In Jesus, God is saying “I know and love you as the one who matters to me more than anyone, so I give you my own beloved son who will transform your life, giving it purpose and meaning beyond anything you can imagine for yourself.”

‘Knowing’ moments only really happen when we are sufficiently vulnerable to receiving well – when we are prepared to be surprised by the love of the one doing the giving. In other words, when we are not focusing on ourselves. It is hard to do this at Christmas, or in any gift giving season, because we sometimes expect too much for ourselves in what we give, in how our gifts are received and in the host of attendant material and relational issues which surround the whole gift giving process. Where children are concerned, the business of receiving is more a matter of establishing rights and boundaries than of being in any sense open to the deeper blessings which come with gift. The task, therefore, is to teach restraint, patience (especially towards other siblings) and respect for things in a way which will gradually lead into a realisation that there is more to receiving than material wish fulfillment. Gifts matter because of the giver. Paradoxically, when it comes to receiving Christ, there is a certain kind of wish fulfillment, but it is of a different order. It is something that we perhaps never realised we were wishing for, that we are loved and valued by God beyond our wildest imaginings. 

God in a Hard Place

During one of my seasonal family catch-up calls I was telling my French cousin about our carol services. “O yes”, she said “I have such good memories of that charming English custom”. I do not often associate worship with charm, but perhaps she has a point, or then again, perhaps not. Carol services can be an opportunity for turning a deaf ear to the reality of the suffering which so many people endure at this time of year. They can sentimentalise poverty to the point of denial. But they are also good for the common soul. They reaffirm community.

 A good carol service flows without interruption, so it allows those who don’t normally attend church (perhaps because they can no longer bear to sit through bad sermons, and worship which is either arcane or shallow and, in both cases, meaningless) to experience something of the mystery of God’s coming to be among us. Carol services are inherently contemplative. They remind us of the particular bond we have with God in the person of Jesus Christ. They also afford a brief respite from the domestic realities of Christmas and from the harsher realities of the world around us, especially those of the Holy Land. So, in a sense, they are a form of escape, but a different kind of escape, an escape into God. 

 I do not think there is anything wrong with an hour or so spent escaping into God, even if it is only a brief respite from the general busyness of Christmas, as long as escaping into God doesn’t become an escape into sentimentality and self worship. It is quite easy to tell the difference between escaping into God and escaping into sentimentality, or into oneself, because escaping into God involves being absolutely real about the needs and suffering of others, including the needs of the person sitting in the pew in front. Escaping into God begins with sensing, perhaps for the first time, that it is a joy and a privilege to share the load which that person may secretly be bearing. 

This is where true worship begins. True worship only occurs where love is allowed to be in control of our wills and of our lives. The escape afforded by an hour spent singing carols is in fact a journey into the love of God. But it only becomes worship when that love is de-privatised, when it is done in a spirit of desire for God and for the well being and healing of others. Being aware of the person in the pew in front of us as potentially hurting in some way leaves us with no choice but to take that person with us in our escape into God. We hide them in the love of God, while still singing the carol or listening to one of the readings. 

Once the person in the pew in front is safely hidden in the love of God, we can turn our hearts (while still singing the carol or listening to the reading) to the enormous suffering that goes on around us all the time. Invariably, this suffering involves violence of one kind or another and sometimes violence perpetrated in God’s name. I think at the moment of young men and women being radicalised to hate, fight and kill in the name of religion. I also think of the injustices endured by the Palestinians. They, and those who persecute them, also need to be hidden in the love of God. 

None of this takes away from the charm of carol singing. Instead, it raises the charming to the level of pathos, a word which in turn shapes the idea of empathy, or  ‘suffering with’. Pathos, with all its beauty, is what God, in the vulnerability of the infant Christ, brings to the brittle world of cruel achievement. The pathos of the Nativity is in the dispossession of Palestinians. So it is worth remembering, as we sing about the 'deep and dreamless sleep' of Bethlehem, that we are all implicitly involved in the commercial achievements brought about by this particular form of cruelty and injustice.

The mercy which God offers comes from a hard place. In the harsh realities which surrounded the birth of Jesus, he brings together the vulnerability and beauty of all that is innocent with everything that is hard and cruel, from the most petty and seemingly insignificant act of selfishness, to the great swathe of human suffering which surrounds us on every side. In all of this God is reaching out for us in our ugliness and violence and inviting us into himself. It is what those charming carols are all about. 

  

No Passing Joy

The less we understand about the mystery of life and death, the more necessary it becomes to frame life’s defining moments through ritual. Ritual and the customs which surround death give voice to what cannot be spoken. They not only process grief, but make it possible for people to meet one another at a depth which is beyond language and find there a common love and a shared hope. It is the shared hope which is so pivotal about the passing of Nelson Mandela, expressed in the opposite of mourning, as joy in the midst of sadness, a celebration of gift in the context of loss. 

Joy transforms the nature of grief itself, but it takes courage to allow this to happen. South Africans are a courageous people blessed with an exceptionally courageous leader who took his nation from a place of darkness to a place of light. The suffering which he endured alongside his people has given an added dimension to the joy they experience now as they remember him. It has also given their grief a substance, meaning and purpose which will sustain their hope for the future. He gave purpose to their suffering, so the grief which they experience now adds, in a mysterious way, to the substance of the joy.

Grief and joy together make for shared hope and, if we will allow it, for enduring love. For love to endure and for a nation to continue to grow in that love, fear has to be continually confronted and overcome. Already, the sceptics are wondering if the Rainbow Nation will survive. Worse still, are those who are adding to the fear by speaking the language of paranoid violence. It takes courage for grief to be channelled in such a way as to allow its particular joy to overwhelm such fears and make hope a reality rather than wishful thinking.

