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.

Not Torn Apart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope

Source: The Guardian

Liturgical seasons are seldom in tune with the emotions of the immediate moment. Today is Ascension day, a time, we are told, when the disciples who were left behind after Christ’s ascent into heaven went down the mountain rejoicing. It seems paradoxical, to say the least. They should have been silently weeping, as we are when we think of the children and young people murdered on Monday as they were partying in Manchester. How, then, can we speak of Christian joy and the hope bequeathed in Christ on this Ascension Day?

Perhaps the difficulty lies in part with our tendency to over spiritualise our great festivals. This one is especially hard to ground in something like reality, and yet it has to be grasped in a way which helps us make sense of the now and the ‘not yet’ – when ‘this Jesus shall come’ the angels said, in the way he had just left. Perhaps more importantly, this final parting is axiomatic to the deeper truth of the Resurrection. If Christ had not been finally parted from his friends in this way, who is to say that he did not disappear only to die again (which would nullify the first death, both forensically and theologically) and then what? Is there a long since decayed corpse somewhere, as many would like to think, waiting to ‘de-mythologize’ the Christian story?

These are the kind of theological distractions which make it hard to make sense of the Christian faith and even harder to do so in the context of the times we live in. How might the Ascension of Christ, and the joy and hope of his disciples, help us come to terms with Monday’s atrocity? I think the clue lies in the undifferentiated nature of joy and hope. The two are of a piece. In terms of Monday, and of the intended collective psychological damage it is wreaking, these are made concrete in every look, word and gesture which speaks of compassion, the kind of compassion which comes from ‘being there’.

We are all called to ‘be there’, to ‘wait’ as the disciples did ‘in the city’. But we are called to do this while receiving the blessing which Christ gave to his friends even as he was parted from them. To receive such a blessing, especially in times like these, means owning the need for it – or owning the need for ‘mercy’, which is another way of talking about blessing. It was Christ’s parting blessing which gave rise to the disciples’ otherwise unaccountable joy and ongoing hope.

Hope is not wishful thinking. It has nothing to do with denying reality. Rather the opposite, in fact. Hope is the courage to own the reality of Monday night, with all its complex causes, including the benighted nature of the perpetrators’ own reasons for doing what they did. Christ’s blessing holds all of that darkness. This does not mean that all will be well in the best of all possible worlds. It means that anarchic forces, however they manifest themselves, will not prevail in destroying our humanity, what makes us persons in the fullest sense. This is the truth to which those who have suffered through the centuries have witnessed, and it is the truth to which we are called, irrespective of the religious, or non-religious, path we choose to walk in responding to that call, provided we walk it with integrity, in a desire for the blessing or ‘mercy’.  

Glimmer of Hope

Source: cbsnews.com

Yesterday, I read of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s moving tribute to the victims of Auschwitz, which he was visiting for the second time. There was another quite different tribute from President Obama, his farewell speech to the people he has served for the past eight years. I read or listened to them within hours of each other. In between, I took in my daily dose of the goings-on at Trump Tower and other power enclaves pertaining to the incoming US President and his chosen few, some of whom are already distancing themselves from their master. Hopefully, they will at least put some brakes on the madness.

Hope is what we need right now – hope in the face of real global danger and the human capacity for pure evil, as Archbishop Justin Welby described it from Auschwitz. Hope is sustained by a basic faith in people, that people have goodness and wisdom in them, even in the darkest of times.

Most of us hope we can simply do a little better this year than we did in previous years. But hope is not just a matter of wanting to do a little better. “Could do better” was what we used to read in our school reports, the most damning indictment and signal of hopelessness that any child could receive. I think I would have preferred to have been deliberately and downright bad at something, than to be told that I ‘could do better’. I have often wondered if the teacher was simply in a hurry to get through her pile of reports. Could she (it was always a ‘she’ in my case) put a face to the name? And if she could, did she care enough to qualify that terse remark, a remark which can completely skew an individual’s life? ‘Could do better’, but somehow never will.. because.. who knows? And who cares? Next report card.

