In Such Times: Reflections on Living With Fear

By Duty Bound

Source: nme.com

We are now well into the Netflix series, The Crown. It is compulsive viewing, not just because of its brilliant performances and direction but because, for me at any rate, it speaks of things relating to the idea of duty. We seldom hear of duty these days, or think of it in the way the monarchy must think of it, as a binding relationship between love for a people and what must be done for the preservation of an institution. Neither do we think of how duty makes victims of those who are bound by it in the exercising of power, of the choices they must make and of the terrible failures which these choices can bring in their wake.

You could say that when duty is bound by love it ceases to damage those it serves, but from the moment duty hurts or blights another life love has taken leave of duty. No matter what the powerful person’s subjective feelings may be, they are, in this respect, the victims of their own power. This was the situation which Pontius Pilate found himself in.

The idea of duty has gone from being out of fashion to downright embarrassing. It’s not something you talk about. Faithfulness to duty seems like a cold, almost inhuman virtue, having nothing to do with love. Kant would have approved of this uncoupling of love with duty. But we, as a compassionate society, like to think that we would never countenance doing something out of duty which would knowingly hurt another person.

In that case, what of honour, and ‘honour’ killing? What of FGM? For some, these terrible actions are a matter of duty. But are we responsible for such actions when those who do them have an entirely different understanding of duty, of its place and purpose in society, than we do? Of course we are responsible, not only because the law of our country forbids such things, but because we are all responsible for everyone’s wellbeing and safety. Duty and responsibility go together. It follows that we are all accountable to the highest power for the extent that we do or do not exercise what we now call a ‘duty of care’ to others.

Those with the most power and influence bear the greatest responsibility for the duty of care for those whose lives they affect. They are therefore the first to be held accountable to that highest power. They are accountable for the lives which their decisions will affect, inasmuch as they have the power to influence them for better or for worse. Doing the right thing out of love may cost them their position. Pontius Pilate knew this only too well, but Jesus reminds him of who he is ultimately accountable to. At the same time, Pilate is not a free agent. Unlike the betrayer, he is bound by his duty to a system, the Roman Empire. It is Judas who, in reality, held the greater power. He was a free agent, compared to Pontius Pilate.

For the powerful, doing one’s duty is not always commensurate with doing the right thing. Duty bound by love is constrained. Love places a constraint on ill considered actions which arise from a sense of the dominant power of duty, in all positions of leadership. Love makes requirements of duty, not the other way round. But the good news is that love ‘unbinds’. It unbinds leaders who are prepared to take the risk of going beyond duty for the sake of love, when they are in a position to do so.

The Crown reminds us that powerful people are not free agents. They are not always in a position to make decisions in which love has the last say, even if they would like to be. We tend to judge the actions of powerful people from the safe distance of hindsight, forgetting the constraints, mores, and even lack of communication which may have complicated matters still further at the time. We have a duty to these powerful people, a duty coupled with the love we ourselves receive from the highest power and for which we must allow safe passage to whoever has wronged us either recently or in the past. The prayer taught by Jesus obliges us to take responsibility for them in our memories, to forgive, as we have been forgiven, to allow God’s love safe passage.

This is not about whitewashing over the past and pretending that wrongs were never done. Neither is it about forcing ourselves to feel lovingly towards people who have wronged us, when we do not. That is simply to prolong a lie, and the lie may be part of the ongoing pain and damage we are still having to endure. Taking responsibility for those who have wronged us is about owning those fragile human beings, even if they are dead, along with the pain they caused, and may still be causing – even if they are dead. This is as true for nations as it is for the individual. Love dictates duty when it comes to doing what is needed for salvation to happen among us.

Wilderness Times

Re-visiting the blog after a 2 month absence (I’ve been working on a new book) is a fast forward exercise, lurching from pre-Christmas to one week into Lent. It feels like a pale replica of how I have always imagined travelling at the speed of light, compressed and outside time. This year’s transition from the post-Christmas season to the beginning of Lent makes life feel compressed, as it might be in inter-galactic space travel. It has left little room for mental or emotional adjustment. We are travelling at the speed of light towards light.

Easter being early this year, there has been very little time to re-adjust to the season of Lent. Epiphanytide ended rather abruptly less than 10 days ago and Lent has suddenly arrived with the first snowdrops. The wilderness season is upon us wrapped into the season of gestation and first growth. In this particular wilderness season, the one which presages ultimate and eternal life, we are obliged to think about what must come first, which is death.

This week’s Observer Magazine features an article about death (‘Memento Mori’ by Emma Beddington). It is a brave article. It also invites Christians to distance themselves momentarily from what we believe about death and re-engage with this unpopular subject from another perspective, the one which many people are most used to, which is simply the fact that ‘WeCroak’.  

‘WeCroak’ is now a phone app which reminds its user of the truth about their own mortality several times during a single day. Lent is a season for dealing with truths that most of us would rather not face, especially the ultimate truth that we must all die. You could say that it is a rehearsal period for death itself.

The only really frightening aspect of death is that, when the moment comes, we may not be quite ready for it, so it is essential to come to terms with this fact if we are not to be taken unawares by death. The purpose of Lent is to provide a space for facing the reality of our own mortality and of the passing of all things, both good and evil.  The phone app is useful here because it simply says, as it pipes up in its random way (there is no set time-table), that whatever you are doing or thinking or saying right now, this precise moment could be your last. What, therefore, would you really like to be doing, thinking or saying?

Facing into death is also essential for knowing how to live. We face into death by facing into the reality, or truth, about the present moment, or of our present set of circumstances. Am I at this moment bored? Or hungry? Or short of sleep? How do these feelings and states of health colour my responses to the needs of others? The last question is the one that matters most because our lives are bound up with other lives, especially those we deal with on a day to day basis.

