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.

No Laughing Matter

Somewhere towards the middle of yesterday’s Guardian there was an article lampooning Theresa May’s visit to Bridgend. In it, we read that ‘Supreme Leader Kim Jong-May’ received a ‘rapturous’ welcome. Perhaps this tells us something about Bridgend. Or is it that English public life (allowing for the fact that the event being described took place in Wales) now merits such headlines, in order to grab our attention, sated, as we are, with personality politics?

I am not a fan of Theresa May, or of her party, but I am not comfortable with her name being so closely associated with that of a baby-faced psychopath intent on global destruction. If a respected newspaper does this, it somehow implicates all of its readers so, as a regular reader of the Guardian, I am made uncomfortable by the idea that I am guilty by association if I find the suggestion at all funny.

But perhaps we are all guilty by association, when it comes to the politics of the day and how they are reported in the newspapers we read.  After all, we are a free society, ideally made up of properly informed individuals empowered to make choices through the legitimate means of the ballot box. We may not be able to effect much change as individuals, but we are still part of a free society. We belong to one another. It therefore behoves newspapers like the Guardian to weigh up its intent in regard to the kind of democracy most of us aspire to, when it comes to how it lampoons the current Prime Minister, at least while she is still in a position to determine the nation’s future and plays some part, again, by association, in that of the rest of the world. Headlines and trivial articles such as the one I am referring to are neither fair nor funny.

Setting aside personal reservations about the present government which is, after all, largely responsible for the mess we are currently in (it was they who called a referendum to sort out their internal squabbles over Europe and arguably to get themselves re-elected under David Cameron), the worrying thing about that headline is that it closely associates us with a society which is far from free and is likely to remain so for some time. Its leader wields absolute power and is directly responsible for human suffering on a vast scale, as are other despotic tyrants. We are also warned by reliable medical sources that the leader of the free world, who holds similar power, is equally unstable when it comes to his state of mind. All of this presents us with a frightening scenario.

What we are looking at is the potential for chaos, in the fullest sense of the word. Chaos happens when societies fall apart because there is not enough of a sense of collective responsibility for their historic future, or when individuals in the context of community, family and relationships no longer feel accountable for the stability which those cohesive agents ought to maintain. As with the mathematical chaos theory itself, it is the smaller elements which bring about the most significant change, for better or for worse. But herein also lies hope.

The Christian idea of prayer is grounded in a sense of responsibility for the greater good of the other, beginning with the least and the smallest. This is what is meant by the words ‘Thy Kingdom come’ which were taught to his followers by Christ himself. To pray, in the fullest sense of the word, is not about cultivating a sense of denial about the realities we face, hoping that somehow things will work out for the best. Rather, it is about embracing reality in the present moment or, better put, ‘facing into’ it. Christian prayer is not simply about asking that things will or won’t happen. It is about taking the reality of either of these scenarios into the deepest and darkest place of our own psyche and allowing it to be seen by God. Words may come but they are by no means essential. What is essential is the truth, sincerity or integrity of what it is we are bringing, beginning with ourselves.

Bringing ourselves to God will involve coming to terms with both private and collective fear and with the helplessness we all feel in the face of  what is going on in world politics today. The Guardian, perhaps inadvertently, made light of these fears in the article I have referred to, but they are no laughing matter.  

In the immediate present, we are given to ‘face into’ the chaos of the prevailing climate of election fever, both at home and abroad. At the same time, we ‘face into’ the uncertainty which is both the cause and the result of break-up and fragmentation, on the one hand, and of the false sense of strength and power which comes with isolationism in international relations, and obscurantism in religion, on the other. Pockets of resistance, like Christians in the Middle East, or moderate Muslims, or indigenous inhabitants of lands which could profitably be exploited for valuable timber, oil or shale gas, have a hard time of it. We ‘face into’ their darkness as well, doing so in the knowledge that to the God we worship in Jesus ‘darkness is not dark. The night is as bright as the day’. (Ps. 139:12)

This apparent paradox is not a denial of reality, but the embracing of a greater reality. It is the reality of Easter itself, of the risen Christ alive in every possible sense of the word, inviting us to live this message, beginning with our willingness to take responsibility for the madness of power and of those who want it at any price, as we face into the darkness but speak and live in the light of the risen Christ.

