from the edge

Monday 21 March 2016

Passiontide 2016 - Seeing you

Betrayal is anachronistic. It is all about lies, and yet at the heart of the moment lies a kind of truth. Whatever form betrayal takes, the person being betrayed experiences something like shame – naked exposure, perhaps. In the moment of betrayal that person is defenceless, without ‘cover’ of any kind. They look and feel foolish because they have trusted. It is their own trust which makes them feel defenceless and ashamed as much as the act of betrayal itself.

The one betraying, whatever their reason for doing so, must justify the lies involved and the pain caused by more lies. They must justify it to themselves, so that the betrayal seems in some way ‘necessary’ and therefore not of their choosing. ‘I had to do it’ they will say. ‘I had no choice’. Apart from justifying the moment, or the act, they must maintain their integrity, at least to themselves by distancing themselves from any direct responsibility for the damage they have done, and thereby exonerating themselves from being held in any way accountable for it.

All of this is the stuff of politics, of international relations, of the life of the Church and of our own experiences of betrayal, as victim or perpetrator. One could say that it is a universal principle, but it is also complex. Take, for example, corruption or betrayal in institutions whose integrity we need to take for granted, we need to trust; the fiddling of party election expenses (and in some countries the election process itself), police pay-offs for saying nothing in the context of organised crime relating to the grooming of young people for sex, the treatment of people held in police custody (especially if they are black), the power games and personal betrayals (both public and private) of government, sexual exploitation and cover up by the institutional Church along with the countless glossed over betrayals of loyal and faithful clergy who have served it in good faith, often for years.

Betrayal leaves us dealing with truths we would perhaps rather not face because in the moment of betrayal we see ourselves and others differently. Two such moments occur within a very short space of time in the final hours of the life of Jesus. Neither came as a surprise, but that did not make the betrayal easier to bear. The first took place in a garden at night where one of his own friends shopped him to the religious police. His friend identified him with a kiss.

Betrayal so often comes masquerading as love. ‘I did this or said that because I love you.’ Or ‘I behaved in that way, but you know I really love you.’ Both are lies, of course. We do not harm others because we love them, no matter how justifiable the action may seem to be at the time. We do not abuse trust by exposing another to pain.

Judas was trying to force Jesus’s hand politically. He was prepared to take the risk of his suffering (which Judas may have imagined would somehow be averted at the last minute) to turn Jesus into what he ‘should’ have been. It was about control and manipulation. The control or manipulation of others, especially those who trust us, is always betrayal. In the moment of the kiss Judas knows that Jesus also knows the truth of the situation, and the truth about Judas. He has known it for a long time in allowing Judas to be what he was, a pilferer of the common purse who had his priorities all wrong. 

Then there was the incident in the courtyard later that night, or possibly early the next morning. Peter, nicknamed ‘the rock’, the one who could be trusted, denies ever having known his closest friend. This moment, held in the meeting of their eyes as the cockerel crowed for the third time, also held every lie that has ever been told for the sake of saving one’s own life or reputation at the expense of the life or reputation of another.

The two moments I have just described are seminal. They are the soil in which the reversal of all betrayals germinates and takes root. Both reveal divine love at its source. They also reveal what that love looks and feels like. It looks like vulnerability and trust. In these two moments Jesus invites us not to look away, not to hide from our betrayals, or from the lies we have lived with for years, but to look quietly and bravely into his eyes, not asking for anything, but simply allowing ourselves to be seen. The rest will follow.


Monday 14 March 2016

Passiontide 2016 - The point

Having got this far without whatever it is we have decided to forgo these past few weeks, we may now realise that we didn’t need it all that much in the first place. We may no longer even like it, as I discovered ten years ago with sugar on grapefruit.

Two things emerge from this; first, that with the exception of serious addiction, getting a grip on a habit or familiar comfort food isn’t that arduous an undertaking, once we get used to the idea, and, second, that not having it has bought us a certain freedom. The freedom comes in two shapes. We will be free in respect to resuming the habit or food (come Easter day) but it will not have mastery over us, and we will be free to choose what we really want – which may only amount to some other comfort food or habit to replace the one we gave up for Lent.

The trouble with this kind of freedom is that it deceives us into yet another variation on the guilt theme; if it was that easy to give up chocolate, why did we not do something much more demanding and difficult (as well as giving up chocolate)? Herein lies another great deception. We are deceived into thinking that nothing we have done in the way of self control, or even of prayer, adds up to anything and that we are as rotten as we ever were on the morning of Ash Wednesday, and will ever remain so. From this follows the question "So what’s the point?" The answer to this question is quite simple: There isn’t a ‘point’. Lent does not have a quantifiable point. It is not about achieving goals. Rather, it is about a different kind of freedom, freedom bestowed in failure and non-achievement.