All of these considerations give Christians and people of faith a focus for prayer. Focused prayer is not a matter of asking for specific things. It is more about placing ourselves before God in an attitude of supplication for the kind of enduring love which overcomes fear and transforms nations – and Churches. For Christians, and for the Church especially, praying for transformation faces us with the question of whether we ourselves know how to tap into the kind of joy which South Africans are manifesting in this time of mourning, and whether we are willing to do this. After all, the Church has much to mourn over, much to be thankful for and therefore much to hope for. In the past few months, a bill allowing women to be consecrated as bishops in the Church in Wales and in the Church of England has presented us with an opportunity, an absolute necessity, to allow joy to overwhelm fear, so as to generate real and substantial hope. We are not talking about indulging in a passing moment of happy celebration before we get down to the challenges which will inevitably come in the future. We are talking about holding on to joy and pain at the same time, so as to allow for hope. This can only be done through forgiveness and the re-establishment of trust. So we are talking about allowing unconditional love to reshape our Church.

As with South Africa, there has to be a reason for doing this, and there has to be conviction. Nelson Mandela was convinced that forgiveness and moving forward together in a spirit of joy was the only way to transform a nation. In the life of the Church, women and their supporters need to be convinced that the joy we all experienced as a result of the Governing Body and Synod votes belongs to the whole Church and that it is not only, or primarily, ours. We are not the only people with a right to be joyful. Mandela’s joy was for all his people and his victory through suffering was a victory won with all of them through forgiveness. If, as women, we persist in allowing overt triumphalism to define who we are and how we relate to the whole Church, it will diminish us and our victory will be a hollow one. The celebration of that victory will have little of real substance to bring to the ongoing life of the Church and little of the good news of the Gospel to bring to the world. The good news is about hope fulfilled and joy which endures through unconditional love, and through forgiveness made possible by grace.

From Darkness to Light

There is something totemic about comets. They are bearers of things. They hold in themselves something of the stuff of creation, assuming they survive their close encounter with the sun without being vapourised. They embody something of ourselves, the DNA of existence, perhaps. I have not yet seen the comet Ison and we are not sure when or where our household here in this beautiful valley in South Wales should be on the lookout for it, allowing for cloud cover. There is very little light pollution here, so we simply wait and hope for a sighting of this fiery beauty before it returns to the darkness of deep space. 

While thinking about the comet I thought about Syria and the devastation there, the wounded and tortured children, the complete absence of anything which could make it possible for a society to function with the normality most of us take for granted. Syria is darkness. I also thought about Iran and the talks which have taken place recently in Geneva where leaders have sat down and sought with determination a way out of the darkness of enmity, an enmity which has brought hardship and suffering to a great number of people in all the countries involved. Iranians have endured siege conditions of varying magnitude for over 30 years. Their neighbours, as well as the rest of us, have never grown used to living with the fear of nuclear terrorism.  Both of these situations pertain to the realm of darkness.

Enmity is darkness. It is a state of being in which we actively refuse to see or acknowledge others, as they exist and suffer in their own darkness. It is a situation without hope in which we are thrown back upon ourselves and back into ancient hatreds. The darkness of enmity is as near to hell as it is possible to imagine.

Darkness can engulf even the best of situations, where good is the overall objective, as when the lights go out in a room while a doctor is in the middle of a life saving operation on a battle field or in a disaster zone. There is no one to turn the lights on again, or no power available and no more anaesthetic with which to complete the operation without the patient suffering unbearable pain. Confusion, corruption and lawlessness. Another state of darkness. The world is in this kind of darkness. 

Last night I attended a very beautiful Advent service in one of our local parish churches. It began in darkness out of which came the sound of voices singing out the world’s longing for the coming of a Saviour, for light in our darkness. The sound of the voices embodied light, if such a thing is imaginable. It embodied the light of hope. Hope was made real, tangible and sacramental, or holy, in a community coming together in this ancient building, as others have done before them for thousands of years, to bear witness to the reality of the light which is Jesus come into the world. He has come, and will come again, not to magic away all suffering but to take away enmity and despair. Despair is the real darkness, but it has not overcome the light. Because of the coming of Christ, and his taking into himself our human nature, it never will.

Reality Check

Looking back on last week, the best that I have seen of television has invariably majored on violence. This does not include sport, which I seldom watch, although if there was a regular slot for Clydesdale horse racing, of which I caught a passing glimpse early on Saturday evening, I would certainly make an exception.  The power and grace of these gentle creatures. The earth trembled as they galloped past.

Human beings have a fatal attraction to violence, and to its seductive power, an attraction that is outside their control and of which they are therefore afraid. As I look back over the past week in which violence, both fictional and real, has figured quite significantly, I wonder whether this state of denial of our fear is really a healthy approach to the reality of a violent world and of our own violent inclinations. Take the 50^th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. For one thing, it is hard to separate the reality of an event like the shooting of a President from the reality of the films which have been made about it, some of which were also shown last week. 

Which of the two categories falls under the heading of ‘entertainment’?  Entertainment helps to take us out of ourselves and to draw a line between reality and fantasy. We need films, as well as documentary drama (and how are we to tell one from the other these days?), to help us understand ourselves better and to come to terms with the ‘real’ violence on the evening news. Films take us out of ourselves long enough to test the boundaries, and reinstate them if necessary, between fantasy and reality. But we also have to face the reality.

Put in the simplest of terms, we have to separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ while remaining as far as possible objective and unbiased. Pre-digested news, as well as films and drama, help us to do this. Quality news reporting and intelligent drama oblige us to look for motive, as well as meaning. The motive for violence, on whatever scale it is occurring, is tied to what a person or ethnic community holds to be right and important, so there are layers and categories of good and bad in all violent situations and these can change as circumstances develop. Things are seldom simply good or simply bad, simply right or simply wrong.

Fictionalised violence can make it difficult to move away from an over simplification or abstraction of this reality and to know how to think about it, how to judge it and then confront it in such a way as to effect real change for the good. The reality of violence in places and situations of conflict is happening to real people in real time. But this is also where film is helpful.

Facing violence in different contexts, both real and fictional, is essential to collective self understanding. It is the collective, and not just the individual, which makes it possible to make sense of the violence we see all around us, because we are in it together. We are all perpetrators and victims of the human tendency to violence. Perpetrators are those who are caught up in the violence done in their name to others, even if they are not actively engaged in it. They are also victims of the hatred which that violence perpetuates. But hatred can ultimately be defeated by the collective will, as the city of Dallas, once known as a city of hate, demonstrated on Friday.