This is not to suggest that Lent is a time for repression and arduous discipline aimed at some kind of mind enhancement or dubious self improvement. It is a time for defeating the kind of death which destroys the individual from within and then goes on to destroy society and the world we inhabit. Every individual is responsible for the greater whole.

We begin to address the questions which pertain to the present moment by throwing out old habits of mind which have passed their ‘sell by’ date, so to speak. What we thought yesterday about any given issue or person pertains to memory, and after a while memory can become skewed. Memories need to be revisited, and this may not always change them for the better. The truth of a memory sometimes has to be revealed as worse than we had thought it was. Facing into this truth is also a kind of dying, dying to the lies we have grown accustomed to living with.  

Lent is wilderness time, patterned on the forty days endured by Christ in the desert when he would have faced into the truth about himself and his life’s purpose – and questioned it. Lent is a time for questioning and for facing into doubt. The biggest questions are invariably presaged with the word ‘if’.

For Jesus, temptation also came as doubt: “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread (you know you can do anything and you must, of course, take sensible measures when it comes to your own comfort and wellbeing)”. It came as “If you are the Son of God, jump off this great height (and show them all who you really are. You know you won’t die – or do you?”)

Lent invites doubt. But we need doubt if we are to know the truth about ourselves, and hence about the purpose of our life and of our own mortality. Lent obliges us to seek out and face into doubt, as we return to our own particular wilderness, to our compressed memories and to the truth about what we are doing, thinking or saying in the present moment. The good news about Lent is that we are never alone in our memories or in any of our doubts.

More Than 'Ho, Ho, Ho'

Source: Alamy.com

One of our Big Issue sellers has decided to be Father Christmas. I chat with him from time to time during the year and buy his paper, so there is a sort of affinity between us. There is something about good conversation, however brief it is, which connects you to a person. If you talk with them often enough you discover a sort of kinship. 

Another Big Issue seller in our town has grandchildren in Romania. She has to get on a bus and travel for an hour or so to get to her ‘patch’. It is not the only bus she has taken in recent years and we have often talked about this, and about what it feels like to have children and grandchildren living far away. We occasionally give each other a hug on parting.

Our Father Christmas seller is also from Romania. He is trying very hard to convince passersby of the festive nature of this season, but his “Ho, Ho, Ho” sounds a little tired and uncertain. He is imitating another people’s language, after all, rather than speaking it. He finds it difficult to speak their language because he does not quite understand their mindset, especially in regard to him and to other Romanians. Also, I do not think that a jocund Father Christmas, or the real reason for the festivities, are at the forefront of the minds of many of those who pass him by, whether or not they pick up a copy of the Big Issue. If they do pick one up, they are more likely to do so out of a mingled sense of helplessness and guilt, rather than as a result of having paused for the kind of exchange which brings joy to all parties involved.

There is a transparency about this whole scenario, in regard to the seller dressed as Father Christmas, as if we all know that it is a rather tired game. But when I stop to talk with him, or even as I think of him, I see through the Santa disguise to his frailty. I also sense the uncertainties and anxieties of others in the street, and their frailty too. One or two of them are wearing Santa hats. Another wears a bright pink coat, an early Christmas present, perhaps.

There is a certain pathos about it all. This being said, I would not describe the situation as an unhappy one. It is just normality trying to enter into the spirit of the season. Everyone is trying very hard, but most are unsure of its purpose, or of the meaning of the festival itself. Perhaps they would rather it was called something else, as it sometimes is. In the US you wish people ‘happy holidays’, rather than happy Christmas.

But in Romania, Christ is still at the heart of it all. It is still Christ-mas. Presents are exchanged on December 6^th, St. Nicholas Day, and the season extends into early January with an emphasis on family and community and with much carol singing and different kinds of festive foods. My Big Issue seller, dressed as Santa Claus, must be feeling quite disorientated as he stands alone outside a clothing retail chain next to a chemist. The shops have somehow obliterated the saintliness of Nicholas.

Perhaps he senses that many of the people in the street are wondering what they are doing there too, and he feels a kind of affinity with their anxiety and uncertainty about the meaning and purpose of all this shopping. There is an underlying greeting, and even something of prayer, in his rather tremulous “Ho, Ho, Ho”. For a moment, the pedestrian precinct is a quite different place. It is transfigured. We sense the words ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ penetrating the banality of the words being called out by the Big Issue seller. They seem to be spoken from within human history, projected by the Romanian from his own culture and religion. I think he is also picking up on something in our collective subconscious, the need to say ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ in response to a divine greeting sensed in rare moments of stillness during this season.

The Christ of Christmas is waiting to greet us. He knows us well and greets us in his vulnerability, in the risk he takes in coming into the obscurity of his own circumstances, of having to be born in someone’s garage. In the years to come, he will know more rejection and disappointment. He will know pain and failure, as we do, but he will embrace our pain and failure with a child’s joy. He experiences the same joy in encountering us, as he did that first odd assortment of visitors, a couple of farm labourers and three foreign dignitaries.

Joy runs deeper than happiness. It is mined in a far deeper seam. Joy endures and withstands all manner of suffering because it is of the very nature of God who is love itself, love Incarnate, love become one of us. I sense that the Romanian Big Issue seller knows this. It will keep him going in the bleak months ahead.  

Season of Hope

This week a man was given his life back. He has been in prison for 20 years for crimes he did not commit. It is said that he will get compensation, although it is hard to see what will compensate for the loss of 20 years of a person’s life and with it, presumably, friends, family, career and reputation.

What do people who are wrongfully imprisoned dream of during their years of mental, physical and emotional deprivation? It must take a while to even get to the stage of dreaming. Perhaps you give up in the end and simply try to survive on what little you have in the way of personal resources – the resources which enable you to believe in yourself and in the possibility that justice will be done. Perhaps you dare not hope, because hope embodies a kind of certainty. It is about looking forward to something that you are certain is going to happen, in the way only children know how to do. Years of captivity can grind away such innocence.  