By now, we may just begin to realise that whatever has been ‘achieved’ with regard to habits and food foregone during Lent, has done nothing to make us nicer or more holy people. This suggests that the most we can expect of Lent is coming to terms with who and what we really are. Having done this, we will begin to realise that the purpose of Lent lies in freeing us into a place where we can ask ourselves, without fear or shame, what it is we really want.

As we move towards Holy Week we begin to allow this life-determining question to be framed, or held, by the tortured Christ stumbling towards the place of his execution. Who is he? And what does he want? What makes him do it? What is the point?

Again, there is no ‘point’, except that the event of his death, and this particular moment of stumbling agony, is also God’s answer to our own question. It is God’s total identification with our failed efforts and distorted perceptions of ourselves. Some of these have been imposed by other people and all of them invariably lead to more ill perceived ‘failure’, so we are left with the reality of an endless cycle of failure and self recrimination. It is the shape of our life.

So what do we really want? Our inability to even consider this question, let alone try to answer it, can lead to the hopelessness which only addiction can assuage, addiction to work, to violent or dysfunctional relationships, to youth and beauty. For the time being, these addictions counter despair, the despair which comes with being in captivity to material things like achievement, or to a self-created persona, and to all kinds of falsehood. These have mastery over us. They also embody the chronic loneliness from which we hide through addiction and ‘comfort’ food.

So the ‘point’ for Jesus lies in meeting us in the secrecy of our loneliness and of our various ways of being in denial about who we are and what we really want. He stumbles along with us in all these states of mind and heart, including whatever our despair tempts us to do in any one moment. Whatever we try to do or become during Lent only serves as a reminder of this central truth. 

Monday 7 March 2016

Lent 2016 - Not in control

As I walk the fields around my house on this clear, cold and stunningly beautiful afternoon, I am reminded that God promises to those who love him something like the joy I am experiencing. I also know, as I watch the doggish joy of our Labradoodle who is hurtling towards the bushes at the far end of the field, where squirrels are bound to be, that this joy is universal. Somehow, the dog, in his doggishness, experiences the joy implicit in the promise made to those who love God; ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived’ (1Cor.2:9)

I also know that others walking these fields may have quite different feelings, feelings which have nothing to do with joy. This knowledge concerns me, because the situation seems unfair. Loving God is, after all, a gift in itself, and God, we are told, does not have favourites. So how is it that some can soar to such heights of joy in the seeming ordinariness of walking a dog while others may remain indifferent to the moment, or are simply burdened by sadness? I have known such sadness myself when walking the fields, sadness attributable to life, the state of the world, or to nothing in particular. I have tried to be joyful in these moments and failed. Mindful of the suffering of millions, I have also tried to be less joyful in those other moments. Again, I have failed.

All of this pertains to the way we think about Lent. Is Lent a season which permits joy? Or is it one for moderating our response to the blessings of life? Many of us tend to do the latter for much of the time, because we like to be taken seriously and serious people do not run down hills exulting in the joy of the moment.

I think there is something almost blasphemous in refusing joy, and in the idea that joy is somehow unseemly in Lent, because joy is of God himself. To be joyful is to allow ourselves to be taken out of the emotional straight jacket we wear for much of the time so that our constricted selves can be blessed by the love of God. To refuse such moments amounts to telling God that we know what is best for us better than God does.  Such knowledge, and the will to implement it, amounts to what used to be known as pride, another of the cardinal sins, for which see a previous blog post.

Pride is about control, the control of other people or animals, and the unforgiving self control which tells us that we can manage our own salvation. The salvation offered to us by God in Christ consists in the freedom to be joyful. It is almost a condition for salvation itself. We are to ‘rejoice in the Lord always’ (Phil.4:4). Rejoicing in the Lord will inevitably involve loss of control, or the surrendering of what we think will make others, including God, take us seriously.

Here, there is a paradox. It lies in the Cross, which was the most serious event in all time but which consisted in God allowing himself to be shamed, to be not taken seriously. In the Cross and in its shame, we are taken seriously as the flawed and fragile human beings that we really are, human beings who believe that their fragility and imperfection can be strengthened or remedied through the kind of self control which makes us resistant to forgiveness.


The need to control stems from the fear of being forgiven. Forgiveness brings freedom from old ways of thinking about life, about other human beings and about God. It frees us into new and wide open spaces, in which we see the world and creation in a new way. It is a cause for joy.