The Art of Life - Believing in the Real

 Last night we watched The Commitments, a film which reminded me of how much I’ve always loved soul music, often without quite realising that it is soul that I am listening to. It takes a film to bring the songs and music of one’s youth together into a single memory, and so remind us of why they were so intensely meaningful at the time. Why did they resonate with feelings which we did not yet fully understand? And why do they still? I don’t think it has anything to do with nostalgia. It has to do with good art. Good art is not about nostalgia. It endures because it is about truth. Soul is a prime example of good art because it was, and remains, agonisingly truthful. It also generates a need for truthfulness, for a certain kind of reality. It does this most effectively when those who are performing cannot name that reality and, like The Commitments, have only a partial understand of their own need for it, so that they have no intellectualised creative agenda. Their creativity is consummated in the moment of self giving which good performance and all good art requires of the artist.

This kind of creative uncertainty is fraught with difficulties. Both the process and the work itself are extremely fragile. Where bands are concerned, everything hinges on the creative and complex relationships within the group, as The Commitments were to find out, but too late to save the band. Inevitably, there was conflict, but conflict and creativity go together because the energy which drives people against one another, and sometimes against the very work which they are producing, is the energy of both creativity and chaos.

Good collaborative art is created out of initial chaos, that initial anarchic energy from which life and the coherence of universes and species derives. When bands or other creative partnerships die it is easy to blame the ‘maker’, or, as in the case of The Commitments, the band’s manager. But it takes more than good management, or even a collective will to get the show back on the road, to bring it alive again. A new connection needs to be made, between life and death, between chaos and the kind of dynamic order which brings new life.

This is where the Christian story of Easter starts to be ‘relevant’, to use that most banal of expressions. On the evening of the first day of the week, the day his tomb was discovered empty, Jesus suddenly appears to his friends who have locked themselves  in a small room, fearing that they would be the next to be arrested. ‘Appear’ is a misleading word because it suggests something not quite real. A real person, or solid object, does not ‘appear’. It is either there or not there. What makes Christ’s actual presence, his ‘being there’, so real, is that he comes into their midst when they are most afraid and therefore most likely to turn on one another and destroy the work already begun in them, which is what happened to The Commitments.

For his disciples, Jesus is what he always was, but he is also more than that. He is the reason and purpose of their life and work, the full embodiment of something already known by them, but which, in this moment of fear and chaos, they had probably half forgotten, so their work could not be fully consummated. The Commitments also had a shared understanding, a kind of knowing, of what they were about. Something greater than themselves made it possible for them to make great music, but they lost sight of this greater purpose in dressing room conflicts which were fuelled by selfish egoism leading to their inevitable disintegration as a band.

The group of friends cowering behind closed doors in the immediate aftermath of the Resurrection might have been in a similar state of disintegration, bickering about who saw Jesus first after the tomb was found empty, and about a host of other issues all of which would have amounted to the need to protect the individual and his or her immediate interests, and all blown out of proportion by fear.

Jesus is suddenly among them in this chaotic situation, so chaotic that they do not immediately recognise his presence. It is, in any case, a very different kind of presence than the one they are used to which was so hideously distorted in the suffering of his final hours. The marks and wounds are on the physical body, but the body is also gloriously different. It is physical, but more than physical. It transcends all that they remember of him and yet it is still him. From the physical breath of Christ’s words, “Peace be with you” comes the Spirit of creation itself, so it is a moment of consummate artistry, the  kind of artistry which dispels chaos and changes the way those who work together see each other and how they understand, and ultimately consummate, the work they are given to do. 

A Christian Nation?

Assuming the media’s reporting of it is to be taken at face value, why has David Cameron’s remark about Britain being a Christian nation unsettled so many? Probably for two reasons, neither of which have to do with the remark being true or untrue, but both having to do with our ongoing neurosis about the subject of faith in general. The first pertains to fear. When it comes to the place of faith in society, or in specific political agendas, the neurosis is by no means limited to Christianity. There are labels and tags which identify fear with other faiths as well – Islamophobia, anti-semitism and various internalised fears and prejudices which bedevil the Christian Church, as well as the spiritual heartlands of other religions. The second has to do with collective identity. Religions, including Christianity, define who we are because they shape history. Our identity, as it has been shaped by Western Christianity, is not something we can opt out of. 

For the time being, I would like to briefly look at how these two areas of collective neurosis concerning faith and religious identity play out in regard to the Prime Minister’s remark about Britain being a Christian country. I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that his remark was sincere and not a cynical attempt to reclaim the ‘grey vote’, of which a significant number are evangelical Christians.

