Please breathe

Source: Wikipedia

Children and babies cry in an alarming way. Once the crying really gets going, there comes a point when the child stops remembering to breath. He has no conscious method for letting go of the inhaled breath so that the next one can follow. A terrible momentary silence ensues. Were these fits of rage and anxiety to continue to be expressed in this way in adult life, you would think of such a person as suffering from some sort of narcissistic personality disorder in which hysteria can be usefully deployed for recording feelings and preferences and getting other people to gratify them. There are no prizes for guessing what adult in the public eye might fit such a description. For one thing, his inaugural address has been described as the angriest in his nation’s political history.

The question this leaves us with is not so much whether he will or will not follow through with his insane agenda, but how do the rest of us handle the anxiety which his behaviour generates for each one of us personally? I think we begin to handle it by remembering to breathe in a particular way. Most of us are not in a position to urge him to ‘breath’, although we still hope that there are people of power and influence who might still be able to do this, but it is not likely to be you or I. Instead, our task is to behave as we would if we were present at the scene of any other kind of emergency –we begin by making sure we are reasonably safe, lest we become a casualty ourselves, and then start looking around for those in need of help.

Thinking healing into the world politics of the moment works in a similar way and takes us to a comparable place. We have to be present to the anxiety and to the causes of it, without becoming a casualty ourselves. We do this through a kind of ‘breathing’. We begin by breathing in and as we breathe out, we drop down into our deep ‘centre’ – like going down in a lift, or elevator.

 This may sound like a rather introspective exercise, but it is quite the opposite. We drop down into the centre (also known as the ‘ground’) of our being in order to let go of everything we think we are – the layers and layers of false self-perceptions that have built up in our lives so far. We do this for a bit – a few minutes, a few hours, a few weeks maybe – until this ‘ground of being’ becomes our natural space, our habitat.

This is the space of the true self from which we can assess any situation calmly and objectively but also with compassion. In time, through doing this exercise, and ultimately living it, we will learn wisdom, and learn how to use wisdom in a measured way for the good of others and not for the enhancement or reassurance of our old ‘self’.

Learning wisdom is not the same thing as knowing the answers to the world’s problems or even, at times, to our own. It has to do with understanding how the tangled web which is the sum total of what is also called human ‘sinfulness’ has become so utterly intractable. The core of this understanding lies in knowing that any one aspect of human sinfulness – an individual’s lust for power and adulation and his or her indifference to the price which others will pay for it, for example – is potentially ‘redeemable’. By that I mean that it can be transformed, or better still, transfigured into something quite different, something which is in the gift of a merciful God and the outworking of God’s grace.

So, to return to the centering down exercise, we learn to encounter human sin in that deep place without being either anxious or frightened by its enormous implications, or instinctively hating or feeling revolted by its perpetrator. We remember that the perpetrator is bound up in his own darkness, in the addictive nature of his self-idolising behaviour, and we remember how easy it was for something comparable to happen in our own lives, and how disastrous it may have proved to be.

So we allow this dangerous person a little space in our deep place. We allow the light to touch him. We do not do this grudgingly. Quite the contrary. We do it as we beg wordlessly for mercy from within our deep place, so that he can be held by God, as we are. Ultimately, the grace which we make room for, as we simultaneously let go of our false self and of all the artificiality we have needed to sustain it, is felt as light and as a lightness of being. He needs to feel this too. It is the peace which literally ‘overcomes’ the world and governs our individual lives – ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’.

Trainscape

Train departing Scarborough. Wikimedia Commons

There is something liminal  about pulling out of a train station. It is a moment in which we have to let go of whatever has been left behind, not only the station, but specific life experiences, a holiday, or a failed love affair. Perhaps we are experiencing the frightening edginess of leaving home for a new country. We also have to let go of the bizarreness of the situation itself as the train gathers speed, of hurtling along in a tin box on rails. In such a context it is sometimes best not to think too much, or at least not to over analyse or dwell on the physical reality we find ourselves in.

Perhaps it is better to dwell, instead, on the unique perspective which train travel brings to our lives and to the world we currently inhabit. Leaving the station, as we become part of an accelerated transition from urban to rural environment , we are reminded of the difference and complementarity which exists between towns and the countryside and of how much we need each other. If we let go of habitual anxieties pertaining to train travel we can begin to look at the view from the window in a different way. We witness in a passing moment the interdependence which exists between all living things.

Letting go of the habits of anxiety which tend to surface, and then spoil such vacant travelling moments, allows us to become  part of a regenerative life, a life which connects us to itself and which is infinitely greater than the narrow confines of the one we inhabit most of the time. This wider, deeper space, or life, is what we might call reality. It is not the same as the reality we create for ourselves by the way we think, or the day to day life choices we make. These thoughts and decisions need to be substantiated and given purpose by a degree of mental effort often mistakenly thought of as ‘productive’.