There is a connection to be made here between authentic teachers and genuine leaders. Both have power to a greater or lesser extent, power over people’s lives or over the future of nations. Genuine, or authentic, leaders are also innately teachers. They have authority. What is needed from leaders is not power but authority. Power is not the same as authority and it rarely brings out the good either in those who have power or in those over whom they exercise it. It is possible to be powerful and have little or no genuine authority (as with certain media and business moguls) and equally possible to have real authority but little or no power, Christ himself being the supreme example of this.

Authentic leaders embody hope because they have this Christ-like authority. They have no need to posture in any way, to adopt a public figura. They are quite comfortable being who they are, even if they are not naturally gregarious. They do not court popularity or put themselves in a position where they are obliged to return favours. They simply want the best for the people they serve, whatever form their leadership takes, whatever the power, and whatever the status it does or does not bring with it. Their authority speaks to the goodness in people and so brings hope. As the outgoing President said in his farewell speech “Democracy works when our politics reflect the decency of our people”. Authentic leaders teach hope through example, thereby bequeathing real political authority to those they serve.

Authority in leaders is often recognised as a glimmer of hope, in small gestures which speak of mercy and the loving kindness of God. They have a certain way of making eye contact. They take a certain affectionate initiative in all their encounters with people. They often have formidable powers of recall. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury could meet someone in a local church gathering and remember their name, only having met the person a number of years before on the day he confirmed them. Years later, he would greet them in a way which signified genuine recognition, saying their name in the way you do when you meet an old friend. That is authentic leadership.

In embodying God’s mercy and loving kindness, authentic leaders are bearers of hope. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not conveyed through mere conviviality. It is not some passing joy, gone with the handshake. Optimism often comes with not being prepared to look at unpleasant realities and come to terms with the things, or the people, they fear – not being prepared to look them in the eye. For certain kinds of leaders, optimism is best conveyed through minimal eye contact because the optimist really has nothing to say to the person whose hand they are shaking. Eye contact makes a powerful person vulnerable to being asked questions. The slightest social exchange makes them accountable as leaders.

An optimist does not make a good leader. Authentic leaders will have looked at what people fear and felt the fear themselves, alone, perhaps as they pray or meditate. Such moments return them to their people in the deepest sense and return them to God who alone is the source of hope. Prayer and meditation return us to the place of our own innate goodness, and to where the wisdom of God indwells us as a people. It ought to be the bedrock of our politics.

Preparing to configure

telegraph.co.uk

Robotics are the next big thing. According to Bill Gates, they will allow us to access all sorts of aids to living, or apps, which we barely dream of. The trouble starts when the apps become indispensible and then go wrong, as we learn when people’s computers are held to ransom by fraudulent individuals who appear to be operating beyond the reaches of the law for much of the time.

Back in the seventies people were imagining, quite confidently, the day when trying to prevent the robot from continuing to make your bed while you were still in it would be a commonplace morning mishap. Now, it is reckoned that by 2045 artificial intelligence will be on a par with what we currently take for granted as human intelligence, just in time for many of us who will be in 'care' homes by then to be tended by such realistic beings as 'Nadine', a product of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. 

Looking at the bigger picture, if such an artificial intelligence, mathematically configured, were to run away with itself, we could be forgiven for wondering what it would feel like to be caught up in the global equivalent of an infinite version of the bed-making scenario. But perhaps, given the present level of global conflict and what it is doing to the planet, we will have done something worse to ourselves long before the robots take over. On the other hand, they might come to the rescue, once their intelligence overtakes ours, and if we survive that long.

Whether or not we survive the intervention of the robots will depend on the resilience of the human spirit. The increasing commodification of learning, at the expense of art, music, poetic imagination and a compassionate and wise teaching of religion, will ultimately do irretrievable damage to the human spirit, and consequently to the human person, so it should not take the robots long to overtake us. Once the spirit is defeated artificial intelligence will have free reign. There will be no more disturbing moral questions for us to address together in the fellowship of our shared humanity, only programmed ones, selected to enhance the efficacy of the system through the constrained autonomy of the pre-programmed individual.