If we retain enough of our childhood innocence we will not have quite forgotten how to hope. There is an excitement about hope which moves us forward and teaches us to see the goodness in others. Hope, and the certainty it promises, derives from the love which is its source. Looking forward to something good is a quite different feeling to what is experienced when, sadly, we relish the moment in the future when someone will get their just deserts, or when we will be finally vindicated at someone else’s expense. These things may well happen, but the moment, when it comes, will feel hollow. 

The difficulty about hope is that the things we look forward to with eagerness, joy and even a degree of trepidation, do not always happen, or work out in the way we had thought they would. So there is always the risk of pain. Daring to hope is also being willing to accept pain and even disappointment. Dealing with disappointment is the risk we take when we dare to hope in the fullest sense of the word.

For many children Advent is a season of eager expectation, having mainly to do with looking forward to receiving Christmas presents. For others it is not. The presents are spoiled by circumstances; fighting parents, the death of someone they love, the looming cloud of debt which is part of the reason that their parents are fighting. The looking forward ends in anxiety and sometimes fear.

Advent is the season for a ‘looking forward’ which never disappoints. If we engage with it as the beginning of God’s fulfilled promise, we will not be left stranded on the rock of disappointment, or returned to ourselves as we were before we began to look forward to the fulfillment of the promise.

The best of our usual expectations often return us to ourselves, not because we are selfish or unimaginative, but because so often there is nothing much beyond whatever it is we are looking forward to. Hope embodies the promise that there is something greater and better than what we know of ourselves, something that can make a positive difference to the lives of others. Hope embodies the idea that we are valued and capable of immense goodness.

The Christian story is good news because it allows for the possibility that our expectations can be transfigured, including the often limited expectations we have of ourselves. So the good news of the coming of God’s Christ obliges us to live in such a way as to be bearers of hope. As hope-bearers we give others permission to act and think from the goodness within them, even if that goodness is not at all apparent. The hope which is given to us in the season of Advent requires that we shine a light into their darkness and into the darkness which surrounds us, so that goodness, or ‘righteousness’ may be released into it.

This is one aspect of the activity of prayer – holding the world and our neighbour in their darkness until they emerge into the light. Anyone who has traveled by air will know the feeling of emerging into bright sunlight when the plane, as it takes off, finally penetrates the grey of the place they left behind. The hope promised us in Christ takes us, and all for whom we pray, through the dark realities which surround us and into that place of light.

#MeToo - What of Forgiveness?

Source:hellogiggles.com

The easiest way to deal with the wounds of abuse – any abuse – is to think nothing, (never mind say nothing), either of the past or of the present. You just ‘deal with it’, a very apt expression, but one which, if acted upon, can be toxic. For one thing, it is a lie. You never ‘deal with it’, so why, at any point in history, do we pretend that this is possible? 

The #MeToo movement is epoch changing, not only because it goes some way towards validating the suffering of the victims of abuse, but because it gives us all permission to re-connect with and, in some measure, own, our pain. We do this privately, in our own dark corridors of remembrance, and in solidarity with others in the #MeToo movement. We also do it in solidarity with other generations.

Abuse, as we well know, is not an emerging phenomenon. It has been around for centuries, so it helps, I find, to try to place one’s own pain in the continuum of the abuse suffered by the perpetrators and by those who preceded them. This does not exonerate the abusers. Neither does it oblige, still less enable, me to forgive them. As if forgiveness was purely a matter of understanding contextuality, cause and effect, and thereby accepting the abuse as inevitable. But this is how women, and I think many men who may have been physically abused in childhood, try to come to terms with what a generally abusive childhood or youth still does to them.

There are two serious flaws in thinking that we can ‘deal with’ abuse and the effects of abuse. First, it tends to ignore the fact that abuse is not limited to the sexual and physical. Sexual abuse, for women, is more often reinforced by what seems at the time a natural and ‘deserved’ shaming of the person concerned. Perhaps it is the same for men. If an adult implies that we are ugly, stupid and to be laughed at rather than with, we accept it as a given. ‘Put downs’, the many chance remarks deemed as OK, but deeply wounding, enforced compliance with how we should look or behave, all in the context of dishonest and manipulative relationships, build a toxic mix of shame, anger, fear and self-loathing.

Very few sexual predators will genuinely want their victim to feel that they are beautiful, intelligent, unique and loved. On the whole, they will either intuit, or possibly know, that their victim has been conditioned to believe none of these things. This makes them fair game. It gives the abuser ‘permission’ to behave as he or she does towards them. Furthermore, and as we all know, abuse is not limited to the sexual. Emotional abuse will, often as not, occur between members of the same sex, first in family contexts and later in social and professional life. By then, it is more commonly known as bullying.

As Christians, each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we ask to be forgiven as we forgive those who have sinned against us. To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pray these words when I think of my own abusers, as well as of the hundreds of women coming forward in the #MeToo solidarity movement. What does forgiving actually entail for us? As I have never really found an answer to this question, I tend to mentally ‘bracket’ the words Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us as I am saying them, and hope God understands, but I don’t just leave the people concerned in a kind of limbo. Later, I ask God what he thinks those of us who have been sinned against are supposed to do with our recurring memories, with our feelings about these people, and with our own anger and shame.

There seems to be no answer to such questions. But I do believe that we pray to a God who not only understands but shares the feelings which prompt them. There are many ways we could visualise this sharing. Being present to the words Why have you abandoned me? spoken from the Cross is one of the most obvious, although not always the most efficacious when it comes to having our negative feelings about forgiveness validated in the moment.

Perhaps a better way is to see the wounds we still carry, because they are far from healed, as part of our transfigured inheritance. They become what makes us worthy of honour in the presence of the Lamb (Rev.14:1). In them we share in Christ’s glory, beginning with the shame and agony of his dying and death, but moving with him to his embracing of us in his risen life. This is not a pious metaphor, or some kind of mental cop-out. It is something which can take a life-time to learn, or it can be learned in a single revelatory moment of understanding.