The Authority of Silence

A political vacuum is dangerous. In the context of the American elections, the vacuum is not simply an empty space waiting to be filled by the person most adept at grabbing power. It is an empty space waiting to be filled by whatever that person is. Presidents are generally

source: blogs.wsj.com

remembered more for what they were than for what they did. Political power, especially in America, depends to a great extent on personal charisma and the chimera it projects and, as we are seeing in the current election debates, chimera, rather than considered argument, produces instantaneous, if short-lived, effects on an audience which wants to believe what it has been persuaded that it is seeing on the podium – not who it is really seeing. The power hungry persona fuses with the face of that person as potential leader, so that it is hard to tell the difference between the two. This is why many of us are willing the American people not to succumb to the momentary and ephemeral taste of power at the cost of making a politically inexperienced narcissist the most powerful person on earth – which is what he dreams of becoming.

To will something to the good is not a purely mental discipline, if only for the fact that no single individual or group has that kind of ‘will’ power. It is also the reason why so much that passes for faith healing, and which ends in failure or is proved to be fraudulent, is confused with the kind of ‘willing’ which we call prayer, and which transforms people or transfigures the way things are seen by all interested parties. This is the kind of transformation and enlightened vision which we urgently need to take effect in the politics of today, in America and elsewhere, and it is the duty of every person of faith to enter into this work.

The transformation of politics, in both secular and religious contexts, will come about not by concentration of the mind but by our becoming the means for God’s grace to inhabit the political and spiritual vacuums of these times. We do this by being fully present to God in our own emptiness. Our emptiness is not a vacuum. It is the stillness of our inner silence in which we know God.

Stillness and inner silence enable us to be present and attentive to the American presidential election, to all the people caught up in the debates, to the rhetoric which both enmeshes and confuses them, to the duplicity and sheer nastiness of politics in both the world and the Church, and to where we may sense a possibility for goodness. It is about allowing all these things to inhabit our inner space without allowing them to overwhelm us.

Our inner space is the default position to which we return moment by moment in the waking day, and it is where we meet Christ. We are not overwhelmed by the people and situations which we draw into this space because the abiding Spirit of Christ is already there to meet them. Our task is simply to return them to him.

The task of returning brings with it a certain authority, which is not the same as power. Power disfigures the human heart and blinds all possible vision because it is driven by human greed and egocentricity. It is something to be taken, often from others. Unlike power, true authority is never grasped or clung to. It is always given. Those who receive authority will relinquish it if the Giver requires it to be returned. Hence, true authority is always exercised in open handed, and open hearted, freedom. The people who have true authority will often be seen as a threat to those who simply want power.

In the moment of ‘returning’ ourselves and others to the Christ who inhabits our inner space, we are given authority to enter into the work of peace building. So ‘returning’ is  crucial to halting the global turmoil which we are currently witnessing and to ultimately transforming it. To return does not mean to escape from. We do not return to our own private space and hide from the world. Our space belongs to all who suffer or are deluded by the blandishments of those who want power over them. In the moment of returning to Christ we are also returning to him the victims of the powerful, including those we ourselves may have victimised if we have been powerful. The moment of returning others to Christ is a moment of the most profound love any human being is capable of. It is a moment of transformative grace.

This is why the word ‘return’ is also used to mean repentance. When we ‘return’ the politics of North America, or the war in Syria, or the horrific abuse of women both at home and abroad, to our inner space, we are repenting with them, for their situation and on their behalf.  In our inner silent space, and for this ‘returning’ to be possible, we are given the authority to work simultaneously on multiple time trajectories, the present moment, the immediate and historic past, the immediate future in which a child’s life may be hanging in the balance in a bombed out hospital in Aleppo, and the longer term future of the world and of the Church, both historic and eternal. On all these time planes we are given the authority to enter into God’s own transformative work, provided we do not allow our inner silence to be overwhelmed by the noise of a world in turmoil. 

When it's somewhere you know

  

Castello de Rocca Sinibalda www.grupofost.it

Disasters wrench apart the most gentle of memories. Amatrice, Rieti, L’Aquila, the hidden villages of Belmonte and Roccasinibalda, all places I have known – the last one especially – with its great castle rising from a rock, towering over the valley, its village nestled around it, all dwarfed by the Abruzzi hills. The castle was once my grandmother’s and I spent many a languid summer there in my teens. Rieti and L’Aquila were our nearest towns, half and hour's drive away. I have not yet been able to establish whether the castle and its present occupants are safe.