As with the maintenance of a ‘life style’, the mental effort, or anxiety, needed to maintain a habitual thought world is in fact counter-productive because anxiety is usually caused by a skewed perception of what is real, and therefore of what matters. The real, as it is usually perceived, is what appears to sustain us in life. The real, perceived in this way, is also the logical. It is what ‘makes sense’. When the real, as we have always known it, becomes blurred or is interrupted, we experience various kinds of emotional and mental disturbance. In this frame of mind, anxiety claims everything, where before it could be limited to certain thought processes or to people on whom we depend, or who depend on us. In a sense, anxiety kept those areas real and the people about whom we were anxious, including ourselves, ‘safe’.

Anxiety gave us a sense of solid reality, a reality which could ultimately be managed and controlled in a logical way. Being anxious seems to hold things in place and so, paradoxically, gives a certain sense of security. We know where to find our worries when we need them. So letting go of anxiety is both irksome and exciting, but it is a  life skill which we all need to learn if we are to retain a hold on our sanity in a turbulent world and in our often turbulent lives.

The letting go, the departing from the station towards an uncertain future and the travelling which will take place before we get there, all amount to the vital work of prayer. The work of prayer goes on in two contexts, that which we might loosely call the self, and that of the world around us, the two being interconnected. Put more prosaically, it means engaging consciously with life as it really is for us as autonomous selves and with the real dirt of life on the ground in the harsh realities of war and injustice. In prayer, we can ‘free fall’ into the worst situation, including those which pertain to our own anxiety, and be part of the life which literally ‘rescues’ or drags us and the world we inhabit back up from what the bible calls ‘the abyss’.

Think, for a moment, of dirty politics. As I write, there is talk of Israel having spied subversively on the Iran peace talks. Nothing has yet been proved, but politics being what they are, it would not be surprising if it is true. This is a situation, among many, which requires that people of prayer ‘free fall’ into it. It does not matter what stage of your own spiritual journey you are on, or whether the particular situation has played itself out in a certain way. We do not yet know what results these talks will yield, anymore than we have seen the end of Isis. We do not yet know what the ultimate fate of Tikrit will be, but we know that the conflict is a dirty one.

The same kind of free falling applies to our own lives. We are called to free fall into the love of God and take the world with us. We fall into what the writer, Meister Eckhart, called the ‘ground of our being’. Then we allow our thoughts, whatever they are, to be taken down to that place. We do not need to have started on a spiritual journey, or to have been formed or trained through any particular method in order to do this, but we do need to be prepared to open up to that good grounded place and to travel deeply into it. There is no telling what we will discover once we get to our destination, if we can call it that, and there are no particular landmarks along the way. It is uncharted territory, the life of God’s spirit at work in us.

Reaching for the edge

Some years ago, we went to Taizé, a place where Christians and many others who are seeking God go to find him. They find him in many different contexts, different ‘mansions’, to quote the word used by Jesus as a figurative way of talking about heaven and the hereafter. At Taizé, these ‘mansions’ are really different kinds of spaces in which surprising encounters take place. They are the moments which together make up a new friendship, perhaps a first experience of what it really means to live in community, but at Taizé the most significant moment happens in the context, the space, in which collective worship takes place.

The summer I visited Taizé, was extremely hot. We sat, several hundred or more, in a huge tent with all the entrances opened to allow a cross breeze.  The altar, or focal point for worship, was very close to where we were seated, but at about a third of the way through the singing the whole gathered community turned to face a different focal point, at the other end of the tent. Suddenly we were out on the edge. Others were now at the centre.

There are many people today who feel out on the edge of things when it comes to questions of faith and ultimate meaning. Perhaps the Church they have known in the past has failed them in some way. It has either left them behind by failing to address crucial life issues in a way which is both credible and hope giving, or it has become introspective, concerned with its own career prospects and with a very partial understanding of the real meaning of tradition.  These concerns have caused it to become stuck in a place which makes it impossible for it to ‘turn’ in the way the worship focus at Taizé allows people to turn, so that those on the edge can also be near its centre. As with the Taizé community, the ‘turning’ is what gives life to the wider Church as well as to its worship. It is also, coincidentally, the root meaning of the greek word for repentance, greek being the language of the New Testament.

For the Church, repentance is about turning outwards towards God and towards all those who are on the outer edges of its life, but who are still rather wistfully seeking God within its walls. It does not really matter how this turning is done, as long as it is done because the Church, in all its denominations and groupings, wants to connect more deeply, more compassionately, and more truthfully, with God and because it wants to make it possible for those on its peripheries to do the same. These are the only ends which matter when it comes to ‘turning’.

 One of the signs that the Church, in its different denominations and sub-divisions, is failing to ‘turn’ is that it is becoming increasingly introspective. It is looking inwards, but without allowing the deeper questions to surface. Something has happened to its heart with the result that it is unclear of what it is really about. It is anxious about numerical growth and relevance. At the same time, it does not want to be seen to capitulate to secularism. So pragmatism rules the day, with the result that the Church is perceived by many as becoming increasingly secular and, ironically, increasingly irrelevant.  

With its heart growing cold, its anxiety feeds on itself, so the Church has little choice but to resort to managerialism on the one hand, or crowd-pleasing tribal religion, as well as the manoeuvring of party interest groups within its own walls, on the other.  Both are forms of retreat inwards, rather than a forward movement of turning outwards.