Such an understanding gives us the greatest freedom. This does not mean that we are given permission to indulge, even momentarily, in gratuitous hatred and desire for revenge. It means that we too are forgiven for finding it impossible to ‘forgive’. But such freedom brings responsibility. We are now ‘responsible’ for our abusers, lest they fall into the abyss. This means that we must be willing to receive what is needed for us to have a transfigured way of seeing them, so that we can ‘hold’ them. It does not mean persevering with, or reviving, destructive relationships. It means allowing ourselves to have deep compassion for those who abuse us, or for their memory. We ‘hold’ what we know of them, as best we can, in the ‘safe space’ of the mercy and forgiveness of God, a space which we ourselves are also occupying. Even if the feeling of compassion only lasts for a moment, it will never completely go away, for His mercy endureth for ever.

Are We There Yet?

Within half an hour of setting off on a long car journey – from Wales to the South of France, for example, a small voice from the back seat would be heard asking the question we parents dreaded. “Are we there yet?”  I’ve often wondered if this is more of a philosophical question than one which has to do with mileage and the hours yet to be endured. For a child, a twelve hour car journey is a significant chunk of her remembered life. I also wonder if it’s not a question we are all asking in regard to all kinds of things – politics, the economy, a solution to environmental melt down, or even in regard to the end of our own lives – the latter, especially. Are we there yet?

Children are particularly interested in things pertaining to life and death. So 'Are we there yet' leads quickly to other questions. What happens when you die? Where do you go? And does such a place or dimension permit you to pick up where you left off in regard to relationships, human or animal, which were suddenly terminated by death? Happily for most children, death is, in a sense, a kind of continuation of life as they know it, but better.

If they are right, it is still quite difficult to gauge what the meaning and purpose of life now might be, especially given the very vague demarcation line which exists between life and death as children often perceive it. Life is still open-ended for them, less finite, more infinite, so they can see far greater distances, on the eternity spectrum, than most of us can until, perhaps, we reach a very old age. Then, we are returned to the conceptual space remembered from childhood, perhaps without realising that this is what is happening.

In the later mid-life years, before we reach this stage, a picture starts to emerge from what until now might seem an incoherent, and often disconnected, series of life events. The questions now being asked are not so much to do with what happens when you die, as what is the meaning of life? What is its purpose? Looking back over the years, it seems that on the whole, we have been far more anxious about purpose than we have about meaning. Purpose has concrete implications. It has to do with ‘making something’ of oneself or even, in today’s parlance, of ‘getting’ a life. But unlike purpose, meaning is something that simply has to be allowed to happen to us. It is a given.

Underlying our aspiring for purpose lies a considerable amount of anxiety. Anxiety is another word for fear. So when it comes to the purpose of life, we are afraid that we might have ‘failed’. The people we fear most in this regard are usually parents, then our own peer group and all those significant others who in some way exact standards of achievement, even if these expectations only live in our imagination. Furthermore, we often imagine that these particular fears will vanish once those who have instilled them in us die, but this rarely happens.

On the other hand, insofar as we live and die in Christ, we are already on the other side of the demarcation line between life and death, meaning and purpose, and between time and eternity. We are already partly in the other dimension. Far from being frightening, this dual-time state of ‘existence’ ought to be a sign of hope for us in the present. For one thing, it cuts into our ideas of linear time, especially in regard to our earthly life-span. When it comes to eternity, we are in the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We depart from linear time into a time-frame in which the meaning of life as we know it, has nothing to do with purpose in the ordinary sense of the word.

 In Christ, and in the context of eternity, meaning and achievement bear no relation to each other. We do not need to achieve, or to purpose our life now with a view to fulfilling someone’s expectations, or our own. In God’s economy, the meaning and purpose of our life comes in any given moment when a thought or action is purposed for the good of others and for the good of the earth God created. But, as I said earlier, it is the allowing which is important. Allowing is not the same as striving for something.

Allowing God’s purpose for our life is a little like the biblical concept of Wisdom. Wisdom, the living Spirit of God, has been around for eternity, ‘dancing’ with God. We are invited to enter into that dance. But we have to listen carefully for its measure, for the things which allow Wisdom to be danced through us in our earthly life time. When it comes to what happens when we die, the person who is wise, and who has taught others wisdom, will, as scripture promises ‘shine for all eternity’.  (Dan. 12:3) We’re nearly there.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

The ‘nones’ (those who when responding to surveys tick ‘none’ in the box marked ‘religion’ but who might possibly tick C of E if pressed) need look no further for a home. Bishop David Jenkins, that prophet of our time, once was heard to declare that God was not interested in the Church. God was all about the Kingdom. It follows that if and when we stumble upon the Kingdom in the context of the Church, we do not need to look very much further to find God. The problem lies in defining the Kingdom, if such a thing is definable. You could say the same thing about the Church. It is not easy to describe what the Church is, still less what it ought to be, if it is to be true to its Kingdom calling.

The original commission to go out and make disciples has acquired a rather hollow tone, given the Church’s history of conquest and forced conversion, not to mention prejudice and plain hatred. But the kernel of truth remains. If the Church is called to be anything at all it is called to offer to the world the peace which only God can bring, the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is even called to embody that peace.  Peace is its garment and peace is the substance of the body it clothes. It is called to give that body to the world, as Christ gave his. The Church cannot simply talk about peace in rather abstract terms overlaid with the clothing of pietism. We need to tend the hurt and resistant body, lest we be accused, like the Emperor who failed to realise that he had no clothes, of being completely naked.

It is the build-up of hurt and the resistance to healing which makes it so difficult for the Church to truly embody peace. As with any physical body, allowing wounds to fester without healing can make them life threatening. Could it be that something like this is happening in the life of the institutional Church? We keep knocking each other’s old wounds without pausing to consider the damage. We are more concerned with allowing our buildings to fall into disrepair than we are about healing the hurts which we have inflicted on ourselves.

