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’.  

What does mercy look like?

Dzokhar Tsarnaev
dailystar.co.uk

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber, gets the death penalty. According to eye witness accounts of his trial, he expresses no remorse, anymore than he did after the crime itself. He smelt the blood and heard the screams but casually went off to purchase a bottle of milk at a nearby shop and then tweeted “there is no love in this country”.

Later, in court, he cried at the sight of his aunt, but his tears, it seemed, were for her and not for those who had lost children or friends in the bombing. But before then, as he remembered the event itself, he had told Sister Helen Prejean who visited him in prison that “No one deserves to suffer like they did”.

Dzokhar Tsarnaev is 21, officially an adult but still a juvenile, a person not fully formed whose emotions are still in a state of flux and able to be shaped by others. At the same time, he seems old before his time. His face is set in the defiance of old age, as it is seen in the faces of those who have lived selfishly and refuse either regret or remorse. Is he in his right mind? Is he as much himself as he was perhaps ten years ago? What kind of a human being could he yet become if he was healed of his hatred? If we kill him we will never know.

Neither will we know what the murdered child and student would have become if they had lived. In all this unknowing, those who were tasked with administering justice wanted Tsarnaev to give them a sign which would help them to be merciful, but he remained impassive. In a society for whom retributive justice is a moral imperative, public opinion would have gone against them had they decided on mercy in any case, and Tsarnaev himself did not seem to want his life to be spared.  So would it have been a harder punishment to allow him to live?  

This begs a further question about what punishment is for. Is it simply to hand out retribution measure for measure, an eye for an eye? If so, what purpose does it serve? Towards what end does it lead? Where something serves an ultimate end, it has a future, a time ahead in which change might be effected in a killer’s mind and heart. The question also turns on the fact that punishment is not handed out simply because it will deter future criminals but because justice demands that criminals should be punished on behalf of their victims.

A quid pro quo approach to justice denies any possibility of a punishment leading towards some better end. Furthermore, it constrains the idea of justice itself within the narrow confines of a problem which can only be solved through payback. But payback is not really a solution for the victim, or for the wider community or for the perpetrator of the crime. Payback justice can only lead to a life-denying outcome for everyone, in other words to more death. It deprives all parties concerned of their humanity, whether that humanity is understood as life to be cut off or spared, or, in the case of criminal justice, the quality and fruit of a lifespan which has run its natural course.

How many victims of terrorism, who have had someone they love taken from them arbitrarily and violently, feel that their own humanity has been restored, even enriched, in the longer term by the fact of a life being taken for a life in the moment of  the judgment handed down in court? Has this judgment healed the victim, or has it simply given them permission to carry on with their own retributive hating? In the case of the perpetrator, the death sentence will prevent further hate-driven activity, but it will not stem hatred. It will simply pass it on to someone else, or disseminate it in the wider group.

 If the death penalty were to be commuted to life imprisonment, would it not offer Dzokhar Tsarnaev the chance to convert his hatred into something life giving and all the more valuable because of the change of mind and heart needed for life to be born out of the ashes of hatred?  If we do not believe such a thing to be possible, have we not already forfeited something of our humanity?

The Christian message of salvation is one of mercy, the kind of mercy which pertains to God and which transforms minds and changes the way people live their lives. To deny mercy is to deny the possibility of the transformation of hatred and of another person changing as a result of this transformation. It also denies our own need for mercy, our need to be embraced by God.  To feel the effect of mercy we have to own our need of it, first to God and then to those we have wronged who are also in need of mercy, each in their separate ways.

Our world is much in need of mercy. Until we all recognise this need, whatever our perceptions of the other religion, the other  nation or the other person, we cannot begin to hope for a future.

Blood lines

I tried to stay with the commemorative service for World War 1 at Westminster Abbey which was televised last night, but there was too much talking going on, too many worthy people being interviewed and too much colour. War is fundamentally monochrome, apart from the colour of blood.

