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.  

A nation's shame

Christ separating the sheep from the goats

Judgment, along with the idea of eternal fire and separation from God, is not a particularly fashionable sermon topic these days, except perhaps in the context of certain dubious religious sects. But Jesus speaks of it on a number of occasions and in the starkest terms. In St. Matthew’s gospel we read of a time of sifting and separation between ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ (Matt.23: 31-46).

Goats were the sin-bearers in early Jewish tradition. The animal had the sins of the community symbolically heaped upon it and was then driven out of the town into the wilderness, from which we get the term ‘scapegoat’. 

The scapegoat story from the old testament has left us with some top-heavy theologies of atonement which derive from a deep need to blame someone else for what is wrong with our lives, our relationships and our world. In the old testament, the scapegoat represents a collective need for a retribution which purges rather than forgives. This old covenant theological inheritance was transposed to the cross and remained unquestioned by the Churches for centuries, so contributing to a great deal of psycho-religious illness. [1] 

Such a view of Christ’s atoning action on the cross also skews the way we think about ultimate judgment and the reward or condemnation which is to follow. In the story of the sheep being separated from the goats, we are being shown two classes of human beings, and two qualities which pertain in greater or lesser measure to every person on earth.

Jesus puts it quite simply. There are those who love and who live out their lives, to the best of their ability, in love. They may not think of themselves as Christian. Indeed, as it is told in the story, they are not aware of ever having met Christ. In other words, they make no particular connection between compassionate actions, including compassionate politics, and loving God. In the moment of judgment they are told not to be too concerned about this because their attitude of heart has effectively done all the ‘faith’ work that could ever be needed. They are already in paradise. They are ‘in their element’, which is the element of Love itself.

Ironically, the ‘goats’ who are, figuratively speaking, in the same element, suffer and ‘burn’. This interpretation of the story suggests that the burning fires of hell are not those of hatred, but of love. If you are a person who, for whatever reason, refuses to love, you quite literally ‘burn’. You burn when the pure refining fire of love starts to make itself felt, first as shame, then as what used to be called ‘compunction’ and, finally, as the capitulation of love to Love. So the sheep and goat story is an allegory for the ultimate and eternal judgment which awaits us all with respect to our attitude to refugees.

At present, we as a nation, and the government which we have elected to represent us, should be starting to feel the ‘burning’ of this refining fire of God’s love in regard to our refusal to accept our fair share of refugees and asylum seekers. This, of course, entails obvious risks. Might they not deprive us of our livelihoods – ‘burn’ them perhaps? Become a burden to our social services and health care – ‘burn’ them also? Threaten our ‘way of life’ by ‘burning’ and completely consuming all that is selfish, hypocritical and destructive of life and the human spirit in the love which they will bring? The answer may be ‘yes’ in a small measure to all of these fears because their very presence will ‘judge’, or ‘interrogate’, our common life, so providing the political sifting which this nation, in its shame, so badly needs.

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[1] For more on this see my Making Sense of God’s Love: Atonement and Redemption (SPCK)

Only connect

My current computer screen saver is Giovanni Bellini’s Christ Blessing, as shown on my post of February 10^th.  I am returning to this picture because it holds my attention in a particular way. With our slow internet connection, there is always time to contemplate it, even if contemplation is abruptly cut off by the arrival of emails and other distractions emanating from the ‘real’ world. By contemplating, I mean looking through the picture, rather than looking at it. To contemplate this picture is to look through it to the Christ who is inviting the viewer into relationship with him, and into a different way of seeing the world. Looking at the face of Christ makes me wonder sometimes which world is the most real – his or the one I seem to inhabit, as most of us do, via a computer.

 

Computers and social network sites, as well as blogs, leave us in a kind of limbo when we are not on them, which is why it is so difficult to turn them off. It is as if we inhabit two worlds at once, in which we deal with what feel like different realities. What kind of inhabiting is this? and what kind of reality am I contemplating as I look at the face of Christ while waiting for the computer to get going? It seems to be a liminal place. I am standing on a dividing line between two worlds, two realities which interface with one another. In contemplating the image of Christ blessing I sense it reaching in to the world being opened up not only to me, but to millions of others, through the computer. When the screen saver goes, an interruption occurs as the computer releases a different real world into the mind space of its user.

But the image of Christ blessing is not so quick to fade. My screen saver remains with me and serves as a reminder of that other real world. The memory of Christ’s hand raised in benediction now confronts the host of alienating images and stories which shape themselves around not only my own consciousness, but also around everything which the computer may have to offer, its potential for both good and evil. The computer is a re-incarnation of that allegorical tree of knowledge portrayed in the book of Genesis. We need to eat carefully of its fruit.

The computer takes us to dark places and, potentially, to a general darkness, although not  always one which is specifically ‘religious’. It is important to differentiate between general darkness, the darkness of ignorance and materialism, and that which seems to pertain solely to religion, as many people understand it. Those who distrust religion will often associate it with the kind of darkness which comes with the preaching of hatred and murder. This particular darkness is encapsulated in the image depicting the Arabic letter ‘nun’, for ‘Nazarene’, as it is used to single out Christian homes for the intimidation or destruction of those who live in them.

The task which faces all of us, if the world is to survive the current tide of religious violence, consists in bringing together these two images, the one of Christ blessing, and the Arabic letter, and allowing them to confront one another. It is challenging and, at times, frightening work. Firstly, because it requires that we come to terms with the idea that the light, as we see it in the Bellini painting, and as we sometimes sense it in the deeper reaches of our own consciousness, has not been overcome by the sinister darkness associated with the letter ‘nun’.

Secondly, it obliges us to also look at our own inner darkness, those feelings of doubt, fear and anger which surface from time to time and for which there is often no obvious or immediate explanation. This process of confrontation begins with our accepting and coming to terms with the light which we also carry within us. It is the light of God’s presence, the working of his grace in our lives, to the extent that we allow it. Allowing grace into our lives is a matter of making ourselves available to God. It is what the writer Simone Weil called disponibilité.

Being available to the work of light brings us to the outer limit of what we think of as our ‘selves’. In so doing, it faces us with a particular kind of emptiness, one where the ‘self’ that we understand we are, including all its dreams and desires, loves and hates, has to be literally ‘forgotten’.[1] This is what Christ meant when he talked about ‘dying’ to self. In the moment of forgetting, or dying, we are invited to drop down into darkness, the darkness of not having answers, of not knowing, and at the same time of trusting in the light which literally ‘lightens the world’. This whole process of forgetting, dying and trusting leads to a new kind of knowing and seeing.

There is a connection to be made in the process of  knowing and understanding on one level with that of not knowing or understanding on a deeper and more significant level. We are talking about the inhabiting of two worlds, or realities. At the deeper level, we don’t need to know things in the same way. We don’t need to have made sense of why the world is as it is, or to have come up with solutions. All that is required is that we maintain a connection between the light, as we see it in the holy face of Christ, and all that is chaotic, violent and dark in our world.

On the whole, this work of connecting is best done by individuals who are prepared to be open to it for most of the day. They will find, in any case, that once they have made themselves ‘available’, being open to the work of grace will become a way of life, although it will not prevent them from carrying on with life as they have always lived it, with regard to what they do for a living, their marriage or relationships and all those in between times when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular.

The vital work of engaging with darkness, while remaining in the light, is a matter of remaining connected at a deeper level with the light we see in the face of Christ, who confronts and overcomes the darkness in the world around us.

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[1] I am grateful to Maggie Ross for many of the ideas which inform this post, especially that of  ‘forgetting’. See her recent book Silence: A User’s Guide, (DLT)