Out of the ashes

Donesk airport 

Debaltseve is suspended in the buffer zone between Russia and the disputed territory of eastern Ukraine. We see the ashes of Donetsk airport through a drone’s camera lens. We glimpse, online, the face of an old woman. She remembers another war which devastated her country more than half a century ago. A tear glistens in her left eye. Another elderly woman sets about ‘clearing up’, as one online report puts it. She is at work with a dustpan and brush on the doorstep of her shattered house. The ceasefire may yet hold, or it may not, but for a moment we can be present to a nation’s suffering. Being present to the suffering of nations is a way of re-affirming what is good about humanity.

To be human is also to die. Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we consider the stark reality of our own mortality, the fact that we are dust and that to dust we shall return. It is in this sombre context that we are also called to repent. In former times this was done literally ‘in dust and ashes’. Now, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross made from the ashes of last year’s Palm Sunday crosses.

There is something significant about the tactile nature of this small ceremony. It invites us to think of our mortality and of repentance as belonging together, and yet the two are quite separate. Our mortality is an irrevocable aspect of the human condition, but repentance is down to us. It means, as the rest of the Ash Wednesday liturgical phrasing puts it, ‘to turn away from sin’. We have a choice.  For many, turning away from sin sounds overtly pious, not something one would want to rush to church for on a cold evening in February. But repentance is not an ascetic exercise for the religiously inclined. It is essential to the survival of the planet and of the human race, because it restores life.

Repentance is therefore everyone’s concern. It is both collective and personal. Nations are comprised of persons, of human beings whose lives and decisions shape the destinies of families and communities, and of the nation itself. They, and those they influence or control, can reduce a once fine airport to ashes, and with them lies the responsibility for the elderly woman ‘clearing up’ in between rocket attacks. Also, we all ultimately depend for our survival as a species on the planet which we are wrecking through conflict, greed and materialism. Archaeological research suggests that our planet has outlived other species in the past and could outlive us if we choose not to repent.

Nations repent when enough individuals apply enough pressure on those who hold the most power to push them to repentance, to push them to choose life for the rest of us. Part of our own repentance therefore consists in taking responsibility for the repentance of those over whom we have some influence. This is not a matter of applying sanctions, or, as in other conflict situations, of retaliatory bombing raids.

The conflicts we see around us are about the exercise of power, and hence about greatness. Repentance is about relinquishing power and accepting our mortality, our littleness and vulnerability, and that our lifespan and that of our planet is held in God’s. This is where a huge reality shift needs to take place. We have mistaken what is real for what is unreal by allowing collective vanity and self aggrandisement (otherwise known as national identity) to destroy our humanity. The last part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy urges us to be faithful to Christ. What it is reminding us of, though, is his faithfulness to us.

Reaching for the edge

Some years ago, we went to Taizé, a place where Christians and many others who are seeking God go to find him. They find him in many different contexts, different ‘mansions’, to quote the word used by Jesus as a figurative way of talking about heaven and the hereafter. At Taizé, these ‘mansions’ are really different kinds of spaces in which surprising encounters take place. They are the moments which together make up a new friendship, perhaps a first experience of what it really means to live in community, but at Taizé the most significant moment happens in the context, the space, in which collective worship takes place.

The summer I visited Taizé, was extremely hot. We sat, several hundred or more, in a huge tent with all the entrances opened to allow a cross breeze.  The altar, or focal point for worship, was very close to where we were seated, but at about a third of the way through the singing the whole gathered community turned to face a different focal point, at the other end of the tent. Suddenly we were out on the edge. Others were now at the centre.

There are many people today who feel out on the edge of things when it comes to questions of faith and ultimate meaning. Perhaps the Church they have known in the past has failed them in some way. It has either left them behind by failing to address crucial life issues in a way which is both credible and hope giving, or it has become introspective, concerned with its own career prospects and with a very partial understanding of the real meaning of tradition.  These concerns have caused it to become stuck in a place which makes it impossible for it to ‘turn’ in the way the worship focus at Taizé allows people to turn, so that those on the edge can also be near its centre. As with the Taizé community, the ‘turning’ is what gives life to the wider Church as well as to its worship. It is also, coincidentally, the root meaning of the greek word for repentance, greek being the language of the New Testament.

For the Church, repentance is about turning outwards towards God and towards all those who are on the outer edges of its life, but who are still rather wistfully seeking God within its walls. It does not really matter how this turning is done, as long as it is done because the Church, in all its denominations and groupings, wants to connect more deeply, more compassionately, and more truthfully, with God and because it wants to make it possible for those on its peripheries to do the same. These are the only ends which matter when it comes to ‘turning’.

 One of the signs that the Church, in its different denominations and sub-divisions, is failing to ‘turn’ is that it is becoming increasingly introspective. It is looking inwards, but without allowing the deeper questions to surface. Something has happened to its heart with the result that it is unclear of what it is really about. It is anxious about numerical growth and relevance. At the same time, it does not want to be seen to capitulate to secularism. So pragmatism rules the day, with the result that the Church is perceived by many as becoming increasingly secular and, ironically, increasingly irrelevant.  

With its heart growing cold, its anxiety feeds on itself, so the Church has little choice but to resort to managerialism on the one hand, or crowd-pleasing tribal religion, as well as the manoeuvring of party interest groups within its own walls, on the other.  Both are forms of retreat inwards, rather than a forward movement of turning outwards.

Nevertheless, management does have its uses. Creative outward-looking management liberates and empowers. It enables movement. It can also provide a little mental space in which to allow the things which really matter to emerge and focus in the collective mind while the Church, as an organisation, gets on with reorganising itself. It is a little like dreaming of the next blog post while sorting out the cutlery draw. This kind of mental break, or ‘space’, allows important questions to surface. When the Church is not allowing important questions to surface while it sorts out its cutlery drawer it is simply managing a static situation. It is no longer reaching out through leaders with vision and contemplative zeal to those outside who need the fruits of such vision and zeal – and who the Church also needs without always realising it. So perhaps the Church needs to forget itself for a while and allow the old walls to crumble without being in too much of a hurry to put up new ones.

The Church endures wherever there are enough rooms without walls, or ‘mansions’, to allow everyone to meet Jesus Christ and live in them in his love. In other words, where it focuses outwards in such a way as to allow those on the edge to also be at its centre. It seems, to those on the edge, that the Church is often afraid to let go of the familiar in order to grasp at what is unfamiliar, but which resonates with the truth they need to hear spoken from the pulpit, conveyed in the sacraments and lived out in the care of the least of the Church’s members. People on the edge have already heard this truth in their own hearts.  Perhaps it is they who are called to convey it into the heart of the Church.