I searched i-player for something which might resonate more truthfully with the events being commemorated and came across a sensitive dramatisation of diaries written by people from all the nations who had been caught up in that conflict. It was not great drama, except for the real footage of shelling and of thousands of ordinary Belgians summarily forced into exile or murdered. As I watched I thought of Gaza City, its people so very like the citizens of Louvain.

Wars look much the same as they ever did. In Gaza, as happened in the First World War, we get glimpses of fragility set in courage. Children still play in what is left of their streets when they are not being shelled. We also see wrong headedness and a total disregard for the uniqueness of the human person before God. War is not concerned with human persons, although it is very much concerned with human blood, to the extent that the desire for blood becomes an animal desire, having more to do with satisfying an insatiable need for retribution than it has for actual conquest. There are no winners because everyone wants retribution. So the war that was to end all wars is still part of  present day reality.

The tragedy is not just that we have never learned the lessons of the two world wars. It is that we fear to offend those of whom we are afraid, so the cycle of retributive violence perpetuates itself. Think, for example, of the situation in Nazi Germany, the driving of people from their homes into what the Nazis hoped would be ultimate extinction, because they were afraid of them. Place this alongside what is being done to Palestinians in Gaza.

Think also of extreme ideologies of conquest and domination which have poisoned the best of religions, and continue to do so today with respect to Islam, and ask what is Hamas really about? The best of causes, as well as religions, are easily taken over by the worst ideologies, and these in turn poison the hearts and minds of the best human beings. Palestinians have a right to freedom of movement, freedom of commercial exchange and, above all, to their lands and their homes. Theirs is a just cause, but one which is open to exploitation by religious extremists who have power agendas of their own.

They know that injustices such as these do not get forgotten. But neither do the events which led to the creation of Israel. The difference today is that the standard of living of the average Israeli is on an altogether different level to that of someone residing in Gaza City. There may be rocket attacks threatening the shopping malls of Tel Aviv but the fact that it has shopping malls, whereas Gaza City has neither sanitation or safe drinking water, alone suggests that Israel has a moral obligation to make good the wrongs that have been done to those whose lands have been taken from them. But the Israeli mindset makes this impossible.

A mindset comes with having had certain events so ingrained in the collective psyche that it is impossible for that people to countenance any other way of thinking. The persecutions and exiles which the Jews have experienced throughout their history, (and not just during the Second World War) are now part of their national DNA. It is hard to imagine how, as a nation, they could think of themselves as anything other than victims. Nevertheless, historic victimhood, and the mindset which it creates, does not exonerate Israel from committing genocide today. The truth which few people dare to speak is that tacit acceptance of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians will only make Israel a victim once again. Israel will lose the goodwill and the trust of a great many people who until now have supported it in relation to Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Many of these people may be supportive of Israel against their own conscience or better judgment, not daring to challenge the Israeli aggression that has gone on for decades, for fear of being thought anti-semitic. But this kind of truth avoidance will not only fuel the anger felt by Palestinians but ultimately destabilise Israel by undermining its standing as a valued member of the world community.

The situation returns us, once again, to the question of justice, or to use a more theological word, righteousness. Righteousness is the apotheosis of all religions, but especially of the three Abrahamic faiths, whose adherents all pray to a merciful and righteous God. God, being righteous, is not concerned with vengeance and retribution, no matter how much one side believes the other deserves it. He is concerned with mercy.

Mercy comes at a great price, a price so great that only the Son of God could pay it in full, and he continues to exemplify this mercy in the lives of those who are merciful. He paid it, not to a wrathful and vengeful father figure desirous of sacrifice and blood, but by becoming the price of Love itself. The reward was new life, the Resurrection of his physical body in its state of divine glory.

Nations are being offered this reward today. What is needed therefore is the will for the transformation of this conflict, the will of every single believing Christian, Jew and Muslim, whether they are caught up in it directly or not. Willing something is more than simply wanting it, or even dreaming of it. It involves everyone moving into a mindset where they face that righteous and merciful God together and share in his mercy.