When it comes to the reality of violence, and all violence is real, being in it together makes it harder to go on hating. It makes it harder to allow hatred to poison human relationships between faith communities, across the barriers of gender prejudice, between generations. These are all potentially violent contexts. They are contexts in which human sin operates in generating hatred in all its nuanced manifestations. This is a reality which has to be faced privately by every human being in whatever context a person exists, but it also has to be faced together.

We can only face the reality of violence and human sin by being in relationship with a loving and merciful God who embraced the human condition as a victim of violence from the moment of his Incarnation. We face it with him, and he faces it with us, in our individual lives and as members of the human race, as perpetrators and as victims. In the coming weeks of Advent we might begin to face this reality while watching the news or a film. 

Tacloban's Emanuel

The last human sound to be heard on earth will not be a whimper. It will be a cry of protest - "Why?"

“Why?”  is the great levelling question, whether you have a faith or not. Perhaps it is also the question which starts us out on life. The newborn infant’s cry is rarely a whimper. More often, it is a cry of protest, demanding an explanation. Why has the infant been thrust from the comforting darkness of the womb into the noise and light of an alien environment? Why this enforced submission to the hands of other human beings? Perhaps she is also protesting at what she knows to be the beginning of a difficult lifetime, the protracted end which leads to death. 

At moments of intense trauma, particularly those of birth, death, fear or loss, the question is always “Why?”  Anyone who has allowed themselves to engage with what has happened to the people of the Philippines (and there are probably many who have not), will be asking it still. Whether or not they think of themselves as  people of faith, they will be asking this question of God, either directly or indirectly.

We only really ask “why?” when reality kicks in, when we experience trauma ourselves or because someone we love is going through hard times. Direct experience of the suffering of others, even if we are not there to share it with them, proceeds from love. So when we allow ourselves to be touched by what is happening to the people of Tacloban and its outlying regions, we are loving them as deeply as it is possible for one human being to love another. We are asking with them for a response to the question “Why?”

 A response is not an answer. It does not solve problems or provide definitive explanations. When asked of God, it does not even allow us to apportion blame where blame seems to belong. Instead, God’s response to the pain and the loss of the Philippine people, to its cause as well as to its effect, is that he is fully present to both.

The only surviving buildings pictured in some of the many photographs to come out of Tacloban are a church and a sports stadium. Both are places where people normally gather, but the church has a special significance. People are sleeping there, being cared for with the very limited resources available – and they are praying. They are probably asking “Why?”, wondering what God’s purpose can be in all this, as if God had caused it all to happen as a kind of cautionary tale pointing to the human destruction of the environment. Those who are suffering in Tacloban do not need to hear cautionary tales. It is the rest of us who need to hear them. What the Philippine people do need, however, is the sure knowledge that God is fully present to them, that he is literally ‘tenting’ with them, to use the biblical expression from the book of Exodus. He is totally bound up in their situation. He is with the children, the anxious and exhausted parents, the elderly, the relief forces, all those still waiting for food, water and medical supplies. 

The name Jesus is a translation of Emanuel which means ‘God with us’. God’s presence with the suffering is not just a comforting idea. It is a reality voiced in the “why?”, a question which refuses to make do with platitudes or pious clichés, a question which insists on response. Jesus is both the question and the response. His life is so bound up with ours that it is impossible to separate them. Wherever we are, there is Emanuel, God with us, and wherever he is, there too are we, both in this life and in the next. 

From the Edge

News Flash!

My new website From the Edge,  www.lorrainecavanagh.net , is now live.

From the Edge is for people who are on the edge of the Church.  It’s especially for those who are thinking of returning to faith, or to church on a regular basis, and don’t quite know where to begin. It is also intended as a useful resource for those in pastoral or outreach ministry.

From the Edge  will continue to grow and provide thought provoking and prayerful material in addition to this blog The site also links to all my published books, including my latest, Beginning Again, which is my first venture into publishing for Kindle.  If you are interested, please consider buying it and, most importantly, don’t forget to post a review on Amazon!

Please share this with as many people as possible and especially to anyone who is either thinking of picking up their faith again, or exploring Christianity for the first time.

Remembrance

Television commercials are becoming an art form.  Some are more intelligent, and certainly more visually appealing, than the programs they sponsor. The fact that I seldom remember what the program was, let alone what it was about, but that I do remember the ad, is evidence in itself. At the same time, the commercial is often too clever by half, forced along by a relentlessly throbbing sound beat which barely has a chance to finish before the next one, with an almost identical rhythm backing, takes its place. All of this makes it difficult to grasp what it is that is being advertised, or to hang on to the basic substance of the program itself. 

The beat, the pulse, the clever graphics of TV commercials, convey something of what life is supposed to be like now – short term, fast moving, with no holds barred. Everything is possible, we are told, anything is achievable if we move to the beat and pulse which drives prosperity forward. Too bad if you can’t keep up, whatever the reason.

Today there will be a pause in the frenetic beat of the average week day morning, possibly of sufficient impact to slow city traffic for more than a few minutes. Wherever an Act of Remembrance takes place, it will be a moment for being present to its unfamiliar stillness in the beat and throb of life. Most of those taking part will be briefly present to a particular event which they are blessed never to have experienced for themselves. So it will be an act of remembrance rather than remembering. Remembrance is a deep collective state of mind which takes us beyond memories and unites us across generations.

Being present to the conflicts of the past, as they are epitomised in the Great War, is not quite the same thing as remembering. It is more of a bringing the past into the present and standing in it, sensing its own relentless noise and beat. In the remembrance of the terrifying beat of conflicts past, we are made one with previous generations who fought conflicts in the belief that in doing so, they would mark the end of all conflict. We are grateful to them and humbled by their courage and extraordinary generosity of spirit. Those who have died in more recent conflicts are part of their number. They are who we might have been. They are all one generation because all have laid down their lives for us in our generation. 

This moment of silence and of remembrance does not compel us to do something, to respond to the deep pulse of the moment by adding to the existing noise around us. In fact, it reminds us of how little we can do to either prevent war or to make wars end in a way which will lead to lasting peace.  It compels us to know and experience in the silence of the moment humanity’s need for forgiveness. ‘ Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy’ translates into the faith language of all who are caught up in conflicts today. The act of remembrance is one of solidarity with them, as together we ask for mercy and forgiveness from one another and from God.

