Sick At Heart

It takes a while for living compostable material to rot down and become the stuff of life again. It’s best not to examine it too closely while this is happening. Perhaps this is what the Church of England was thinking during the decades spanning the abuse of vulnerable people by one of its prelates and by another highly regarded individual whose integrity was compromised by, presumably, the toxic mix of sado-eroticism and religion.

Eroticism and religion have long been known to serve each other, when allowed to. Only read some of the poetry of John of the Cross, for example, and the worryingly sadistic reaction it led to at the hands of his deeply religious tormentors. They were afraid of its power and equally afraid of the poet’s ability to contain and focus that power in a God-ward direction, something they were not able to do. Powerful life-giving spirituality can make others envious, especially if those others are already powerful in a worldly sense, but exercise their power in a formal religious context. Power can be erotic and, in this respect, is always dangerous.

Religion, and Christianity especially, has always played dangerously with erotic power, especially in the form of sadism. Sadism is highly flammable stuff which, for some reason, is easily ignited in the religious mind. Think only of the still enduring fascination with medieval graphic portrayals of the suffering of Christ, rendered in the visual language of modernity. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, comes to mind.

Perhaps all this is part of a processing of our own dark fascination with perverted religion, as it combines with violence and with sexual sadism of one kind or another, not to mention personal charisma and the vanity which accompanies it. Some would say that if the Church as we know it is to survive, it must keep a cap on all this dark stuff, even if its highly placed prelates and senior figures are revealed to be actively part of it. The more cynical might just write them off as ‘collateral damage’. But it won’t do. Rottenness will never do. This suggests that a radical change in the way the institutional Church is currently perceived is needed now more than ever.

It takes time for things to rot but once they have reached a point of no return, excision remains the only possible option. This is beginning to happen in the Church, largely thanks to the courage and persistence of the victims and through the action of the police. It did not happen as a result of the niceness or kindness of Church leaders. When it comes to abuse, whether in the Church or anywhere else, niceness and kindness are not enough. Niceness and kindness do not stop the rot. Many of us are sick at heart for the rottenness of the state of the Church and for its complacency in regard to rampant injustice, and some of us are angry. We are angry about the citadel mentality which dominates so much of the Church’s life, at least in that which pertains to those with power and influence. It is a mentality which is not simply limited to protecting the interests of abusers.

If you are a woman priest in certain provinces of the Anglican Communion, or simply a member of a sectarian group within it, you will very soon feel powerless in the worst possible sense of the word. You are not part of the citadel, the largely male inner sanctum which holds to status and to the power which comes with it, but which is seldom used for the common good. You will be someone who is denied a voice. All the more so, if what you say or do troubles its peace of mind and general complacency in regard to arcane laws and an unworkable authority system which is ill designed to nurture gift among all God’s people and so allow Christ to speak to our society. You will know what it feels like for ranks to close and exclude you from the inner sanctum of the powerful, though all may smile and many will be nice to you. If you are a member of the LGBTQ community, you will experience the same thing.

For people belonging to either or both of these groups, serving the institutional Church is not life in its fullest sense. It is not life as Christ promised it. It follows, quite obviously, that the institutional Church is not Christian in the sense that Christ would have wished it to be, so it is not working very well. It is not freeing people into Christ. Rather, it has been reduced to a largely self serving and introspective system with something rotten at its heart.

To be a Christian is to be a liberator, one who empowers others as Christ did. So it follows that those who hold power within the institutional Church must look first to the victims of abuse, and of institutionalised misogyny and homophobia, in order to set them free. They will do this by seeking their forgiveness before beginning to enact the kind of radical change which will enable the victims of every kind of abuse to live in the fullest sense of the word. For this to be possible, radical change is needed both within the Church’s own political system, the power games of superficial niceness played out by a select few, and in its spiritual life which is perceived by many as pallid and meaningless, bearing no relation to the dangerous freedom offered to us in Jesus Christ.