Human intelligence is shaped from within the human spirit for better or for worse. Unless righteousness, compassion and the will for genuine peace can be programmed into artificial intelligence in such a way as to allow these essential virtues to grow exponentially with the developing robotic functional intelligence, it is hard to imagine what the world will look and feel like beyond 2045. What kind of uniform preconfigured politics will reshape the way we make moral decisions? and what will we yearn for, if anything? How do you program righteousness? How do you program hope?

It is the human spirit which yearns for righteousness, in other words for God’s own justice and loving kindness, but if that God-ward yearning has been factored out of the artificial mind, will we even know that this has happened? And will it matter? I think it is the last element of this postulated scenario which is most chilling – that the question of humanity’s belonging to a loving God will simply not matter. Hope will have been effaced in a single stroke, or minor equation perhaps.

There are parts of the UK where Polish immigrants are the new life blood of their local Catholic church. For them, the Christian faith is a life-sustaining continuum. In it, they carry their history, their sense of their humanity and their hope for the future. They wonder how it is that British people seem to have forgotten God. Perhaps they have something to teach us.

Hope and Glory

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, but the Churches have yet to agree where it belongs on the calendar. Perhaps this somewhat ludicrous difference is a kind of prophetic blessing. The ‘postponement’ of Easter on certain Church calendars reminds us that Christians can live with at least some differences. Our household postponed its own Easter celebrations – those which involve hunting for chocolate across several acres of soggy terrain, eating quantities of Easter cake with homemade marzipan (so much better than the shop stuff), and lamb not done the traditional way, for once, but spiced and slow cooked Ottolenghi style. We postponed all this because we had church commitments, as did our friends who came to stay with us.

Having taken the Good Friday service, and with Easter Sunday yet to come, I was particularly glad of the emotional space provided by Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday provides a chance to find our equilibrium in the context of the emotional swing which hurls us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday provides time to prepare for Easter Sunday without having to shop and cook at the same time. The preparation on Holy Saturday corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath, so we can also think of the women who had earlier prepared spices with which to anoint the body of the Lord once the Sabbath had passed. We need a Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not just to shop, cook and prepare the egg hunt, but to make sense of where the Church and our society stands in this ‘in between time’, in relation to the Easter event itself.

The Saturday space, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, allows us to think of the world in the light of how all things will be when Christ comes again. I have long felt that Holy Saturday is better suited for ‘end time’ reflection than the Sundays preceding Advent. There is a sense of Christ’s absence about it which invites thought about how he will return ‘in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Christian creed puts it. This sense of absence is important. It gives us time to bring the suffering and dying of Christ into the light of his rising again and, in so doing, try to make sense of the world through the prism of these events.

Tradition holds that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell. While his descent might also be construed in his words of desolation and abandonment spoken from the Cross, he also descended into hell later, as the creeds declare, in order to grasp poor, despairing Judas by the hand and to offer him the kiss of peace in return for his kiss of betrayal. The hope offered to us by God in Jesus would not be hope if it did not travel beyond the reaches of despair.

While we were having supper on one of the evenings when are friends were with us, conversation turned to politics. We were generally agreed about one thing, and that is that the world is a pretty grim place and that it is hard to see where it will all end. Various end time scenarios were postulated, but that was about as far as the conversation was going to take us, until our youngest guest (aged 11) took us to task. What, she asked, did we think we were about? Had we nothing better to offer her generation than a generalised imminent doom scenario? What was she supposed to make of such talk?

Our young guest was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with an abrupt change of subject, or with being told not to worry her pretty head about such things, as if all would be well in the end. So we had to pick up where we had left off and posit something like believable hope. The conversation did not last much longer, but it did invite us to consider in our own minds how such hope, or the lack of it, relates to the kind of despair which Jesus experienced on the Cross and from which he later rescued Adam (the symbol of our humanity) and Judas.

The hope offered to the world in the risen Christ is not like any other kind of hope. It does not depend on vague belief in God, or on vague belief in anything. It is not a straw to be clutched at. Hope lives in the worst imaginable scenarios, past, present and future, and in any degree of despair in the life of any one human being. It is the hope of glory.