At the more traditional end of the Church, we hide complacently behind beautiful but arcane (in the minds of many) liturgy, clerical dress and the kind of managerialism which consists mainly of moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. At the other end, as I have suggested in previous posts, lies a mixture of naïveté and hubris. I do not think that either of these scenarios provides a setting in which the ‘nones’ are likely to meet God in his Christ.

What is needed, before it is too late, is for the Church to take ‘time out’, a couple of year’s sabbatical perhaps, in order to focus prayerfully and pastorally on its relationships, particularly on those which relate to authority and the pastoral care of its people, clergy and laity alike. If the present hierarchical system of governance is to endure, those with the most authority must be subject to those with the least, as Christ was. It is the powerful who must begin this work of peace-making, because peace- making is both the mandate and the sign of true leadership.

Peace-making in the Church will entail the hard practical work of seeking forgiveness and the bridge-building which should follow; hard because it requires that everything that is not of love be burned away. Love must do the burning. This, incidentally, is about as close as it gets to the burning fires of hell. Hell is hell insofar as it is the ultimate conflagration of love vs. hatred. In the life of the Church the gates of hell appear to be impregnable, though, as Christ promised, they will not prevail. The fire of love will ultimately destroy them, even if the Church as we know it is destroyed in the process. The gates of hell are such that they bar human beings from the forgiveness which brings peace, from facing into all the private and collective betrayals, untruths and resistance to the goodness and giftedness in people which it has allowed over the centuries, and still allows, leaving only a hard shell of fear and mistrust, for those who experience the Church at close quarters. This makes embodying the peace of God for the world very difficult for them.

Thankfully, this is not always and invariably the case. There are acts of heroic self giving which pass unnoticed in the Church’s life. Priests who minister in and for the love of Christ, and whose work is largely ignored by the Church’s critics, embody the healing fires of love. Their work endures in the hearts of those whose lives they have touched. Bishops who are true to their calling as peace-makers and as pastors to their clergy do the same.

All of this suggests that it will take time for the Church to be transformed in such a way as to make the ‘nones’ tick a different box, but I am convinced that it will happen. Such is the nature of the faith we proclaim, that we will be changed ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye’ and that we shall all belong together in Christ.

If Music Be The Food Of Love ...

St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate is being taken over in what can only be described as an act of spoliation, which the dictionary defines as ‘the action of taking goods or property from somewhere by violent means’. The eviction of its classical musicians, for whom it has become church in the fullest sense, reflects the kind of iconoclastic violence witnessed at the time of the English Reformation when monasteries were sacked, statues decapitated, frescoes and wall paintings obliterated. Now, it is orchestrated music that must be expunged. The musicians who for years have made St. Sepulchre a space for prayer and reflection, are being removed to make room for ‘worship and ministry’. One can only presume that what the musicians offer is no longer deemed to be worship or, for that matter, ministry. The whole unhappy business raises two things which ought to be of concern to all Anglicans, whatever their churchmanship.

Anglicans in this country have for too long ignored or condoned the kind of quick fix which certain manifestations of charismatic, and largely conservative, evangelicalism has thrust upon them. Church ‘plants’, and St. Sepulchre is to be one of them, are in fact a form of colonisation, a process which has already been described as the McDonaldization of the Church of England. McDonald’s and the goods it serves is not only extremely bad for our health, it is also bad for a nation or community’s self respect. The French who only a decade ago were the envy of us all when it came to body image, are now getting fat. Could the same thing be happening to the Church? I think the spoliation of St. Sepulchre’s indicates a very real danger that it might. The Church is getting fat as a result of the McDonaldization of its worship and the commodification of its inner life in God to suit the tastes of the market.

What this danger entails pertains specifically to what the present incumbent, who has instigated the eviction, is about to do to St. Sepulchre’s when it comes to worship and ministry. It implies, among other things, a very narrow understanding of worship itself and, possibly, a very shallow interpretation of both worship and ministry in respect to how Jesus spoke and behaved in regard to these vital areas of Christian life.

In one of the most profound theological conversations in the whole of the New Testament, we are told that worship is authentic when it is done in ‘spirit and in truth’ (John 4:24). Beautiful music, especially classical music and liturgy, and some traditional hymns, releases the mind and raises the spirit to God. It is a truth language.  It is truthful because it is received into the listener’s ‘God shaped space’, to borrow from St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal and scripture itself. It is received in such a way as to allow for an encounter with God. It does not tell the listener anything, or issue terms and conditions for this encounter to take place. It simply opens up a space. Beautiful music is not pure aesthetics, as some may think. It is worship.

Music is therefore a unique and infinitely precious gift, because in freeing the mind and momentarily opening the heart it allows both listener and player to encounter one another within the love of God. It is also essential to ministry, and ministry, rightly understood, is essential to the ongoing life of the Church. Bands, trendy songs and shallow sensationalist preaching do not minister to anyone except the performers themselves. They do not serve. They simply perform. Classical musicians serve. 

The proof lies in the extent to which trendy songs and endlessly repeated cliché choruses do or do not transform those who imbibe them. Do people come away from these events less selfish, less needy, more able to love those they find hard to love or even respect? Are they more lovable themselves? Are they Christ-like in every sense? Are they the body of Christ? None of the methods which purport to make a church successful bear any relationship to what it means to be the body of Christ. They are not evangelism. They are part of a commercial enterprise. They deal in the commerce of spurious success, and they are entrepreneurial in following a set recipe for achieving that success. Beautiful music, especially when it is performed in a church, does not purport to do either of these things and for this Anglicans should be grateful.  

What then can liberal thinking Christians, as well as people who are ‘not religious’ do to prevent the Anglican Church from sleep walking into a place where God in his ineffability is rarely to be found?