But these are, on the face of it, trivial anxieties compared to those suffered by someone like Ahmed who lives in asylum accommodation in Stockton.[1] He spends what little available money he has on keeping his phone topped up, so that he can check on his family still in Syria. He learns daily of their deaths and of the continuing obliteration of a town he loves. He dreams of returning, and of completing his engineering degree.

I know Ahmed, in that part of human consciousness where a person knows another person, or place, without ever having met them, or been there. His situation is as much a part of me, perhaps more so, because of what may be happening to the village of Roccasinibalda and to its 15^th century castle. The difference lies in Rocca being only a distant memory, brought to life perhaps by passing associations – like hearing Italian being spoken, or the smell of pinecones on a hot day. Ahmed’s memory is shared by millions of refugees in the reality of every present moment, in all its loneliness and grief.

Amatrice and Aleppo, Ahmed’s town, have something in common. Suffering, like sickness, is a great leveller. We hear in the news that some who were pulled from the rubble of their houses in Amatrice, miraculously unhurt, instantly became rescue workers alongside those who pulled them away from certain death. This happens on a daily basis in Aleppo. It is perhaps happening at Rocca. As yet we have no news. The village must be inaccessible by road in present conditions.

Amatrice, Aleppo and Roccasinibalda invite careful consideration of what we mean when we say that we are praying for someone, or for a particular place. If prayer is ‘answered’, I do not think that the ‘answer’ always comes in the form of a request granted. If it did, all natural disasters like earthquakes, as well as unnatural ones, like the barrel bombing of civilians, would be instantly reversed, as though life were a film which we could wind back, editing out the bad bits.

I think it is better to think of prayer as pertaining to a dimension which is beyond our own time frame and yet very much a part of it. Prayer takes us beyond the present and embraces both past and future, the known and the as yet unknown, in a single moment of ‘knowing’. In the case of Roccasinibalda (if it has been affected by the earthquake) and Aleppo, a place which is remembered identifies us with the place known by another person who we do not know. Ahmed and I meet in these places, and in this particular dimension, to a certain degree.

So prayer is a multiform, multilateral process, one in which all parties, including God, grieve and yearn, but for which there is only one source of healing and redemptive grace. Some disasters, those which touch us personally, quicken the heart with an anxiety and longing for there to be at least some good news, some reassurance that the people or the place we have known have been spared. Prayer affirms our belonging to God and to the whole human race, past, present and future. It is more mysterious, far more subtle and complex than wish fulfilment (waiting for good news) or denial (not accepting responsibility where we should). It involves entering into God’s love, being part of the ‘engine against the Almighty’[2] which drives us to God and is also driven by divine love.

Through prayer, we take responsibility (not blame) for suffering, as God did in his Son. We become part of that universal salvific act and hence also part of the new creation which springs from it. Taking responsibility is not about blame, and still less about retributive punishment. It is about allowing oneself, and the people and places we care about, to love and to be loved by God. Both can be painful.

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[1] Any resemblance to a person of that name in similar circumstances is unintentional

[2] George Herbert ‘Prayer’

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:

Screaming at God

'Sunrise' J.M.W Turner (1845)

The White Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass, screams for no apparent reason. When Alice asks her why she is screaming she says that she is about to prick her finger. This does indeed happen, a few seconds later, at which point she falls silent. When asked the reason for this inversion of the logical sequence of events, she replies that she has already screamed, before she pricked her finger, so why bother screaming now? I think this is a fairly good representation of the attitude many of us take to prayer, even in times of national crisis. Why bother praying, or perhaps ‘screaming’, at God now? We have done our praying, or screaming, and the bombs are being dropped, for better or for worse.

Whatever perspective you are viewing the outcome of Wednesday’s parliamentary vote on whether we should get militarily involved in the Syrian conflict, you could be forgiven for thinking that from here on it’s downhill all the way, whichever side of the argument you favoured, so why bother with prayer? But I do not think that prayer works like that. For one thing, it involves starting from where you really are, rather than where you think you ought to be, with regard to God and what you feel about the world and the Syrian crisis, or about your own life.

In all of these contexts, prayer can certainly involve screaming at God. St. Theresa of Avila, a person of great holiness, was known for her rants. On one occasion the wheel of the vehicle she was travelling in came off and lodged in the mud, upturning the vehicle and ejecting all its passengers. She told God, quite forcefully, that it was not surprising that he had so few friends if this was the way he treated them.  It’s fine to scream at God, but it’s better if we can simply hold the person or the situation in the deep inner space where our existence is ‘grounded’, where it is held firm but not mired down.

