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.

One Love

Source: Billboard.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’.

Lent 2016 - Confronting Fear

I read in Saturday’s Guardian that a woman who had tripped and fallen while crossing a road was ignored by two passing cars, before being run over and killed by a bus whose driver had not noticed her lying there. Did all three of these drivers perhaps half notice the woman, but for fear of getting involved (the legal and practical ramifications of doing so would have been considerable) simply pass on by? Selfish individualism, as the Guardian article suggests, runs on the fear of getting involved.

Selfish individualism is no new thing, as the story of the good Samaritan also reminds us, but what does not immediately register with the reader of that story is the acute loneliness of the two who pass by on the other side. We get a sense of this loneliness in the incident which took place on a city street in the UK only a few days ago. The drivers of the cars and bus, like the religious experts in the gospel story, seem disconnected from other people’s humanity, and perhaps even from their own.

The selfish person almost always ends up being the loneliest and the most alienated, as we often see with some of the elderly people in care homes whose families seldom visit them, not because they do not care about their relative, but because their love has been absorbed, sponge-like, over many years by a self obsessed and often fearful individual.

The loneliness of the self obsessed individual could also become the plight of the selfish nation. The selfish nation only thinks short-term and takes what it can from the wider family, the family of nations. In certain contexts its short-term thinking has been compounded by the  fear of what might happen to the nation if it started to risk itself for the sake of the powerless. The plight of the selfish nation returns us to the plight of the selfish individual who is too timid or self obsessed to be pro-active about taking in refugees, for example.

It seems strange that all of this fear is often confused with religion, or with the lack of it. Lack of religion is sometimes seen, by those who do not understand what religion is about, as lack of moral fibre, or a version of the same. But one cannot help suspecting that, for them, the real problem with religion is that it involves passion. Dispassionate morality, or virtue, is easier on the conscience; suffering and need become someone else’s problem. Who knows where passionate love for a loving God might take them?

This being said, the critics of religion have a point. Religious people are often blind to their own self obsession and the threats which it poses when it is cloaked by religious individualism. Religious individualism feeds on the same fear as any other kind of individualism. It feeds on the fear of those whose religion is strange to us, with the result that we feel we must protect ourselves from whatever we think they might do to us.

One way around this problem would be to take advantage of the most powerful resource which all people of faith have at their disposal – prayer. Prayer takes one of two forms. It is the intimate conversation which the human being has with the creator God who is loved and trusted by the one doing the praying. Prayer also involves desiring the highest good for all human beings, beginning with those whose religion is different from our own.

Christians are about to enter the holy season of Lent. I think many Christians would greatly value the prayers of Muslims for our highest good. Many of us will be praying for them during the coming weeks. Here are two prayers which Christians say together on the Sunday before Lent begins.

Lord, who has taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth, send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted dead before thee; grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

Merciful Lord, grant, we pray, to your faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I hope that those who read this blog will continue to say these prayers throughout the coming weeks for all Muslims of good faith, as well as for themselves, and that Muslims will join us in saying them for us in a spirit which is true to their religion:

What hope for the Church in Wales? (2) Minding the gap

Last week I wrote about alienation as symptomatic of a dysfunctional organisation. Alienation is probably best defined as the fear which generates distrust between individuals and groups, causing them to perceive one another as mutually threatening, even though they may not realise this or admit to it. To feel threatened by others is to feel diminished by them. We feel threatened when we are made to feel exposed and unworthy, or at times less than human, by another person’s attitude, or by another group’s politics.

What happens to the individual is mirrored in the life of the collective. Where one group feels threatened it will instinctively respond to the other in a defensive way. Such a defensive response can translate into aggressive language or behaviour, or into angry withdrawal, thereby creating another layer of fear and distrust. This whole fear syndrome constitutes a cyclic and repetitive pattern found in just about every human social situation, and it is endemic in the life of the Church in Wales, as we saw in last week’s Deanery conference meeting.

The challenge facing the Church lies in interrupting this cycle of fear so that it can be revealed as a deception. We create such a healthy interruption by looking at the unhealthy interruption, or gap, which exists between the way we pray and the way we live our lives. The unhealthy gap, or interruption, exists in both collective and individual contexts. These two sets of human interaction – how we relate to God spiritually and practically and the extent to which we do so as a Church or diocese, as well as in our own personal prayer lives, belong together, of course.  But this is something which we perhaps take for granted without looking at the nuances and overlaps which exist between prayer and getting on with life, including that of managing the life of the Church or diocese. We tend to assume that God is around without actually pausing to connect with him, or maintaining our connection in the difficulties and conflicts which we face as Church in all areas of our common life.

Maintaining the connection, or minding the gap between prayer and life, begins with recognising that we are much in need of love, of being counted as worthy not only by God, but by each other. If we can recognise how much we need each other in this way, we will also find that we are all very much alike, and therefore together.