Perhaps the future lies with the ‘nones’. People who describe themselves as ‘nones’, when it comes to religion, are extremely valuable to the Church. For one thing, they are capable of being prophetic, because they are, by their own definition, outsiders. Jesus loved outsiders. He did not require them to prove that they had a faith. He knew them and loved them for who they were. He loved them because their faith, and the truth to which it witnessed, consisted in the extent to which they were capable of love, and on this alone did he rate people.

The Church must be a place which draws people to itself because it touches them where they need to both give and receive the love of God. This is its ministry, and it is the ministry of every local church. Worship will only happen when a church has been ministered to with Christ like love and in a spirit of service. It will happen when people encounter something of the sacred, of the enduring nature of the mystery of God in the beauty of their surroundings, and in music. Let there be music at St. Sepulchre’s.  

Black Dog

There is a French saying ne pas être dans son assiete, which roughly translates as ‘to not be fully in one’s own plate’, as when pasta, badly served, overspills onto the table. It’s a great way of describing the general sense of being all over the place which I think many of us experience from time to time. It is not something we can easily ‘snap out of’, as sufferers of anxiety and depression, in all its manifestations, will know. Not being fully in one’s plate is a debilitating state of mind, especially if you are a writer, teacher, or someone tasked with preaching sermons or providing leadership.

There are other names for this state of mind, like ‘writer’s block’ or ‘black dog’, not that the two are identical, but they invariably feed on each other. I find they do the same in the course of the average day, since all days are potentially creative, whatever kind of work we do. Things get put off when we are blocked. We feel tired. We live for that cup of coffee, or something worse. We are not fully in control. There is something random and anarchic about the way we go about the day and the way we apply our thinking, if we are able to think at all. At the same time, we are absolutely static, inwardly ‘blocked’, so that there is not even the dubious thrill of the roller coaster effect, teetering on the creative high before plummeting to the depths.

The way we are feeling prevents us from doing anything specific. It paralyses, and makes it impossible to do what, theoretically, we should do in order to get back on track and motor forward. There are different methods for achieving this forward momentum. Personally, I find that methods only work for a while, and that when they no longer work you are back on your own, dealing with the black dog, or with writer’s block, or with the inability to dream up a sermon if that is what is required of you.

I have slowly learned that what is needed in all of these situations is a deep and inexhaustible energy in which we can trust, something which we can draw on simply by owning our desire and need for it. Whatever work we do, but especially if it is creative work, we must continually return to its creative source.

But this is impossible if we have not first learned to accept and believe in ourselves as gifted, or fruitful, full of life and hope even if, right now, it feels that we have ground to a complete halt. Knowing ourselves as fruitful is not the same as feeling reassured by relative success. Success will often come at the price of the work itself, because to be sure of success means being willing to think of one’s work as a commodity designed to satisfy consumers and fit the mood of the moment. This is as true in the context of preaching sermons as it is in any other creative work.  In our own low moments it is tempting to simply generate the kind of work, or preach the kind of sermons, which will satisfy the criteria for success or popularity. But we may end up hating ourselves for doing so, and then hate the work.

We are only fruitful when we write or say what gives people permission to flourish as the persons they were created to be. We are fruitful when we free others into their gifts so that they can use those gifts, and their lives, in the service of the truth which makes us free. For this to be possible, we have to trust our own giftedness enough to wait on it, even in the depths of depression and self doubt, because it is often there that we meet people and offer them hope in their own dark depths. We offer them hope because we have visited the depths ourselves.  We have learned to forgive and accept ourselves there, so we are in a position to help others do the same.

A good way to begin this process of self acceptance is to get into the habit of returning to any period, or even a single moment, in our life when we knew ourselves to be utterly valued, that our very existence was a blessing to someone else. It is important to re-own such moments without feeling guilty that we are doing so, because guilt is itself a denial of love.

Loving and forgiving one’s self is the hardest kind of loving there is, especially if you have not been equipped for it in early life. It is often much easier to remain in the depths of depression and self doubt, simply because they are familiar depths, whereas acceptance and forgiveness open up new horizons, new roads to travel into the unknown. The unknown is frightening because discovering it will inevitably involve getting to know ourselves as we really are, and accept our giftedness. We are gifted in and through the love of God from whom all energy for creative work, and life itself, proceeds.

Morning

Source: nedhardy.com

What gets you out of bed in the morning? In a way, I find this question harder to answer as I get older. It has to do with old habits wearing thin. The things that used to get me going are either no longer relevant, or no longer exist. When it comes to relevance, after 43 years of being together I’ve finally had to accept the fact that my husband really does not like hot tea, so to trek back upstairs to bring it to him the minute the pot has brewed is a waste of time and effort. I now pour it and leave it for him downstairs. Then there’s the other reality. The children have long since left home and now lead lives of their own at some considerable distance from ours. The only reason for getting up early for their sakes has to do with fitting in with international time zones. This we manage to do at other times of the day.

But I still get up an hour earlier, and I still have a reason for doing so. For one thing, there is the silence, both external and internal. We live in a silent place. In other words, silence is consistent. It is a given. There is no ambient traffic noise. There are no times of the day when we are even particularly conscious of noise, apart from the change of predominant bird cry. Buzzards are very active at the moment and the swallows have not yet started marshaling the troops for the long flight south. They will get noisier when they do so in a couple of weeks time. Also, we have cut down the old elder in which the crows used to nest, as well as fight with the magpies. Their departure has made the silence almost palpable.

External silence has the effect of quelling internal noise. In the first hour of the day the busy mind is subdued. It has not yet woken up to mundane preoccupations, although it is not asleep either. In fact, I find that it is more awake than at any other time of the day. It is open, in every sense of the word. For me, the first hour of the day is a time of openness to the Real Presence, but it is not a mental vacuum which I expect God to fill. Instead, I find that I am involved in a kind of three-way dialogue between the mind, the senses and God. But rarely is anything said. Instead, the heart is allowed to have its own mind, to speak from its concerns and from its fears.