Glory pertains only to God. All other forms of glory, and the seductive and temporal power which they bring, are a poor imitation of the glory which pertains to God alone. The delusional desire for this counterfeit glory, and the seductive nature of power itself, accounts for the scarcity of true leadership in the world and in the Church of today. But hope sustains the human spirit because it proceeds from the glory of the ongoing life of the risen Christ. This is the Christ who speaks into the empty politics of the world and of the Church, as he spoke to the grieving woman who had brought spices with which to anoint the body of the one she loved, and found an empty tomb. 

Absence

We are approaching the shortest season of the Christian year. It lasts a little over a week and is known as Ascensiontide.

Ascensiontide is a season for celebrating absence, a season of paradox.

Edward Hopper 'Automat' (1927)

Absence correlates with loneliness. A great deal is being said these days about loneliness and whether or not the problem of loneliness in our society is either helped or exacerbated by the internet. Are we living in an increasingly ‘virtual’ world, one which is, by implication, false? If so, loneliness, in its various manifestations, especially those related to addiction and abuse, must also be connected to loss and bereavement, the loss of what is real and true in human relationships.

It is at first surprising that the Christian Church should treat this interim season, between the Ascension of Christ into heaven and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as one of joyful expectancy. For the disciples, it was also a time of disorientation and emotional disorder. Ascensiontide is a time of conflicting emotions. A certain tension prevails which needs to be broken, so that negative and sad emotions can be dis-ordered and then reconfigured in ways which change how we see things, and perhaps how we see God. Ascensiontide is, like Advent and Lent, a time of preparation in which we know God in his absence, prior to knowing him in a new way.

We get so used to a negative experience of absence in our lives, absence associated with separation or bereavement, and to what it does to us, that at times it is hard to imagine how life would be if that absence were to be filled. Absence speaks of a space that has been vacated, either because someone, or some animal we love, has left us or died, or because we ourselves have left another person or a place we associate with happiness, so absence also resonates with loss.

How does such a seemingly bleak situation connect with the season of Ascensiontide? I think the answer comes in the form of joyful expectation, or ‘hope-filled waiting’. Hope involves risk. It means being prepared to have our sadness questioned and then thrown into disorder while we remain realistic about what caused it in the first place. Hope comes with being realistic about how human beings connect or engage with one another, and about life itself and our own mortality. The disciples waiting in the upper room were acutely aware of their connectedness with one another in the one whose presence they so missed. They also feared for their physical lives.

A sense of connectedness is essential to our physical and emotional survival, especially in times of separation or danger, but connectedness does not have to be limited to our immediate family or social ‘circles’, to employ the language of social media. We are also connected to all those who, in these times of religious extremism and global turmoil, fear for their lives. This is the wider context in which our own particular sadness, and whatever emotional violence we may be experiencing, is held and healed.

Connectedness also has to do with having a sense of history, our own, that of our society and of the planet which we share. When connectedness is understood in this way it sustains us because it allows us to understand life as an unlimited, or eternal, creative event. There are scientists who are even beginning to think of the universe, or universes, as an eternity of eternities. Presumably it is ‘uncreated’ life itself which connects these eternities.

Such a way of thinking might also help us to make sense of conflicting emotions. The moving unbounded event of life anchors the chaos of our negative or destructive emotions. It reconnects them with the interdependence of all living things, and reconnects the present moment with both the past and the future. The way our individual lives have touched upon those of other people, including those whom we have perhaps never met, is part of this continuum. Where our connectedness with others is interrupted we experience a profound sense of absence, or loss, a kind of relational vacuum. Perhaps the internet makes us feel this loss all the more keenly.

But it is in this acute sense of loss or absence, this vacant space, that we wait with joyful expectation for the renewing event of Pentecost, for a sudden surprising ‘wind of change’ which derives from a single source, a single energy. It derives from the energy of God’s love, of truth itself, at work in the present moment in which a particular absence is perhaps being most acutely felt.