This suggests that if the Church is to survive at all, its survival and its future life will begin with speaking and acting with integrity. The abuse scandals, and the institutional misogyny of the past twenty or thirty years, have led to many people losing all confidence in the Church’s integrity, and hence in the Christian gospel itself. What people are looking for today, in the life of the Church, as well as in public life in general, is integrity. This has been the message of Glastonbury 2017: Give us integrity and we will start to re-engage with politics. It is a message which the Church needs to hear for itself. 

What Are You Doing Here?

Summer, and heat, has come upon us unexpectedly, even though it is mid June. Those of us who rely on a good crop of runner beans for the freezer were just getting used to the idea that we were likely not to have a summer at all, and hence no beans, when along it came. I still don’t think the beans stand much of a chance. The gales and the wet have enfeebled them, possibly beyond hope.

Beyond hope. How easy and how disconcerting it is to slip into melancholy and pessimism on a day like this. Perhaps we should be better prepared. Perhaps we should know ourselves well enough to see such thought trends coming and not allow them to spoil the present moment. But the present moment is far more complex than it might seem in the heat of summer. It is, after all, shaped out of a million other moments which, according to how they are remembered, define our lives and the realities we live by.

While musing on reality, I find myself remembering another hot summer day back in February, when we were in Australia (see my post of 9^th February, 2017). We were listening to someone’s jumbled, confused, and tragic memories, the realities which shaped her life in that moment, and the pain they brought, a pain which was only partly anesthetised by drink. Such present moments, our own and other people’s, and the realities they face us with, are sometimes too hard to bear, especially when they come upon us suddenly. I remember feeling that I had not served that person well, even by listening. As far as I could see, I had been unable to effect any kind of healing.

Our own realities need a time of gentle germination before they are exposed to the terrifying light of memory. Heat, like today’s heat, forces the seeds of  long buried memory to germinate, to seek the light and warmth needed for growth and healing. The light is also in the telling of them, whether spoken or written, and the warmth is in the listening, or in the kind of attentive reading which enables us to understand and accept, through the story being told, how our most private memories shape the realities we live by.

On such a day as this, in the sudden heat of mid June, these memories are revealed to us, perhaps for the first time, like a piece of pottery straight out of the kiln. They emerge, hot, in this present moment of heat and soporific silence. Silence is not the absence of sound, or even of noise. It is the ‘still small voice’ heard at the very heart of that noise and of today’s heat – out of the fire  in which Elijah heard it, as he dared to face down God’s question “What are you doing here?” Heat forces itself on us with this question, a question which waits on our memories for an answer.

“What are you doing here?” is all that is left after all other questions have been burned away, or ‘refined’ as the bible puts it. What shall I do? How can I love or make myself deserving of love? Why am I unhappy? These questions matter to the extent that they enable us to know the answer to that one seminal question. “What are you doing here?” What is the meaning and purpose of your life in relation to God – or in the fear and resistance to such a relation? Part of the refining process involves how we process our memories. These memories, and how we live with them, pertain to the reality, or non-reality, of our existence, to whether the life we lead is really worth living. Right remembering always pertains to the truth, even though that truth may need to be fictionalised, painted or rendered into music or, perhaps, mathematics. These all serve the refining process, our own and that of others.

This is why art and scientific research matter so much. Science which is pursued with the artist’s reverence for truth and life is salvific. As separate life paths, art and science yield knowledge about the kind of truth which saves us from ourselves and from the delusions which are the product of wilful ignorance. Such knowledge also pertains to justice, our own just dealings, including our thoughts and mindsets in regard to any number of historical events and current social issues, and returns us to the desire for a deep and unnameable truth. Taken together, the desire for justice and for knowledge of deep truth comprise a ‘push’ for life, or  a resistance to it. They therefore pertain to every single person’s life choices.

Being ‘refined’ begins with allowing ourselves to be questioned by God, as Elijah was and as the allegorical figures of Adam and Eve were before him. In both cases, the question remains the same, “What are you doing here?” We babble excuses and justifications for ourselves and for the life we presently live, as Elijah did. Or we blame someone else, as Adam did. We also blame circumstances, often justifiably. But silence always returns us to the same question, “What are you doing here?” because the one who asks it is the answer. 