Today, it spoke of North Korea and the US, and of the threat to our very existence which the leaders of these two nations represent. The mind, and my personal fears, being quelled, I was able to sense the impact of the situation on its most helpless victims, the ordinary people of North Korea. What came to mind was a picture of its baby-faced leader peering through what seemed like an old fashioned pair of binoculars while two of his adjutants stood by. One wore an army uniform. The other was dressed in a thin fleece type jacket. The army character looked thin. His companion was emaciated. Their leader was wearing a warm well cut heavy coat. He looked very well fed.

The memory of this picture, seen either on line or in a newspaper, speaks to me of the deeper evil, and of the most pressing danger, which is at the root of this crisis. It is the total disregard for other human beings which comes when two narcissistic leaders are sated or infatuated with power. No doubt if these two leaders were to disappear, others would replace them, so the solution to the crisis does not lie in praying that they, and the danger they represent, will simply go away. In fact, when we are engaged in the kind of three-way dialogue I have been describing, the idea of a ‘solution’ to the crisis of potential nuclear holocaust recedes a little. We realise that something more than a solution is needed, because a solution would be no more than a political construct designed to get these two leaders out of the impasse they have created and so allow the rest of us to breathe a sigh of relief, at least in the immediate present.

But whatever calming devices are deployed, in respect to the two antagonistic leaders, they will not make a jot of difference to the suffering endured by tens of millions of North Koreans. Their suffering will not be diminished, even for a moment. The silence of the early morning tells me that it is their suffering which matters most when it comes to any kind of meaningful solution to the Korean crisis. There is no particular logic for thinking this, and it will appear naïve to many, but for those who know the value of silence, engaging together in God with the suffering of ordinary North Koreans is vital spiritual work. If you have read this far, please reserve an hour of mentally uncluttered time to join me in this work.

Dreaming Up a Church

At school, when it was too wet to play lacrosse (O happy day), we did country dancing in the gym. One of the dances involved going to the back of the line and partnering the last person on it, so that you would both eventually end up at the front. I think the dance was called ‘Strip the Willow’. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I am right in my recollection of ‘Strip the Willow’, or even if I am confusing it with another dance, the basic pattern has stayed with me as a blue print for ecclesial life; how the Church could yet be, and how this new joyous way of being could liberate it into becoming the kind of Church which the Lord of the Dance might like to be a part of.

I think he probably is a part of it. It’s just that the Dance has moved on. Reels and country dances have a way of moving on by shifting the focus and altering the plane of action, so transforming the action itself. It is this shifting and re-focusing which the institutional Church needs to allow itself to do, if it is to keep dancing with its Lord, and if it is to survive at all. I say allow, because the movement is not a plan to be decided upon by those at the top and then enacted by those at the bottom as best they can. It is not a strategy for keeping going. It is the energy in which the Church should live and move, the energy which it breathes and then releases into the world. Or which it wilfully refuses to breathe because it is afraid of the risks entailed.

This is not as abstract as it sounds, any more than the Dance is itself an abstraction. Nevertheless, it does require some right side of the brain thinking, to acknowledge and borrow from a much more complex line of thought.[1] The Dance is a pattern, a collective creation, energised by the measure of its music which is its heart beat. The music is too fast, too compellingly joyous, to allow for strategy, for watching one’s back lest a fellow dancer fill our place unobserved. The Dance is not a competition in which one person or group feels threatened by another. Fear plays no part in it.

What makes the Dance a living Church, as opposed to a fearful and disconnected institution, is the will to love, at least for the duration of the Dance itself, in other words on this side of eternity. It moves in tandem with the changes, chances and inexplicable suffering (seemingly allowed by God) of this transient world. Given such a fluid, and at times frightening, situation, there is little time to do anything other than love. This is another skill which the institutional Church seems to be in danger of losing. The momentum of its collective inner life is slowing down because it has forgotten how to love. So it is losing the measure of the Dance.

Part of the problem, indeed most of the problem, is one of separation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel puts it well ‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”'. (Matt.11:16) One half of the dance, the clergy hierarchy (especially those at the top of the line), has become dislocated from the other, from the people who the clergy exist to serve, the people at the bottom of the line who are ‘playing’ and ‘mourning’. So it feels to those who are either at the bottom of the line or outside the Church altogether, that the clerical hierarchy is doing its own thing, its own private dance, one which is completely detached from the people, despite the fact that the people are the other partners in the Dance.

What practical solutions can we offer to save the Church’s true life in the Dance? We could begin, perhaps, by breaking the existing clerical caste system, which is still redolent of class and privilege, though not restricted to either, and which is currently stuck in a mould, or cast, of its own making.

The cast reveals striations of love which have become set in stony hearts. In order to break these hearts – and they do need to be broken, so that those called to be bishops, priests and deacons, can relearn to love their people, the people at the top end of the line need to link up and partner with those at the bottom. This is fundamental to the sacramental commission given to them. We love in and through our sacramental ministry, particularly in the celebration of the Eucharist which we take from the altar to the world.

In terms of ecclesial life, such a partnering would require two ‘givens’; the first that no ordained person should be doing a desk job and the second, that every ordained person should be mentored, or partnered, by a lay person. All clergy would be non-stipendiary. In regard to mentoring, we would begin by drawing on the skills, life experience and wisdom of older lay members of our churches, who might well be paid. These older members (aged at least 60, but preferably older) would mentor those clergy from whom current leadership expectations are the greatest; in other words, bishops, archdeacons, area deans and/or ministry area leaders. These expectations ought, one hopes, to diminish as the existing hierarchical structure is gradually dismantled. We could begin this dismantling process with all clergy being elected or sponsored by the members of their church (as happens already in some denominations) and bishops being elected for a fixed term by clergy.