Nevertheless, management does have its uses. Creative outward-looking management liberates and empowers. It enables movement. It can also provide a little mental space in which to allow the things which really matter to emerge and focus in the collective mind while the Church, as an organisation, gets on with reorganising itself. It is a little like dreaming of the next blog post while sorting out the cutlery draw. This kind of mental break, or ‘space’, allows important questions to surface. When the Church is not allowing important questions to surface while it sorts out its cutlery drawer it is simply managing a static situation. It is no longer reaching out through leaders with vision and contemplative zeal to those outside who need the fruits of such vision and zeal – and who the Church also needs without always realising it. So perhaps the Church needs to forget itself for a while and allow the old walls to crumble without being in too much of a hurry to put up new ones.

The Church endures wherever there are enough rooms without walls, or ‘mansions’, to allow everyone to meet Jesus Christ and live in them in his love. In other words, where it focuses outwards in such a way as to allow those on the edge to also be at its centre. It seems, to those on the edge, that the Church is often afraid to let go of the familiar in order to grasp at what is unfamiliar, but which resonates with the truth they need to hear spoken from the pulpit, conveyed in the sacraments and lived out in the care of the least of the Church’s members. People on the edge have already heard this truth in their own hearts.  Perhaps it is they who are called to convey it into the heart of the Church.

Internet soundings

The creative use of light and shade are what make a painting work. The same is true with words and ideas. Light and shade, ambiguity without trickery, make for composite truth. We need this kind of composite and intuited truth in order to establish an anchorage, or footing, for love and in order to communicate that love effectively. Considered ambiguity makes for intuitive communication. So if communication is to be in any sense meaningful, it has to be undertaken at depth, perhaps through the medium of art or music, or through the internet. The internet has revealed that deep intuited communication leads to understanding and to solidarity with people, particularly with the oppressed because communication can involve not just two people, but millions.

These are not just abstract ideas. They are the concrete reality which is currently being explored in the abstractions of internet social networks. In the past, before the arrival of the internet, a social network consisted of a group of friends, or of like-minded people, possibly of a similar social class with similar economic advantages or disadvantages. You were most comfortable, socially, with your own kind. The same may be true today, but in a far less limiting way. The internet has helped us re-draw social demarcation lines. We are freer to choose where and with whom we belong, or to belong to everyone and to be at home everywhere. But freedom is not something human beings handle very well. It frightens them, so they construct new and different ways of delineating and separating themselves from one another, defensive lines against people they neither know or understand, and who they at times fear.

The internet, and social networking sites in particular, give us a new and rather strange freedom. If you take away real faces and real social situations, the way in which social demarcation lines are drawn, or re-drawn, changes. The internet gives us permission to draw lines, or efface them, without ever taking responsibility for the human being who is at the end of the fibre optic cable. We seldom have to look them in the face or even speak to them personally. This isolates the individual at both ends of the cable and makes them anxious about other people and about themselves.

Working through the internet, as a writer, is liberating and exciting, but it also induces a certain amount of paranoia and anxiety. Is there anybody out there? Even if you manage to catch sight of a twitter follower or Linked-in connection in some real but still somewhat fabricated way (with the help of u-tube, perhaps), the person is still not quite ‘real’ to you. The body, the voice, the nuanced expressions, the memories pertaining to a specific encounter are missing. If you do find the person on u-tube, or its equivalent, what you see is at best a different encounter, someone else’s. It is second hand.  And yet, the new follower is real because they have decided to follow you for a particular reason. There has been a communication between you and them. But how are you to respond, and how are you to maintain the line of communication, given the limitations of time? Replies and re-tweets only take you so far. They don’t sound the depths when it comes to real human and creative exchange.

This being said, there is some hope where twitter is concerned. While the individual is still remote, he or she usually has a ‘face’ and a tiny profile description through which you glimpse them as a person. I’m always pleased when new followers appear. I can’t deny that a couple of new followers every day is reassuring. Followers tell you that there are people out there who may possibly be reading your work and, as a result, want to signal their existence, their ‘reality’ in the particular thought world which you and they inhabit. This is a great blessing, and it is a blessing which grows exponentially with the number of seconds you are prepared to ‘contemplate’ that follower as a person with what little you know of them from their profile. Simply following more people in order to get them to follow you back is not the same thing as meeting them singly, on a one by one basis. 

One of the things that the internet offers, at least in the sphere of twitter and linked-in, is the opportunity to look at a face and hear the ‘voice’ of a complete stranger via their profile. You can read a profile in the way you might look at the face of Christ in a painting or icon, allowing the mind’s ‘heart function’ to fill in the shadow areas. The contemplation of paintings and icons involves filling in what is absent, where light complements dark, or shades merge. Something similar can happen, conceptually, in the world of twitter. By sensing the presence of our followers, as people with whom we are creatively involved, we are already engaging with them at a deeper level.

This kind of deeper engagement, or sounding, requires a different and deeper level of attention to our own work, as well as to the people who might read it. Paying deep attention is a form of blessing. When we bless our followers, by taking a couple of seconds to actually look at them, we are being grateful to them for blessing our work, for paying attention to it, and it is in this mutuality of blessing that the real work of communication begins.