The Meaning of Life

Our lives, from the moment of conception, are a search for connectedness. We begin as one germ of life seeking to connect with another. Out of the two, a human being is created. Not any human being, only that particular one, in all his or her particularity.  The particularity of the human person, and of all sentient beings, is not simply uniqueness or ‘specialness’. Being ‘special’ is a rather bland term which appeals to our personal insecurities but says little about the value of life, or about the real self.

The idea of particularity resonates with intention, God’s intention to create a person, a species, a world, and universe upon universe, in an ongoing process whose mysteries we have barely begun to penetrate.  When scientists do touch on these mysteries they are connecting with something already known, already brought into existence by love itself. They are discovering truth in a particular way as they reveal something they already knew to be true. This is not only about proving a theory. It is more like the kind of discovery the artist makes when he or she stumbles on  truth, the only way an intuition can be communicated in words, or colour, or stone.  Creativity belongs to science, art and the realm of faith. It is about connecting with something already known but which we need to discover again and again. This is a very powerful need, peculiar to humans, or at least that is what we assume. Human beings need to know the meaning and purpose of their lives and of the whole of existence in a definable way.

Thinking about this, I wonder if the house martins who nest under the eaves above our front door aren’t involved in a similar urge to discover and make meaning. Their obedience to the call to return here each year, in order to nest and raise their young,  is perhaps a kind of reconnecting with meaning. They fly due north in a direct line from the shores of North Africa to the same spot in the same valley in South Wales.  They fly a ‘life’ line. If, as a result of climate change (caused by our human interference) they find, perhaps next year, that there are no insects, because it is unseasonably cold when they expect it to be warm, they will not survive. The life line will have been broken. It will have been broken in two places, the first physical, and the other perhaps spiritual pertaining to the realm of meaning and purpose, as God has ordained it for house martins.

Perhaps this sense of purpose and meaning keeps migrating birds in flight, as it does human beings whose lives are held with theirs in the ongoing life of God. For human beings to be at peace with themselves, their lives need to have meaning, direction and purpose.  Their lives need to be energised so that they can make meaning from within the greater life which they share with God. This is the life of the Holy Spirit which energises all existence and from which come wisdom and understanding.

The bible tells us that wisdom is of the highest price, the most valuable of all treasures and that it is to be desired and sought above all other things. Wisdom is God’s own energy ‘working’, literally ‘energising’, all of life. Wisdom begins when a person realises that they are more than a collection of cells, or an accident of nature, but that they belong in the wider ambience of the love of God. Wisdom comes with the realisation that our lives have a purpose which is worked out in and with the lives of others, including the lives of birds like the house martins. When we pause for a moment, aware of our connectedness with the created world, we are more alive than we were perhaps five minutes ago when we were absorbed by our own self and its immediate short term needs and desires.  Jesus told his disciples to go out and make other disciples, not because he wanted a huge personal following, but because he had allowed them to discover and understand something which makes the difference between life and death. It involves knowing that in Christ we are fully alive. In him, we are deeply connected to one another in God.

Between Times

We waited and it never happened. After all that careful storage of dustbins in the greenhouse, along with other potential missiles lying about in the garden, the hurricane passed us by. Spring and Autumn have always been unpredictable times. Allowing for the anomalies of climate change, they are still thought of as transition periods between the more predictable seasons of summer and winter. They are ‘between times’.

There are two ‘between times’ in the Christian year. One of them falls towards the end of the calendar year and the other at the end of January or in early February. We are coming into one of these ‘between times’ now. It is known as the Kingdom Season. It precedes Advent, as it corresponds, in a calendar sense, to the season of Epiphany which precedes Lent.  The Kingdom Season is a time of preparation for a further time of making ready – making ready for the coming of God’s Son into the world and of his embracing of the human condition.

What is the Kingdom? Jesus speaks of it often, and yet it is easy for it to be relegated to the realm of hopes and dreams, a kind of Nirvana. But the kingdom for which we pray when we say ‘thy Kingdom come’ is about the grittiness of life in the present and about the uncertain future which we all face.  Both are as real as the humanity which God embraced in Jesus. The Kingdom is about making real the presence of Jesus Christ in the here and now. It is about creating real hope in a seemingly hopeless world. It is about the things which can be changed when we human beings put our knowledge and gifts to the service of God, rather than using them to prolong or sustain the fantasies which keep us going – which make achievers and ‘do’ers’ of us, rather than people who appear to be doing nothing, who seem to have failed and are written off as a burden on society. The reverse side of success is not failure. It is shame.

The Kingdom Season is therefore a time for taking a second look at our immediate surroundings, because this is where the Kingdom of which Christ speaks is being shaped. It is shaped by the people we fail to embrace, or even notice, most of the time. They are the elderly person who passes by every afternoon on some routine errand which is the high point of their day. They are the Big Issue seller. Whatever views a person holds about how the Big Issue operates, or about those who work a particular patch, selling it day after day in the streets is not the way most of us would choose to live our lives. If we are fortunate enough to work from home in a beautiful part of the world, sometime between 5 and 7pm on a weekday evening, we might think of the millions travelling uncomfortably on trains and motorways as they return from another day spent doing a dull or unrewarding job. All these people are the Kingdom waiting to happen. They are the Christ we must embrace.

In Good Company

The pressure to be at the cutting edge of what is inappropriately termed social networking can leave little time or emotional energy for real engagement with others. It is hard to survive, let alone thrive, in a culture of relentless communication, or at least in what passes for communication, because the kind of communication being offered is not sociality in the fullest sense. Millions experience loneliness on a daily basis, even if they possess a smart phone, and loneliness amounts to failure, especially if you are young.

Real sociality begins in the textured relationships of family and in deep friendship. It is in these contexts that trust is learned. Trust involves knowing another person and allowing ourselves to be known by them. We can only do this by engaging with them in real time and as real people. In the contexts of family and of deep friendship we learn the truth about ourselves and, as a result, learn to understand and have compassion for others. The most valuable friendships are often trans-generational. Older people have much to teach and much to give, and the same is true in reverse. Older people want to learn and receive from younger generations because in so doing they remain connected to society. Older people are often excellent listeners and on the whole pretty un-shockable. They know that human nature does not change all that much over time and that we all make the same mistakes, usually for the same reasons. This giving and taking of wisdom across the generations is real sociality.