One Love

Source: Billboard.com

‘There is no fear in love’ ( 1 John 4:18). If I’m honest about it, these words strike me as optimistic, even somewhat whimsical. Most people’s life experience has demonstrated at one time or another that fear takes absolute precedence when it comes to violent defining moments, or ‘crises’, in the full sense of the word. When it comes to how we imagine we would behave in a violent crisis intentions are invariably good, even heroic, but reality, when it kicks in, often reveals us to be anything but heroes. Not that this is always a bad thing. The independent hero can be counterproductive in times of crisis. He or she can put the lives of others in danger. On the night people were randomly stabbed in a London restaurant, the u-tube footage shows police telling them to lie down and not run, or even move. They were not to be heros. If there was to be heroism, it would be a matter of holding together, and of having the courage to trust the police who were trying to contain the fear.

The lying down, and what must have been an agonised period of waiting for the ‘all clear’, suggests that fear can only be confronted, and then contained, through trust in what it means to be real community. Real community is about being in ‘communion’ with one another. In a moment of violent crisis, being in communion begins with trusting those who give the orders which will enable all innocent people to live. It is about everyone belonging to one another, so that whoever holds legitimate authority in any given situation is also fully in communion with the rest of us.  In the wider context of our shared public life, this is only possible when there is wise and competent leadership, wisdom being a combination of vision, compassion and common sense. Such leadership is vital in times of mass violence.

The present mayor of London, a wise and compassionate leader, has told people to expect an unusual amount of police presence and high level security in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. He has also told them not to be afraid, not because he wishes to delude them into thinking that these are not frightening times, but because he wishes them to know that their fear is valid and that he will do everything he can to protect them under his mayoral leadership. This is why Trump’s remarks about Sadiq Khan are both crass and dangerous.

A few nights ago, we saw another example of wise and compassionate leadership, this time coming from a twenty three year old woman and her co-celebrants at a rock concert. She was affirming communion, so you could say that her initiative to re-stage the concert so soon after the terror attack which took place at the last one was not only courageous in a human sense, but had something of the self-giving of Christ, and something of his innocence. His innocence was reflected not only in her, but in the faces of those attending the concert, as they faced down the violence that had been, and might yet be.

No doubt most of the young people attending the second Ariana Grande concert had been at the first one, with its tragic and terrifying outcome.

What brought them together a second time? I believe it was the collective will to be 'as communion', so defying those who would fragment and ultimately destroy what is good about our society and our way of life. This is what made this concert so unlike any other concert. There was an exhortation to love one another in the facing down of fear.

All would be remembering the horrors of the previous celebration. Many of those attending this one were probably there when they took place. All would have felt the fear. Some would not have known what to do with the feelings these memories evoke, especially in their immediate aftermath. But they knew, and their leader knew, that to return to that moment of naked fear, evoked by the memory of the perpetrators’ crazed envy and untrammelled hatred, as it was expressed through brutal mass murder, was not why they had come to this second concert. To remain in that moment, or to return to it by re-invoking hatred for the perpetrators, would have meant defeat for them and for all of us.

Instead, their leader, was in this moment urging them to celebrate a eucharist, a shared moment of love and thanksgiving. She was offering them a different and better way, a way out from fear, so that they would not spend the rest of their lives emotionally short-circuiting back to the lie which bred the hatred on the part of the perpetrators. But neither was she exhorting her fans to some kind of collective mental discipline involving them being seen to enjoy themselves. She was affirming and releasing the re-creative love which lies within each one of us. She was inviting her fans to be ‘as one’, or as communion in spirit and in truth. 

To love one another is to worship God in spirit and in truth. I believe that, whether consciously or not, it was to this end that she told them to “Touch the person next to you. Tell them you love them – even if you don’t know them. Those watching this at home, do the same.” It was a sacramental moment, a hallowing of the ‘matter’, of our shared humanity, in the face of the sacrilegious acts committed a couple of weeks earlier in the name of God.