First, there is the question of fear, specifically with regard to Christianity.  Fear operates on two levels. The first is, ironically, often the result of inadequate Christian teaching and the absence of any kind of balanced Christian formation in early life, including in those families who may describe themselves as nominally Christian. As a result of this vagueness, many people who are seeking a more substantial, and thereby meaningful, Christian faith are drawn to highly vocal fundamentalist churches where they feel secure and clear about their Christian identity. To be a ‘Christian’ in such contexts means having a particular tribal identity which stands over and against any other religious or non-religious way of understanding self and society. These churches have been growing over the past 30 years with the result that Christianity is becoming increasingly equated with fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism gives rise to sectarianism, in attitude if not in actual practice, so it is not surprising that many people confuse sectarianism with the wider Church and fundamentalism with Christianity itself and are afraid of both. 

One of the things which disturbs many of us is the way Christian fundamentalism understands itself within a largely unacknowledged and distorted notion of judgment. For fundamentalist Christians, judgment is entirely concerned with punishment and retribution, along with an exclusively substitutionary notion of atonement which not only skews the theology of atonement and redemption, but throws into question the morality of Christianity itself (See my Making Sense of God’s Love: Atonement and Redemption SPCK). If we think of a Christian country being governed out of such an ethos, it is understandable that Cameron’s remark might resonate with this kind of thinking and thereby make people afraid. What we need, therefore, is to understand his remarks as pertaining to a different kind of fear, one which is a test of love, as we see it fully revealed in Jesus Christ. This is the Christianity which ought to define us as a nation.

Jesus promises that Christians will be known and judged by the fruits which they bear. This is where we ought to be ‘fearing’, in a healthy way, rather than worrying about an open declaration of our Christian identity causing a major rift in politics by upsetting people of other faiths (many of whom would agree with Cameron, in any case) or of no faith at all. If Cameron’s words are to be taken seriously, it is the governments we elect, and those who hold power over people’s material assets and livelihoods, who need to fear the implication of his words and of the way in which they sit uncomfortably beside the words of Jesus who told his disciples that 'by their fruits you shall know them'. It is by our fruits that we are known as a Christian nation. Those fruits consist in the extent to which governments use the power ceded to them, through democratic process, to alleviate suffering and to protect the weak and the marginalised. Merciless deportations, punitive cuts in benefits and social services set against obscene bonuses, blatant political careerism and (often dishonest) profiteering, are not the fruits of Christian faith. Governments who could have made a difference but chose to look the other way in the face of human need and suffering will surely be held accountable, both in this world and the next. 

To come back to national identity; here, the fear has something to do with being ‘taken over’. In this case one must suppose that, for some people, the signs and symbols of a bygone age and of its religious identity are still around to ‘haunt’ us. It follows that cathedrals  along with Christianity itself, are psychologically manageable as long as they remain museums. The problem comes when the life which identifies cathedrals as Christian, and may still breath into their worship today, becomes a force with which the visitor had not quite reckoned. This is not only true of cathedrals which are, it seems, experiencing something of a spiritual revival. It is perhaps even more true of tiny churches up and down our land. Some of them are centuries old. Their walls seem to ‘breath’ prayer, so that on entering them visitors are instinctively silent or speak only in whispers. 

The visitor cannot treat these ancient churches as monuments to a religion which has long since ceased to be relevant, because something is going on here. These ancient churches make their presence felt in a disturbing way. The visitor feels an irresistible pull, a falling into something like prayer because ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’ (Heb.10:31) The fall involves a massive letting go of identity, and even of self, in exchange for an identity and a self which is infinitely greater. In the letting go and the falling, the visitor experiences not fear, but gratitude. It is the ‘fear’ engendered by holy places, the ‘pull’ of the Christian faith and holiness itself, a holiness which ought to be shaping our Christian nation. 

Forgiveness - Feel the Pain and Do It Anyway

In his article in last week’s Saturday edition of the Guardian, (Guardian April 12^th, 2014) Giles Fraser tells us that forgiveness isn’t something that you feel. It is something you do. To anyone who has had to do a significant amount of forgiving in their lives, and most of us have, this smacks of a rather stiff upper lip approach to life, pain and God. It probably derives from what has come to be known as the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius believed that human beings were perfectly capable of being good if only they would try hard enough. It was a matter of pulling yourself together and getting on with it without letting your feelings get in the way.

 The problem with this kind of thinking, in regard to forgiveness, is that it involves deception. The person trying to act in a forgiving way deceives themselves since, in many cases, they must deny their pain, and the feelings which accompany it, in order to get to a place in their own heads where they can make themselves behave in a forgiving way to the one who has wronged them. In doing this, they allow the person who has wronged them to carry on deceiving themselves.  In other words, they give the wrongdoer permission to remain in denial. When this happens the forgiveness which they so badly want to offer to the one who has wronged them gets blocked because the person who is in denial about the hurt they have caused is also denying themselves forgiveness. Forgiveness is two-way traffic or it is not forgiveness.