Through understanding and compassion, learned by spending real time with another person, in real life, rather than ‘following’ ‘friending’ (or unfriending’) them in a virtual world, we also learn what sacrificial love entails and why it is necessary. Sacrificial love is not about making oneself into someone else’s passive listening post. It is about actively ministering to the loneliness in that person by hearing them in their humanity. In other words, by knowing how to befriend them in the fullest sense. In the social world of networking, we are consumers of a fabrication of friendship but seldom the beneficiaries of the real thing. Fabricated friendship does not minister into loneliness. It helps to briefly assuage it at a certain level but loneliness returns when the iphone or computer is turned off.

There is nothing new about loneliness. In one sense it is part of the human condition, which is not to say that we should try to ignore it in ourselves, or be indifferent to it in others. It is just that most of us don’t know how to deal with loneliness – our own or anyone else’s. Our unconscious response to the loneliness we sense in ourselves is to go online as quickly as possible, so as to reassure ourselves that we belong through the familiar but delusory panacea of emails and social networking sites. When it comes to the loneliness of others, if we notice it at all, we often have nothing to say – other than a quick facebook comment. Deeper connectedness can be hard to establish or maintain if we are not used to doing it in real time. Relating to the lonely person is like not knowing what to say to someone who has been recently bereaved. Lonely people are in a state of permanent bereavement. Like the suffering servant in the book of Isaiah, they are ‘cut off, from the land of the living’ (Is.53:8). What can we do to connect with them?

I do not think we can do much to lift the burden of loneliness from another person until we have learned the value of solitude and silence. Solitude is not loneliness. It is the way in to a deep connectedness first, with God, and subsequently with others. In actively embracing solitude, and in valuing silence, we learn what it means to be in good company, the company of God himself. Silence is not about the absence of noise, any more than solitude is about the absence of people. They both are a way of making space for God at all times and in all places. We carry this rich silence around with us, along with the steadiness of mood and purpose brought by solitude. Silence and solitude are within us. They teach us to communicate, so that we can hear and be with the lonely, even if we have never met them. They transform the way we engage with social networking because they allow the loving kindness of God into its loneliness.

Courage and Filial Love

Where does courage come from? What would it look like in you? Christiane Amanpour’s interview with Malala Yousafzai and Malala’s father (CNN Sunday, October 13^th) showed us courage – what it can look like and how it is nurtured. Not everyone will experience being shot on the school bus, so it is tempting to think that Malala’s steadfastness, grace, humility and passionate compassion is somehow unique to her. In a sense, it is, of course, because of the circumstances and because of her own giftedness as a human being. But we are all gifted human beings. We can all be brave if we know where and how to look for courage in ourselves.

It took at least two other people to nurture Malala’s gift, her parents and probably other members of her extended family. We only caught a glimpse of her mother on the programme but Malala’s relationship with her appears to be quintessentially normal – a healthy loving relationship which any young adolescent girl might have with her mother. But Malala’s father seems to have had the greater influence over her life so far, although the word ‘influence’ barely does justice to the courage he must have had to draw on, in order to raise his children with such integrity and unswerving loyalty to truth.

Truth is what drives courage because truth proceeds directly from the love which is of God. Christians see this love in the person of Jesus and in the relationship of trust which he had with the Father. When a person is loved unconditionally by their parents they will be experiencing something of God’s love. It will have taught them to tell the difference between what is true and what is a lie, especially when the lie is dressed up as true religion. They will learn to feel passionately about truth and about the freedom needed for truth to prevail over lies. These are the lies which deny and obscure God’s love for his people, and all people are God’s people, whatever religious path they follow. So a lie is recognised for what it is because it jars with the kind of truth which proceeds from the unconditional love of God. 

Malala will have learned through the courage and integrity of her parents, especially of her father, how to tell the difference between what is a lie and what is true. Her upbringing will have taught her that perverted religion goes against love. Where religion systematically crushes the life out of people, it cannot be true and should be resisted with everything one has to give. This is courage. Even the smallest degree of courage involves holding to the kind of truth which is life giving and therefore of love. It comes at a price. It is not just a matter of doing the right thing, because courage is more than a virtue to be honed and developed through hard ‘character building’ work. It is about laying claim to our full humanity in whatever testing circumstances we may be in. Malala’s testing circumstances were not what most of us have to face on a daily basis, unlike those who are caught up in the cross fire of war or of lawless anarchy. 

Our own testing moments are often so small that we fail to notice them and only later regret not having spoken the necessary word, or taken a decision which might have cost us personally, in order to prevent an injustice at work or in family life. When we are required to show courage it is our humanity which is being tested and our humanity is known in the fullness of our love and in the integrity of our faith.  In the integrity of her own faith, Malala resisted threats, intimidation and lies so that others might know what courage looks like, and where to find it in themselves when they need it.

Sofascape

Downton Abbey and Homeland are back. I have been trying to hold on to the plot lines of both for some months now. As a result, I only have a tenuous grip on what is going on, which at times is problematic, especially with Homeland. Fortunately, I also have an ever patient husband who not only fills me in on the plot but, incredibly, is able to record two or more programs at once. He can even fast forward the ads when we’re watching the ‘live’ showing. This is something I’ve never been able to get my head round, with the result that when he’s away programs which ought to last an hour take twice as long and I end up going to bed before they’ve finished. I’m determined to get on top of this before he goes away again. 

On Sunday, we were faced with two defining questions (they would define the evening and how we would be feeling by the end of it and possibly for some of the following day), which of the two to watch first – Downton or Homeland? We went for Homeland, as I didn’t want to risk the appalling prospect of something going wrong with the recording gizmo. A bird in the bush is worth – well, something. The following evening we watched Downton which, in any case, had been preserved for us by a universal device ‘out there’ somewhere which enables you to watch programs you might have missed. This is something I haven’t got my head round yet and I must admit, it worries me. In fact, it’s a concern which ranks third in my ‘life’s urgent to do tasks’, after making sure our wills are up to date and planning our funerals. The idea of being condemned to living alone on a diet of Come Dining, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (and others of a similar genre), and a range of same-ish talk shows is too awful to contemplate.

