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| Source: turmarion.wordpress.com |
Ignorance is not bliss. Neither should ignorance be
confused with not knowing the facts due to lack of available information. There
is plenty of information to be had about most things in this data driven age. Ignorance
is more about not feeling confident when it comes to telling the difference
between objective information and information which is partial, if not a
downright lie.
In the context of
world politics, and in the politics of the Church, duplicity is so commonplace
that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between truth and a lie.
This kind of ignorance leads to ultimate collective political suicide which begins
as political apathy. Why should the governed bother to do anything? Why imagine
new and better ways of governance in politics, and why ask ourselves what it
means to live and be the Body of Christ in the Church for God’s people? At the
end of the day, it is so much easier to let the ‘experts’ get on with the job.
As a result of this passivity, cover-ups, the wholesale
disregard of the interests of ordinary people and the self protection of the
powerful, gives rise to a cartel mentality which is rife in both Church and
world. But politicians, as well as those who manage the Church (rather than
offering visionary and pastoral leadership), exist to serve people – God’s
people. Serving people is therefore the most awe inspiring and humbling work anyone
in Church or government could undertake. In the case of the Church, apathy and
decline occur when management obscures this specific call to love and care for God’s
people. As a result, the Church’s management system no longer knows what or who
it is there for, and hence how to properly exercise its power. So it ends by loving
and serving itself. This constitutes idolatry.
In the case of politics at home and abroad, when people
feel that their strongly held views, even if profoundly misguided, are not
heard, they will respond like pins to a magnet to those who appear to champion them,
even if their champions are peddling lies. The rest will retreat into apathy,
leaving the field wide open to the likes of Donald Trump and to varying degrees
of neo-fascist enthusiasms dressed up as serious politics in the UK and in
Europe. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are both extremely intelligent people,
irrespective of the buffoon and pub-frequenting personas they try to project.
This is what makes them dangerous.
As we approach Thursday’s generation defining referendum,
all of this duplicity, and the manipulative power games which go with it, heightens
the fevered mood of uncertainty and division in this country and in the EU
itself. But in the midst of it all, and in the most tragic circumstance,
silence prevails for a day. Parliament is recalled to honour the violent passing
of a young and gifted politician who showed in her short time in government
what it means to love the people she served and to do so faithfully and with
integrity. Uncomplicated goodness and truth are rarely visible in politics.
Following the news of Jo Cox’s murder, there is a brief,
if partial, moratorium on the referendum campaign. There is silence. It is the
silence in which truth is spoken and heard. It is also the silence of peace.
Silence and peace speak of God and, if allowed to, will lodge in the inner consciousness
of every person. God’s silence does not simply invite us to listen and
wait for instructions as to how we should vote on Thursday. Thursday’s vote is
of relatively little significance in the context of eternity. What is
significant is the peace and prosperity of nations and peoples as desired by God.
The 14th century Christian solitary, Julian of Norwich, was
known to have said of a hazelnut, as she held it in her hand, “It is all that
is made”. If she were to do this today, she would be telling us that emptiness
and silence reveal the truth and integrity of all that is made in and through
the loving purposes of God. We are a small, but infinitely loved part of ‘all
that is made’. So this unexpected silence, or the memory of it, invites every
person, however they conceive of the idea of God, including those who have no
such concept, to enter into deep silence, and allow it to enter them, so that
they can bear it into the noise and duplicity of the times in which we live.
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