We cannot hold all the upheavals going on in our world in our rational minds for very long without putting our own mental health at risk, which is not what God would have us do, or what prayer is about. So we have to do the holding in a different way, using other methods for processing the world’s trauma.

Such methods could involve placing all the events of the past few weeks within the larger moment. The larger moment is time itself, understood any way you like, but understood as that dimension which embraces the past, the present and the future, in Love’s eternal regard.

Holding the moment in the larger moment is like a very simplified version of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen. We breath in the darkness that surrounds us in the present moment and we breath out the light, so becoming a part of that light. The light is life, so when we do this, we are more fully alive. Our minds become clear and steady, more pure, in Buddhist terms.

Christian prayer begins with being present to the moment, breathing it in as we face into the turmoil in the Middle East, what the bible describes as the ‘roaring of the nations’. In prayer, we face into the evil embodied in Isis, the confusion and doubt about what is best to do next, and the moral dilemmas facing world leaders and our own politicians, dilemmas which we must face as a nation, in solidarity with them, irrespective of our political affiliations.

All this darkness comes to us as a kind of scream from outside. If being present to the darkness is not to do us psychological harm, we must encounter it in the silence which is already within us in the form of Christ who waits for us to yield to the grace which he offers. 

The silence is our inner sanctuary. It needs to be cared for and guarded. The darkness will yield to the grace which comes out of silence if we are prepared to spend time in our inner sanctuary, constantly returning to it as our default position. When we do this, and it becomes our way of life, we can begin to breath out the light which comes from the inexhaustible reserve of God’s love for his world and which the darkness will never consume. 

Prayer - We don't know the half of it

www.telegraph.co.uk

There is water on Mars– or at least some sort of brine, and questions are no doubt already surfacing. Who will be the first to lay hold of the planet’s mineral wealth? Who will claim its forbidding terrain, give it a corporate name and then, in ignorance and haste, wreck it?

Perhaps these questions have already been answered, which only confirms the fact that destruction of the irreplaceable is the price we all pay for the ignorance and greed of past generations compounded by the selfishness and duplicity of the present one. This being the case, there is little reason to suppose that the fate of Mars will differ from that of Earth.  

The wealth of Mars, brought through its trickle of life giving water, will be unevenly distributed. Its key beneficiaries will justify their own short-term selfishness on the basis of ‘trickle down’ economic theories which are proving unjust and unworkable and whose methods also contribute to the ultimate destruction of planets – our own, and potentially others.

This whole destructive process feels unstoppable because, it seems, there is no single ultimate justice which we can trust and to which we can be accountable, no source of mercy to engage with us in the taking of responsibility for what we do with life itself. As a direct result of this, we seem to be losing sight of the purpose of our very existence. We are drowning in our own lostness.

It is as if the more we learn, the less we know, because in our haste to acquire, achieve and be something other than what we are (frail and fallible creatures, but who are gifted with intelligence and free will), we have lost our connection with the source of life and truth, from which comes the kind of deep understanding which issues forth in right judgment and responsible leadership.

Faced with this reality, systems and the people which systems ultimately control and govern (even though such people believe that it is they who are in control) start to fall apart. We are seeing this in the systemic disintegration of the institutional Church and we are seeing it in the panic experienced by the Labour party as a result of the unexpected arrival of two righteous people to lead it. No doubt everything will be done to try to undermine these people and so de-stabilise a hope-filled situation.

This general state of rapid disintegration resembles a piece of knitting which is falling apart. The work goes well until a few stitches get dropped. If these are not picked up and re-worked immediately, the piece unravels to a point where it becomes irretrievable. The human predicament, and the state of the planet, are like intertwined stitches which are part of a far greater work. In the case of knitting, when one stitch goes, the whole piece disintegrates, unless the knitter is quick to spot the situation and has the patience to work down to the dropped stitch and pick it up.

In terms of the world and our own lives, we are dependent on a creator God who is forever picking us up, and picking up our dropped stitches. When we become aware of this, and work with his purpose for us, we become agents of his salvific process. We engage in his ongoing work of redemption. This is the work of prayer.