But then there’s always the news, that part of the evening when we connect with a world which somehow carries on against all odds. I have no problem getting on to my favourite news channels – CNN’s Amanpour followed by the second half of Channel 4 – back to CNN if Channel 4 is not up to par, but back again to Channel 4 in time for the weather and that interesting little reflection on faith and ethics which follows.

After that, it’s a case of processing the news through  cooking.  One of the reasons why programs like Downton Abbey and Homeland are significant is that they allow us to process reality through non reality.  Downton hails back to a golden past, although it was golden only for the very few. Their lives were serviced by, and entirely dependent on a majority who, in different ways, were the ‘below stairs’ population of an entire nation. Downton is also a microcosm in which to experience the concerns of patriarchal privilege. With the sudden departure of her personal maid, who will dress the Duchess of Grantham?

 Downton’s world is also heavily sanitised. This, we all know, and are prepared to go along with because of the costumes and location, perhaps, and the great one-liners given to Maggie Smith. But also because it occupies the imagination in such a way as to allow space for the much harsher world which existed for some, and which continues to exist now in other parts of the world. At the same time, it reminds us of how much less stressful life could be if we could expect courtesy to shape the way we relate to others, instead of having to legislate for it. 

Downton provides us with an imaginative space in which to process reality. Homeland  does the same thing, but in a different way. It shows us a contemporary America that is fast becoming something of the past. In a curious way Homeland is beginning to feel more ‘dated’ than Downton because in the reality which we currently inhabit, it is becoming plain that America can no longer afford to maintain its Lone Ranger persona in the world. Homeland gives us the chance to take this reality on board, paradoxically, by taking us into the world of espionage and counter-terrorism in a way which seems all too real. So Homeland gives us some mental space in which to come to terms with how power might function in the future in the light of what are still recent memories. It also offers us a slightly different way to pray. Prayer can now be shaped and given substance with the help of a television drama which reflects something of our collective fears and paranoia and of our fascination with violence. This in turn helps us to begin to pray into the realities we are currently faced with. We might begin by praying for America and its future. 

The Beginning of the Academic Year - The Right Way to Learn

It is the beginning of the academic year. The new student is both bewildered and excited. He or she must decide what courses or papers to do, and discover whether the room-mate is quite what they’d hoped for, where are the best places to hang out with friends and, finally, locate the Chaplaincy which many who never thought of themselves as religious may later find to be a home from home, a real stronghold.

Having been a mature student myself, I have found that the defining moment in a person’s first week at university comes with their first lecture, or supervision or tutorial. At the end of it they know for sure whether or not they are in the right place doing the right thing. If the course is right, and the place is right, a certain bond of understanding will have established itself between those who are taught and those who teach. This is because the purpose of good education is to ‘lead out’ (from the Latin ‘educare’), to free a person into real creativity. The person teaching is therefore entrusted with a great responsibility. Their task is to connect with the student in the realm of understanding, which is not always the same as knowing a great many facts. Teachers are asked to convey something more than information to those they are serving. Their task is one of ministry. They minister to the unique person in ‘leading’ or ‘drawing out’ the best of that person. 

Good teachers change lives, because they sense, or ‘intuit’, how to connect with those they are teaching at the head-heart level where a person’s real longings and dreams for a better life and a better world are lodged. It is here that the imagination is first awakened in childhood and it is in knowing how to rekindle that imagination that a teacher connects with a pupil or student and enables that person to learn. Real thinking begins with imagination. So learning is not just a matter of acquiring information, but of discovering what it is that we are really seeking in the context of classroom or lecture hall. In doing so, we know immediately whether the course we have chosen is right for us. If it is not right, my advice to a new student would be to seek out a wise and trustworthy teacher and ask for their help in changing courses. Time dedicated to study and training are usually a once in a life time opportunity, a gift, even though we pay for it, which is not to be wasted on the wrong subject. 

In an age where education is fast becoming a commodity and students are no longer learners, but consumers or clients, the ability to learn, and later work imaginatively is vital. A course which is geared to a particular profession needs people whose imagination has been developed so that they can apply what they have learned for the betterment of other human beings, of society and to the survival of the planet. They need to have learned disciplined imagination. This is the point of all those essays and lab experiments.

Disciplined imagination enables us to engage with the wider purpose of a loving Creator. So academic work, or any kind of professional training, is the most important gift we can give to anyone, because it will equip them to participate in the re-making, the re-creation, of God’s world. We are training them to be agents of his mercy, his redemptive love. A lawyer working on a case, a doctor treating a patient, politicians and those engaged in commerce and finance will all be part of this process. Each is given the means, through their education and training, to work for justice, or healing, or fair and honest standards of trading and financial transactions.

Two things emerge from this. The first is that no one can learn and later apply wisdom to their work if they are primarily concerned with their own advancement or personal benefit – the ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude which has crept into all areas of public and commercial life, especially since the 1980’s. The same is true, paradoxically, of talent or gift that is sacrificed or compromised out of pragmatism or a misplaced sense of duty.

The second is every bit as important as the first. It involves accountability, being willing to take responsibility for one’s work and for its effect on others. Ultimately, we shall be accountable before God for the way we have used the gifts he has given us, including our own professional skills and intelligence. Part of that accountability involves how we think of those who we have been trained to serve. Are they simply clients, or consumers from whom we benefit personally? (whatever we may tell them or, for that matter, tell ourselves.) Or are they our own kin, part of the human family, whose wellbeing matters to us? Their wellbeing will include getting value and quality for the services they pay for and truthful integrity from those they elect to govern them. Learning to be responsible to God, to other members of the human family and to the planet itself is the purpose of any study and of any work. Nothing must get in the way of it.