As someone who has spent much of my life either directly or indirectly in a theatre environment, I have sensed this kind of commonality in the way an audience laughs together. This can happen in the context of preaching too. The preacher and the congregation laugh together at something which emerges in the sermon as absurd or funny, and in a single moment barriers fall. We all hear and understand something new together. Prayer that connects with life often makes itself felt when obstructions to human love are broken down, even if only momentarily, so that we can laugh, or ‘rejoice’ together in this way.

In the life of the Church in Wales, there are a number of fear areas which obstruct the growth of love and which could disappear if we would only let them. There is the fear which comes with years of unquestioning adherence to outdated rules and customs, the latter including the way some clergy dress. These rules and customs alienate us from one another and put many people off coming to church.

There is the fear, especially among clergy (irrespective of gender), of losing power or prestige. This contributes to a fear of change and to a preoccupation with status. There is the visceral fear which many people have of articulate women (and of women in general), and the fear of LGBT people, both of which continue to haunt the Church and compromise its credibility in the world. Both of these can be traced to misguided notions of ritual purity, a partial reading of scripture and, in the case of LGBT people, to lingering but unquestioned social taboos. Taken together, all of these fears have directly contributed to what has come to be known as decline.

All of this suggests that bridging the gap between prayer and life requires that we create new openings for the love of God to flow into our life together. This work begins with every person being prepared to be vulnerable before God with regard to their own particular fears. Only then will it be possible for us to encounter him together as his Church. 

On Dying

Last week I was privileged to be at the bedside of a man who was dying. I say privileged because the experience was akin to what I feel when I approach the altar before celebrating the Eucharist, a sense of being on holy ground, in the immanent presence of God and, like a number of Old Testament prophets who found themselves in a comparable situation, having nothing to say. It’s not that I had nothing to say to the man who was dying. I had nothing to say to the fact of death itself. There is a built-in instinct to talk in the presence of death, knowing that a person’s sense of hearing is the last to go, and in the mistaken belief that our talking will somehow assuage their loneliness, or their fear of oblivion, as well as our own. Being at the bedside of someone who is dying obliges us to think about our own mortality.

As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being the only person left alive on earth except for one ancient spectral figure who would one day meet me over the brow of a sunny hill. I later recognised different versions of the same nightmare in my everyday unnameable fears. Most of us experience unnameable fear from time to time. It is like waking from sleep, disorientated, having dreamed of being in some unfamiliar and perhaps threatening dimension from which one has not fully returned. These are the disorientating fears which inform all our other fears and return us to the fear of oblivion which is the fear of death itself.

Viewed as part of our fear landscape, the idea of death has something to teach us about the everyday fears which beset our lives. Am I intelligent? Will I be accepted? Will I fail? Am I loved? Will I be remembered? Each of these fears is, in its way, the spectral figure waiting to confront us over the brow of the next hill. They embody the fear of ultimate nothingness, the fear of oblivion. They also return us to ourselves and to our own life span, to who we are in relation to other human beings and in the continuity of time as we know it. They are the fear that we have not done enough, been enough, lived enough.

Who we think we are, or want to be, will often accord with the perceived expectations of someone who we may have feared in earlier life, a parent, a teacher, an admired or envied sibling or friend. All of these fears can be summed up in the fear of failure which is closely linked to that of loss. Loss begins from the moment we are conscious of our own mortality. Failure and loss are both significant because they pertain to the concept of judgment and to what lies beyond judgment, the unknowableness of death.

The fear of judgment is greater than the fear of death itself because judgment determines what will ultimately happen to us. The fear of judgment pertains as much to the present moment as it does to the dimension of eternity or, if we are young enough, to what we will make of our lives in the relatively near future. In terms of existence itself, there is, in the human psyche, a sense of the determining moment, one which has to do with oblivion, or death, versus eternal life. This sense of the ultimate, of something following death (even if that something is oblivion or nothingness) is common to everyone, irrespective of whether or not they have a faith. For those who do have a faith, a deeply embedded fear of judgment therefore governs who we are, and what we do with the present moment.

But for us at the moment, whether or not we are accompanying someone who is dying, or perhaps facing death ourselves, facing the emptiness, the ‘nothing’, can become the beginning of a fullness, a presence which consumes all fears. In it, we are reminded not only of our mortality but of the mystery and joy of our existence. We sense that some greater creative power deliberately, of his own will, desired, and continues to desire, that we not simply exist but that we be fully alive from the moment of our conception into eternity itself. He desires and purposes this eternal life within the re-creative energy of his own love and we are invited to play an active part, to make conscious choices which will accord with this purpose. To this end we are given two great gifts, the ability to think and the capacity for love. We deploy these gifts in the present moment. Both work together, but it is the capacity for love which determines the outcome of judgment and our ultimate destiny.

Love is not something that we can resource from within ourselves, or plan and deploy in a bounded and rational way. It is sourced from within God and therefore unlimited, unbounded. The choice we are given, beginning in the present moment, lies in allowing this God, who is love itself, to claim our lives as they have been, as they are, and as they will ultimately be in death and in the decisive moment of judgment. So judgment is a two-way decision, but one in which God has already chosen us. All that remains is for us to say ‘yes’ to his invitation to be in union with him.