But what, the reader is now probably asking, is to be done about the running, or management, of the fabric of the institution, its buildings, real estate and pension schemes, to name only a few? To which the answer might be, is it too hard to believe that there are not willing, and perfectly able, retired people who could do this (remunerated) work? Perhaps someone reading this post could make some practical suggestions in this area. Meanwhile, let’s dream of a Church which recognises and honours its Lord when He turns up unexpectedly, hoping to join in the Dance.[2]

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[1] I am indebted to Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emmisary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, London (2009)

[2] This post is a development of some of the ideas I shared in an interview with Mark Tully for the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Something Understood’ July 16^th, 2017

Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. As with all good fiction and drama, you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously, I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be oneself.

Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only watched the first three episodes of Broken. I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing. Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in translation, so to speak.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the ‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed. Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers with him – again.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. There are other paths of suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in this particular case.

All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain, although it may numb it for a while.

The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also tied to a particular poem, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.

All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent. They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we see in Broken, they are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying, or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured.  God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made whole again in his brokenness. 

Armageddon - or possibly not

Source: BBC

I was still at my convent boarding school when the Cuban missile crisis peaked. They were thinking of ringing our parents to ask them to take us home. Maybe it was the end of the world. We were told to pray, not that we really understood the scale of the threat in relation to ourselves, still less to the wider world. We did sense something unusual, though, about the school possibly having to close down in the middle of term, so it was vaguely frightening, even if the fear was sugar-coated by the prospect of an extended half-term break.

I cannot say that I was truly afraid of what might happen over Cuba. My earliest memory of fear was on my stepfather’s boat. I was about five and the crew would play at dangling me, screaming and kicking, over the side. That was real fear. Real fear, the kind that grips and paralyses a person happens when the threat is direct, immediate and personal. All three apply to the individual and to the collective in equal measure. Those who have experienced war will recognise this.

But there is another variant on fear, which is the vague fear we have all learned to live with. It has its peaks and troughs. Right now, given the situation in North Korea and the leadership vacuum in America which has helped to ramp it up, you could say that it is peaking, perhaps like the Cuban missile crisis with which I am sure it is already being compared. And there are other fears swirling around, most of them having to do with the instability of financial and property markets, along with climate change and the medium to long-term effects of Brexit. Added to these are the ‘plagues’ said to presage the end of the world, the zika virus, if you live in South America, being one of them.

All of these fear triggers have, in one way or another, happened before, with huge cost to human life and happiness. As a result of them, many people have ceased to believe in the existence of an all powerful God, still less a merciful and wise one. They will say that those who persist in believing in such a figure are clinging to some kind of psychological prop which enables them to get through life and to manage their fear. But getting through life, whatever it throws at us, by simply managing fear, is a thin substitute for a life lived in, with and through God, as it was lived for us in Jesus Christ.

What we are given in Christ is an altogether different way of managing fear. It is the last thing most of us would think of doing in frightening situations, although with wise leadership and a less frightened electorate we might limit, or even prevent, most of the fear situations which face us today. Instead of succumbing to fear, we are told to keep our inward eye firmly fixed on the embodiment of truth, the Word made flesh, the Christ walking towards us on the turbulent water. This is the ‘way’ and the ‘life’ that enables us to deal with fear.

If we return to the Armageddon-like representations of the current North Korea nuclear threat, one thing is clear: There is unfinished business, and North Koreans, who are ruled through fear, are not allowed to forget this lest they cease to be quite so fearful. North Korea is technically still at war with the US over the carving up of the country and the ensuing Korean war. No peace treaty was ever signed. This possibly deliberate oversight has led to a great deal of loss of face for the ruling dynasty of the north, beginning with the present incumbent’s grandfather. Powerful and morally weak leaders find it hard to cope with loss of face, except through violence.

In the context of Korea, Trump has added to the existing problem of loss of face by upping the ante in regard to violent retaliation and thereby provoking the already angry Kim Jong Un who, like Trump, is a powerful and morally weak leader.  Narrow readings of religious texts do nothing to allay our fear of the end of all things being brought about through the hubris and stupidity of President Donald Trump, and the hubris and cleverness of Kim Jong Un. In fact, it is being exploited in certain religious contexts for political power-driven purposes. The exploitation of fear through religion is a long way from the kind of life Jesus was talking about when he spoke of himself as the ‘the way, the truth and the life’.

What then can Christians learn from their own Leader about managing the world’s fear? Many of the key exchanges which take place between Jesus and powerful people, as well as those who fear them, are contained by the words ‘You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you’. In other words he calls us to convert fear to something resembling the honouring of the enemy – you might call this love, although perhaps not immediately. I think Jesus may have been talking about something resembling ‘chivalry’, which is not an exclusively masculine virtue, incidentally. Rather, it is a sense of the need to brace oneself for the best we have to give when it comes to the things we fear. Those who lived through the second world war, if they are reading this, will remember what bracing oneself for the best one has to give entailed. So will the doctors and muslim taxi drivers who rushed to the scenes of the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. I think that they were able to call on something within them resembling chivalry, or honour, perhaps even love.

All of this may not seem to relate directly to what we are feeling about the possibility of a nuclear attack by north Korea, unless we can conceive of a way of ‘centering down’ to that place of goodness and honour which lies somewhere within even the worst of us. Centering down to the best that lies within us does not involve an introspective search for the good in ourselves. It is more a case of being available to it, should it suddenly emerge and surprise us. Coming to terms with our own goodness can be frightening at times.

When it comes to managing fear, in relation to ourselves or events in the wider world, this is only possible when we are willing to allow our fear to be ‘converted’, or turned into something else, by God. We do this in and through our life in Christ. We do it collectively as the Church and privately as every single individual who secretly wrestles with fear. We do it by wanting, more than anything, to see our fears, both public and private, finally overcome by the peace which comes with courage and must ultimately end in reconciliation.