The Face of Good Religion

What is really the issue at stake when the subject of religious apparel appears once again in the newspapers? It seems that the rights of the individual to express their religion through what they wear are more divisive than the beliefs and mores which it sustains. But religion is not about the rights of individuals to express themselves, unless doing so communicates the idea of a merciful God. To take this a step further, religion lived out as faith is more than an idea. It is about living that love, and wanting it to be known and experienced by others, through the love we are given for them by God himself.

Good religion binds people together into God’s love, the word ‘religion’ being rooted in the latin ‘ligare’, meaning to bind together. It is about the making and strengthening of the life of community from within the depths of the love of God. Religion, when it is good, is born of that love and ultimately returns us to it, whichever path we choose to follow. But the choice is not meant to be purely for own individual satisfaction. Others must see God in the kind of person who claims to follow him. They must see the face of God in her every word, gesture and action, so that they can understand from that person what it is to be loved unconditionally by our Creator. 

The wearing of a Cross or niqab is only problematic when it actively prevents such understanding . If a young child is frightened by her teacher’s appearance, or a hospital patient feels that he is unable to relate to his nurse or doctor because he cannot see their face, then whatever is preventing him from doing so should be removed. Such obstacles to human relations in pastoral, teaching or legal contexts are not limited to the wearing of a niqab. They may also include crosses (especially oversize or ostentatious ones) whether or not they are worn out of religious conviction. Anything that disturbs or frightens a vulnerable person, or makes it difficult to apply the law in a judicial context cannot be good religion.

Contextuality is the defining point in this issue. As Christians, we try, without really trying, to be Christ to others in whatever situation we find ourselves in. We should not be thinking about what we are wearing in this respect. Rather, we should be forgetting ourselves enough to love the other person with everything we have to bring of ourselves to that task. As far as possible, we should understand their facial and body language, and be wise to these things as Christ was in all his dealings with people. Being Christ to others is not just a matter of adapting to people’s views or swallowing all things secular without taking the trouble to think how conducive they are to the flourishing of the human person. The human person is not the same as the individual, because that person is already known by God and does not need to define their identity by what they wear or own. The person’s rights have long since been met in knowing and being known by God.

Being Christ to others means that we desire more than anything that others should achieve full personhood. This requires the kind of trust which is the basis of real friendship. We become transparent to Christ while being more fully and freely ourselves, not as individuals conforming to the expectations of trend or fashion, but as persons. Through this kind of friendship others will see his face and experience his peace and joy. The young child in the classroom and the patient in hospital or surgery need to see the face of God in those who care for them. As for all people of faith, we must consider how we appear to people when we oblige them to take note of our religion through what we are wearing. 

The Christian ought to communicate his or her faith by being, above all, a person whose identity is shaped by his or her inner life with Christ, so that the people they meet can see the face of Christ in theirs. It is not hard to imagine that Muslims would want others to meet a merciful God in a similar way. I would welcome their comments.

The Church in Wales and Women Bishops

The 12^th of September 2013, was a momentous day for the Church in Wales, which, along with the Anglican Church in Scotland and Ireland, will now see women as bishops in the foreseeable future. There is great cause for celebration even though the appointment of a woman to the episcopate may not actually take place here for some time, given the scarcity of episcopal vacancies. So women and their supporters in the Church in Wales have time to prepare, as people who now know what winning feels like and who have also known what it is to lose.

There should be no losers or winners in the aftermath of this vote, any more than there were losers and winners at the foot of the Cross. We are all ‘losers’, in that context, and we are all winners when we hear our names called by the risen Christ outside the empty tomb. So this life changing vote must also be a vote which transforms the way we hear and understand calling. It must be the beginning of the transformation of our life together as it frees us all to be better priests and bishops, both for one another and for the people we are called to serve, the latter being the ones who matter most.

Paying attention to calling changes the way we celebrate this historic event because it obliges us to hear Christ calling the whole of his Church. Until now, it has been hard to hear this call to the whole community of God in the Church in Wales. It seems that it has only been possible to hear him call certain groups or individuals, depending on whose side one was on with regard to the consecration of women to the episcopacy and, before that, of their ordination to the priesthood. Now we must hear Christ in an entirely new way, a way which celebrates freedom. But there cannot be freedom while there is still fear, so there will only be real cause for celebration when the fear that is still hanging over many people in regard to women’s ministry is overcome by the slow process of building trust. Freedom is not really freedom while there are still people who cannot let go of the past and move on to what is still an uncertain future. We cannot realistically talk of love overcoming fear until trust has been established, and by trust I mean trusting the new situation and being realistic about it.

Some people will continue to feel the hurt of the past and may take a while to heal. Healing comes about when individuals take the trouble to form real friendships across the barriers which still divide them – as well as checking that the friendships they already have are in good heart, that there is no ‘unfinished business’. There needs to be truth telling and truth hearing for real healing to be effected, both across party divisions, and between women themselves. As women, we shall need to take time to reflect on our own individual callings and on what the priesthood in the Church in Wales should now mean for everyone. It will involve asking certain questions of ourselves: Is our love genuine? Do we live richly towards one another? How can we live richly towards those who still cannot accept our ministry? How can we live richly towards God in the new world that is opening up before the Church?

Living richly towards others can only happen when we are resourced by the grace which comes with a lived experience of God’s forgiveness and acceptance. It is only when a person has known God’s forgiveness in the fullest sense that he or she is really free. Experiencing forgiveness means being released from a ‘stress position’, as it is termed in certain notorious places of captivity. We have all been held in a ‘stress position’, by a status quo that has endured too long and has done much damage to our relationships and to the credibility of our Church and of the Gospel itself. So it is the whole Church which needs to experience this forgiveness and the healing and acceptance which comes with it. Now is the time to begin this work with reverence for one another and in the fear of God.

The Already and the Not Yet

Yet another mesmeric TV drama is getting under way on BBC1. It is brilliantly directed, meticulously observed in both character and location and altogether compelling. But the problem for some of us viewers, with regard to the options available to us on evening television, lies in the fact that we are not exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding between light and darkness. It is mainly darkness of varying degrees and kinds – ranging from the morbid and frightening to the banal and plain boring that gets served up most evenings. I do not blame television producers for this. It is we viewers who provide the ratings, after all, and we seem to rate the dark very highly. Perhaps the same can be said of the news. Bad news is always good news.