In saying these words, Ariana Grande was helping us all to face down our fear of terrorism, by being in deeper communion with one another as a free society. Perhaps she was thinking of the two generations who, in the last century, fought and died for that freedom. If so, she was also inviting communion across our generational barriers – all the nonsense we tell ourselves and others about how much better things were in the good old days. Not only was the singer telling them that love was very much alive within each one of them, regardless of the envy of religious extremists, but that we are all, regardless of age, gender, race, nationality, or politics, deeply at one with each other and that we are called to worship God, as we love one another, in spirit and in truth.

Not Torn Apart

There was a massive falling out this afternoon in our house. It had to do with one person, (tried beyond the limits of human endurance it seemed) coldly destroying another person’s complex lego helicopter. This was a treasured object for which the instructions have been lost. As a third party trying for twenty minutes’ respite before setting off for the nearest play area (it being a damp afternoon), the inevitable uproar proved that my ‘red line’ is far closer than I had hitherto assumed it to be. I was furious with both of them – until, of course, an almost unbearable compassion, ‘twin suffering’ perhaps, took hold of the situation.

Then it became a case of who to deal with first when it came to ‘damage containment’ – and assessing where the most significant damage lay. The easiest course of action might have been to lay down the law by shouting louder than either of the combatants and to dismiss the lego as just an old toy, easily replaceable, thereby also dismissing its owner’s valid grief. Such a course of action would have done nothing to heal the far more significant long term damage which might have been done to the two individuals concerned in their relations with each other. Such moments embed themselves in a person’s memory and grow like tumors as, over the years, they become overlaid with words or gestures which ‘trigger’ that particular memory, so giving it enormous significance. Ideally, the situation needed to be resolved without the final arbitrator appearing to take sides.

But in such defining moments, one’s instincts are often correct. So the first tranche of my volcanic fury landed on the perpetrator. How then was this person to be helped to take the first step in the healing process, unless I could provide some cooling off time – time to really feel what the victim was feeling? Meanwhile, the victim continued to howl – taking full advantage of having been wronged. It became clear that reconciliation was only going to take place once the victim had stopped howling for long enough to hear the word ‘sorry’ spoken in truth, a word which was beginning to shape itself in the perpetrator’s heart, once the usual formulaic (no eye contact) ‘sorry’ had been said.

I demanded more of both of them – more willingness to take responsibility and more courage to let go.  And perhaps because by this time I was close to tears myself, I got it. There was silence, life-defining silence, followed by a deep embrace, almost painful in its goodness. And then laughter. For a moment we knew the Kingdom of Heaven.

Applied to the present fevered political climate this invites pause for thought. Hatred, bitterness and blame could be transfigured in a single moment of ‘twin suffering’. Everything might be perceived in a different light, the light of hope, which is the knowledge that all things work to the good for those who have not forgotten how to speak the kind of truth which makes for real reconciliation, but reconciliation is not what we want from our politicians – or is it?

The gospel for this Pentecost Sunday speaks of a comparable situation. A group of people holed up in a room, afraid, confused and by now probably falling out with each other over who was to blame for what happened two days ago. Everyone wants the last word. The Christ steps in to the room, seemingly from nowhere – or had he been there, unrecognised, all the time? Into the mounting tension he speaks the words “Peace be with you”. They are a command, not an exhortation, a command which comes from within the deepest compassion for the human predicament, of which my two combatants were only a tiny sample.

It is our humanity which is at stake in such quarrels because blame reduces not only the perpetrator of the original wrong, but the victim as well, to an object – something to be conquered, ‘bested’ or won over. The recent televised election debates, though articulate and at times passionate, suggest that our politics are a magnified version of what went on in that upper room, before those words were spoken, and of two children trying to have the last word over how and why the lego helicopter was wrecked. In so doing, each is trying to have power over the other, to reduce the other to something legitimately ‘won’, a kind of trophy figure.

The incident which took place in that upper room reveals that the authority given by Christ to forgive or withhold forgiveness is the only authority which really counts. It follows the command to be at peace, knowing that we ourselves have been forgiven. How badly do we want forgiveness in these elections? Or peace for the world in the longer term?  No political party can deliver on these things. It is we who must start by wanting it, working from within the system itself, of which we are a part whether we like it or not.