Jesus gave his disciples the authority to forgive sins, but he also told them that they could ‘retain’ those sins. He was not saying that they could decide whether or not the person deserved to be forgiven. He was telling them that forgiveness involves healing and that healing can only take place where all parties to the hurt engage with the pain. In his article, Giles Fraser writes that ‘the stories of the Bible .. are mostly uninterested in a person’s inner life’. He also implies that Jesus was a man of action rather than feelings. This is odd, given the number of times Jesus makes his feelings about injustice and pain (including his own) heard in the strongest of terms. Jesus is concerned with feelings because feelings dictate actions. It follows that inaction is the result of the denial of feelings which pertain to guilt or pain, or both.

Productive feelings are often painful because they necessarily involve speaking and hearing the kind of truth which requires that we own pain – our own and that which we may have caused to others.  A gesture, a moment of genuine unselfishness, or of attentiveness, will often speak this kind of truth far more effectively than words. Where truth is not spoken and heard in word or gesture forgiveness lacks substance, so it is not really forgiveness.  Similarly, where a person denies the pain they have caused to others, the forgiveness that is being offered will return to the one trying to do the forgiving. Both the pain and the forgiveness will be ‘retained’ because there is nowhere for either to go.

To prevent this, the one who has offended needs to bear the weight of the pain by owning to themselves what it feels like to be the other person, or the innocent third party who so often figures as ‘collateral damage’ in family disputes or marital breakdown. Real forgiveness, and the healing which comes with it, takes us out of ourselves. If the offender does not allow this to happen, he or she will eventually be consumed by remorse. They will be consumed by their own despair, because remorse leads to moral and spiritual despair. The person who is filled with this kind of destructive remorse will often turn to alcohol or drugs to relieve the pain, so that where addiction is a form of escape from pain, it is also a denial of who we really are. 

There is a moment during the three hours which Jesus spends on the Cross in which he asks that his tormentors be forgiven because they do not know what they are doing. They are ignorant of who Jesus is but they are also in denial about themselves. Their denial of the real significance of their words and actions is echoed in our own manifold moments of denial and self delusion. In such moments we deny what we are really feeling to ourselves, as well as the pain we may have inflicted on others. Jesus does not let us off the hook by simply absorbing our feelings and smothering them in sacrificial love. He enters into them with us, in his knowing of us as we are and in his invitation to allow him to heal us by accepting his forgiveness. The judgment and the verdict come from the Cross where healing and forgiveness begin, provided we allow them to.  

Betrayal

At what point do fiction and reality meet? When does the one become indistinguishable from the other? That is the fascination which lies in spy stories real and invented.  Fiction enthrals, fascinates, gives us a break from the everyday and, more dangerously, perhaps, a chance to make sure that fictionalised reality remains safely within the confines of the imagination. Reality TV, whether it is part drama or entirely documentary, allows us to look at reality objectively. But being an onlooker in regard to the suffering of others can also disempower the onlooker by inducing a form of sterile guilt, for which see my earlier post on the dangers of political apathy. 

When it comes to distinguishing the real from the unreal, we need to be able to recognise lies and betrayal for what they are. Take, for example, the excellent BBC documentary drama about Kim Philby, the notorious double agent (Kim Philby – His Most Intimate Betrayal BBC2). Real footage set into the drama allows the viewer to look at the actor alongside the real man, and so observe, in a fairly objective way, what a liar looks like. Lies have a powerful attraction, perhaps because they are at the root of much that goes wrong in the contexts in which power is exercised and maintained. Raw power is potent and addictive, and those who depend on it will inevitably need to lie and betray others. Unfettered power is also ephemeral. There is something not quite real about it, so those who want to keep it at any price must reinforce it with something equally unreal which they must first find in themselves. At what point, then, does the real person merge with the unreal?

Lies create their own fantasy realm which is how illicit power is maintained over nations. When it comes to exercising and maintaining power in the more intimate context of family relationships, the one who is being lied to must be persuaded that he or she is in fact the liar. This is the worst form of betrayal because it makes the victim’s self understanding neither truthful or real. The real merges with the unreal and he or she experiences inner fragmentation, like a tower block which, when dynamited at the press of a button, collapses in on itself and is, in effect, obliterated. Betrayal and lies obliterate their victims from within. Christ experiences something similar when he is betrayed by one of his friends, an inner fragmentation which culminates in his forsakenness, his seeming obliteration, on the cross.

The nature of redemption is that it restores things to what they should be. Redemptive love restores those who have been forsaken in being lied to and thereby betrayed. It also restores the liars and betrayers. The cross, and what it seems to have destroyed in the betrayed and disfigured Christ, is in fact the making of a new creation. Redemptive love takes betrayal into itself and ‘re-makes’ whatever it is that has distorted a person and turned them into a liar or a betrayer. It redeems, or ‘buys back’, the goodness which they once had and, in so doing, redeems the person. 

Since time and all things are interconnected, all things, and time itself, are destined for this ultimate redemption. All betrayers, and all the victims of betrayal, are held within the embrace of the cross. They are ‘steadied’ and await justice in this moment of equilibrium. The justice will restore the victims of lies to their rightful place in God’s good purpose which is his mercy, a mercy which draws all things into himself, so making peace by the blood of his cross.