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.  

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’.  

Lent 2016 - Not in control

As I walk the fields around my house on this clear, cold and stunningly beautiful afternoon, I am reminded that God promises to those who love him something like the joy I am experiencing. I also know, as I watch the doggish joy of our Labradoodle who is hurtling towards the bushes at the far end of the field, where squirrels are bound to be, that this joy is universal. Somehow, the dog, in his doggishness, experiences the joy implicit in the promise made to those who love God; ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived’ (1Cor.2:9)

I also know that others walking these fields may have quite different feelings, feelings which have nothing to do with joy. This knowledge concerns me, because the situation seems unfair. Loving God is, after all, a gift in itself, and God, we are told, does not have favourites. So how is it that some can soar to such heights of joy in the seeming ordinariness of walking a dog while others may remain indifferent to the moment, or are simply burdened by sadness? I have known such sadness myself when walking the fields, sadness attributable to life, the state of the world, or to nothing in particular. I have tried to be joyful in these moments and failed. Mindful of the suffering of millions, I have also tried to be less joyful in those other moments. Again, I have failed.

All of this pertains to the way we think about Lent. Is Lent a season which permits joy? Or is it one for moderating our response to the blessings of life? Many of us tend to do the latter for much of the time, because we like to be taken seriously and serious people do not run down hills exulting in the joy of the moment.

I think there is something almost blasphemous in refusing joy, and in the idea that joy is somehow unseemly in Lent, because joy is of God himself. To be joyful is to allow ourselves to be taken out of the emotional straight jacket we wear for much of the time so that our constricted selves can be blessed by the love of God. To refuse such moments amounts to telling God that we know what is best for us better than God does.  Such knowledge, and the will to implement it, amounts to what used to be known as pride, another of the cardinal sins, for which see a previous blog post.

Pride is about control, the control of other people or animals, and the unforgiving self control which tells us that we can manage our own salvation. The salvation offered to us by God in Christ consists in the freedom to be joyful. It is almost a condition for salvation itself. We are to ‘rejoice in the Lord always’ (Phil.4:4). Rejoicing in the Lord will inevitably involve loss of control, or the surrendering of what we think will make others, including God, take us seriously.

Here, there is a paradox. It lies in the Cross, which was the most serious event in all time but which consisted in God allowing himself to be shamed, to be not taken seriously. In the Cross and in its shame, we are taken seriously as the flawed and fragile human beings that we really are, human beings who believe that their fragility and imperfection can be strengthened or remedied through the kind of self control which makes us resistant to forgiveness.

The need to control stems from the fear of being forgiven. Forgiveness brings freedom from old ways of thinking about life, about other human beings and about God. It frees us into new and wide open spaces, in which we see the world and creation in a new way. It is a cause for joy. 

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. 

Random acts of joy

A couple of nights ago we skipped the news and went to the circus instead. How frivolous and irresponsible was that at a time like this? the little voice counselling doom and despair kept telling me. How could anyone allow themselves to be distracted from the brutality going on around us? Places like Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, all of them controlled to a greater or lesser extent by the forces of evil at work in IS, al-Quaeda, Boko Haram and the various splinter groups, not to mention corrupt governments, working with them to a greater or lesser extent. Is it right to forget for a moment, by going to see Cirque Beserk at the Hackney Empire, that women and girls are being enslaved and that whole peoples are being subjected to a medieval nightmare?

Guilt and doubt are the great killers of fun because fun allows us to forget. It affords a time of respite. This is why banning fun is the essence of evil. It is also why poisoning religion by banning fun has long been the stock in trade of the evil one, and of his agents. The evil one, far from being an allegorical figure with horns and a pitchfork, is more like a virus which attacks us where we are most vulnerable, beginning with that aspect of human nature which we call spiritual, or religious, or our human consciousness. Consciousness or, to put it in religious terms, conscience, is where we differentiate between right and wrong, between what makes us fully human and what dehumanises or depraves the human spirit.

To begin with, and for most of us, the evil one works most effectively through counsels of doom and despair, accompanied by the voices of accusation and deception. In the very moment of full and uninhibited enjoyment of Cirque Beserk, I am accused of cowardice and moral turpitude as I sense the enemy questioning my enjoyment of such a distraction. Surely my attention should be fully taken up with the suffering and deprivation going on in the world? This private deception plays itself out within a wider psychological context. We are a chronically anxious society, deceived, as individuals, into thinking that if I do not hold up the world like Atlas, it will be overrun by these dark forces and it will all be my fault.

For this kind of deception to be effective, so that evil can take hold and do its malicious work, all signs of uncomplicated, selfless and at times even ‘pointless’ joy, or fun, need to be eliminated. It follows that joy, or fun, is probably the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal in the context of what is often referred to as ‘spiritual warfare’. Spiritual warfare is what all people of good faith, irrespective of their religion, are engaged in at present, even if they would not necessarily call it by that name.

Spiritual warfare centres on joy because joy is of the essence of creation itself. Evil, or the evil one, attacks the goodness of creation and of human beings by first destroying joy. If God is love, and if all things have their being in him, he rejoices eternally in their goodness. He ‘sees’ that they are good, to paraphrase the beginning of the book of Genesis. In this joy over the goodness of things, and of people, he also ‘comprehends’ darkness. In other words, he takes darkness into himself and transforms it through the love which is constitutive of his own being. Joy works through love and sustains all things. Human beings are entrusted to work God’s love into the world through joy – or what we call fun.

This is what happens in the circus. Circuses are contexts in which fun is given at great risk and at great personal cost. The woman hanging upside down on a rope some twenty feet above ground depends on the knots she will have tied herself and on the three pairs of hands holding the rope at the other end. The tumbling acrobat, if he misses his appointed landing spot, could be seriously injured, or even killed. We hardly dare watch him – and yet we do, not because we relish danger for its own sake but because we, like his colleagues waiting with a safety mat in case he misses his landing spot (I won’t spoil it by saying more), are willing him to be OK. We are also laughing with him and with his colleagues when he executes the act with flawless grace. The relentless joy of rave-type circus music, sustains the process and adds to the fun in the most surprising way.

And then there is the clown. His act is rooted in 17^th century Commedia del Arte, a popular form of street theatre in which human nature and human folly are portrayed through stock characters. The clown shows us to ourselves and gives us permission to laugh kindly at ourselves and at human folly. Laughing at ourselves without feeling guilty or afraid cures self deception and all the deceptions which we cherish about those who we fear or dislike. It allows love to happen.  

The clown is therefore one of the great healers of the human spirit. He is the Christ figure in our midst. He appears in every random act of joy, in shared and generous fun where all kinds of risks are taken for the sheer goodness and beauty of the moment, and in laughter that is entirely devoid of malice. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.