There is no telling how this mending and re-making actually functions, because prayer takes place within the uniqueness of every human heart. It also depends on faith, and faith itself is only known in the human heart. It is not an intellectual exercise, so no single person can judge whether another has or does not have the faith needed to make prayer a reality in their lives. Similarly, nobody is in a position to judge whether someone’s prayer has been ‘effective’, or tell them how to make it so.

Faith is not just a matter of belief. It is about recognising and owning our need for God’s mercy. Prayer begins with facing into one’s deep need for God and daring to let ourselves be touched by his love. When we do this we bring with us our planet’s fragility and the strangely alien beauty of worlds as yet barely discovered. In whatever way, or whatever circumstances this encounter with God takes place, his mercy is recognised first of all in prayer. It is felt for what it is and never forgotten. It elicits a response. 

There is no way of ‘proving’ that this response has had an effect in any given situation. Who knows if apartheid would, or would not, still prevail in South Africa if millions of people had not allowed their need for God and for his mercy to enable some of them to be proactive in overcoming that particular evil? Whether or not they took direct action, they were all involved in the work of prayer. The same can be said of those who pray into the evils of the present day.

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Reality Overload and How to Bear It

It has been said that human beings can only bear so much reality. This might imply that beyond a certain point they either go mad, or simply zone out, as happens to most of us when we witness on the news yet another incident of barbarity and pre-meditated cruelty committed against women. What can we do about it? And how do we manage our own feelings in relation to these occurrences? There have been three this week. The first involving the incarceration of a Muslim woman, Mariah Yahya Ibrahim, who became a Christian and subsequently married a Christian man. She awaits execution for apostasy, having first been allowed to give birth to her child. The second is the gang rape and public hanging of two sisters in a village in rural India. The participants included members of the local police force. The third involved a pregnant woman stoned to death by relatives in a major city in Pakistan for refusing to comply with an arranged marriage.

How should Christians, and all people of faith, respond to such things? The disgust and outrage prompts us to get out there and do something – protest, write letters to governments or join an organised petition, all of these being perfectly valid courses of action, even if they leave us still feeling powerless and ineffectual. But they are not the only things we can do. There is another way, an even more powerful way to effect change.

It has to do with being ready to face and fully engage with the pain itself from within our own history of suffering, our well of loneliness, be it ever so slight in comparison to what we see and read in the news. Our inner well of loneliness is that place where human consciousness, or conscience, is rooted in the history of every individual’s life experience and connects with the sum total of suffering which makes up human history. It is the place where we learn, sometimes through bitter experience, the difference between good and evil. We return to this place and face our demons when we pray. Our demons are the thoughts, inclinations and predilections of which we are perhaps ashamed but which may be connected to circumstances beyond our control, circumstances which sometimes do not even pertain to our own lives.

The more we do this returning, and own our pain and our demons before God, the better equipped we become to face the evil and violence that is committed on a daily basis against women and girls. A rape is committed in India every 22 minutes. In the moment that we return to our inner place of darkness, where we know ourselves and are known by God in all the fullness of what we are, we can be pretty sure that some hideous act of violence is being committed against a woman somewhere in the world.

The point of what I am saying is not to induce guilt or a sense of hopelessness. Neither am I suggesting that prayer, the centering down into our own inner dark space, our place of loneliness, is a form of escapism. Rather, it is a matter of owning the darkness in ourselves which makes us part of God’s purpose for our world. His purpose is the complete overwhelming of darkness by light, a purpose which is already being worked out in the moment we own the darkness and loneliness in our world to God.

The psalmist writes, ‘darkness is not dark to him. The night is as bright as the day.’ (Ps.139) This is a mystery and not one which is given to us to understand in this life, but eventually it will be fully understood by everyone, beginning with the perpetrators of the worst crimes against the innocent. They will see and understand what they have done in all its dreadful fullness. So we take the suffering of women and girls, as we hear of it today, into this place where we are ‘known’ by God and we are in solidarity with them, as Christ is in solidarity with us in our own darkness. It is from our own place of darkness that we share in the outrage of people around the world at the crimes which have been committed against these women this week. It is in this place that the world’s anger and grief has meaning and purpose because it is ‘known’ by God in ways which we do not as yet fully understand. We plead for justice in this place of darkness. We ask for mercy, knowing as the prophet Job knew in the depths of his own darkness, that our redeemer lives – and we carry on caring.