Recently though, we have had a glimmer of genuinely good news where the turmoil in the Middle East is concerned. It is a glimmer, and not a blinding light, which is perhaps a sign of its goodness. It is encouraging, not so much because the diplomatic work being instigated by the Russians might just work out, but because it indicates that human beings can occasionally surprise themselves by the good they are capable of doing. There is the faintest possibility of détente if the Russians succeed in persuading the Syrians to surrender their chemical weapons and allow them to be destroyed. As with the perhaps intended delay of Congress and the House of Representatives in deciding whether or not they are prepared to back the President in targeted strikes, it provides a breathing space, or perhaps a stepping stone or two, as a means for all the major players in this lethal game to get out of the corners they have painted themselves into, without losing face. Let us hope that we don’t lose sight of this opportunity in arguments about who had the idea first.

A week or so ago, before the Pope put out his plea for prayer, or before the World Community for Meditation called on all its members to pause at noon on Saturday to pray for Syria, no such initiative had yet been dreamed of. There is no way of telling whether prayer made any difference, of course, because prayer operates on an entirely different level of consciousness and ultimate connectedness to that of the so called ‘real’ world.

We are connected to one another as families of individuals and ultimately as a family of nations, all held within the embrace of a loving God. We and God are an integrated whole. Even though that integration is constantly being threatened by conflict, something greater seems to be at work mending us, moving us on and remaking us, even in the midst of our own destructive actions, our own collective sin. The poet, George Herbert, would have called this benign force the 'engine' of prayer.  

Prayer is effected in a different dimension of time and movement, one in which the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ somehow occur together. When people come together to pray they are working with God’s own energy for the good. The engine of prayer, fuelled and fired by the love of God, overcomes the darkness with the light which it generates. It also beats to a different time. It beats to the rhythm of the heart of God. The prayer which is going on now for Syria and the Middle East has its origins in God who is from always to always, and whose energy will continue ‘unto the ages’ or ‘for ever and ever’, irrespective of who is doing the work of prayer and when it is being done. So the battle is, in a sense, already won and yet not quite won.

Action and initiative for the good in the present Middle East conflict are a sign of the Wisdom of God at work. The word ‘wisdom’ can also be translated as ‘spirit’. This opportunity for the good, initiated by Russia, and quickly endorsed by all parties to the conflict, has enormous potential for reconciliation both in the world and, because they are working together, for Christians of every denomination. The Pope’s call for prayer brings together the desires of the nations, which is really a deep desire for peace, and holds them in the desire of all Christians which is for the healing of those nations and of its own fragmented body, the Church.

Syria - Healing the Fever

There is a moment in St. Luke’s gospel when Jesus visits Simon’s mother in law who is suffering from a fever. (Luke 4:38) She may have been in the grip of a more serious illness of which the fever was only a symptom. Jesus, as we imagine him in that moment, leans over her and breathes healing. Perhaps he speaks to her as well. We don’t know. We can only imagine. There follows, as always when fever abates, a moment of lightness for the sufferer in which she senses around her the waiting, the whispers, the silence. Then the woman pulls through, suddenly, in a moment, and rises to see to her visitors’ needs. Jesus goes back out to the fevered crowd, and draws out ‘the demons’, the fever spirits who know goodness when they see it and scream out their fear and anger. Real goodness, in the face of evil, makes evil itself afraid.

The world is in fever at the moment. High fever, untreated, can make a person hallucinate, dream terrible dreams, toss and shiver and all the time dread some further development of their illness, and death itself. It is not a good time for making life or death decisions, and yet the West and its allies must make decisions because if it waits for too long it will inevitably succumb to the illness which is causing the fever. The illness is called hatred. So the West and its allies must be instigators of healing before they do anything else. 

The way we have intervened in past conflicts has been disastrous because the work of healing was not done in time for it to overcome hatred. Neither did we seek to cleanse the wounds of the past before taking direct action. Where Syria is concerned, we are called to be healers before there is any question of military intervention. It is too late for that, in any case. Healers are people who intervene in fevered situations, as Christ did. The emotional climate which prevails in the context of the present conflict  is the fever of hatred, a fever in which all of us feel ‘tender’. None of us dares to let ourselves be touched even by a hand which heals, especially if it is the hand of the perceived enemy. But at the heart of the matter lies the suffering of two million human beings who want only for this conflict to end so that they can go home and rebuild their lives, and it will only end when real healing is allowed to begin. 

Politically, there is a glimmer of hope. It is becoming clear that Russia does not want a showdown with the West, and the US and many ordinary Americans, as well as the British, have no stomach for war. The pointless conflicts of the last ten years, in the Middle East and beyond, have left them war weary. But they feel the fever, nevertheless, and yearn for real goodness to enter into this situation and heal it before hatred takes over.

Goodness is a matter of wisdom which, properly understood, is God’s mercy and forgiveness at work healing the world of the fever of hatred. Wisdom comes with the compassionate detachment of a good doctor. Compassionate detachment is common sense worked from the hearts of political leaders to the good of all in a spirit of humility and generosity. Wisdom makes healing possible. It cools the fever of the nations by recognising and allowing them to take responsibility for evil. Wisdom comes with the right kind of fear which is the fear of God. The fear of God is not like the feverish fear of all-out disaster which occupies our thoughts so much of the time, but wonder and gratitude at the certainty of life. The fear of God leads to regeneration and growth but it requires that those caught up in this conflict (in other words, most of the world) own before God and before one another the direct contributions they have made to the present evil through the sins of the past. All have sinned and are in need of God’s healing. So all are responsible before God for its innocent victims. 

Obama’s hesitation may have bought a small amount of time for sanguine reflection in which all parties to the conflict, supported by faith leaders both in the Middle East and in the West, can take responsibility for the suffering which history is delivering to this region. For Christians, this means pausing to take our share of it and breathing Christ’s healing into the present through the way we pray, the way we think and perhaps most importantly, the things we say. Words inflame fever by fuelling fear. Fear left unchecked spreads quickly, often with fatal consequences. So let’s stand with all our leaders, confronting the hatred while feeling the fear and the pain, and so breath healing into the Middle East whose people have needed it for so long.