Evil Within

Two notorious child killers figure in the news at the moment; the first, Ian Brady, infamous serial killer of the sixties; the second, Rebecca Shuttleworth who subjected her two year old to a prolonged and agonising death through torture and repeated beatings. Where do we draw the line between the psychotic, or damaged person, and plain evil?

What is disturbing about these people is their ordinariness. The young woman is, on the face of it, any mother. She is not bad looking and the way she is able to manipulate and deceive suggests that she is both intelligent and personable. Brady once had a certain malignant charm, enough to turn his accomplice into someone who, like him, exulted in the experience of evil as extreme power over defenceless children. But why are we fascinated by them?

I have only once visited a prison but in those couple of hours I experienced pure dread. Prisons are ‘dreadful’ places, not because the inmates are in any way weird or frightening, but because they are so ordinary. I did not know what crimes any of them had committed, nor did I want to, but seeing them there, in their ordinariness, reminded me that in every ‘ordinary’ person lies some sort of fascination with evil. For most of us, the fascination is unacknowledged, even unrecognised, but it is there, lodged inside the psyche, inside the human heart.

We think and remember out of this secret inner place and our thinking and remembering will, more often than not, tend towards darkness rather than light, towards the suffering we have experienced at the hands of others, and the bitterness or hatred which it has left us with, or to the evil, vindictive or otherwise, from which we have gained, and perhaps continue to gain, some sort of perverse satisfaction.

On the whole, dark destructive impulses remain in the realm of the imagination and of fantasy. We are thankful that, unlike the psychopath, we have not been tempted to work them out in reality, into some violent action or sadistic impulse to harm the innocent and the vulnerable. Exposing and punishing psychopaths helps, in some perverse way, to reassure us that our own fascination with evil remains safely in the realm of the subconscious. But there is a better way to deal with the evil within, and with the fatal attraction which it holds for people like Ian Brady and Rebecca Shuttleworth.

In Jesus Christ, we have a God who willingly takes what is dark, destructive and violent in the human heart into himself, into his own inner psyche, his own spirit. On the cross, he experiences the effects of this darkness as ‘God forsakeness’. In doing so, he takes our propensity for evil into himself and prevents it going any further, thereby preventing it from destroying us. Hence, the description of Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’. This is what is meant by salvation. 

On the Cross, Christ allows himself to be ‘made sin’, to be completely taken over by the evil of which human beings are capable without himself thinking, imagining or perpetrating evil in any way, so two seemingly incompatible things are going on here. Christ takes into himself the things of which we are most ashamed, which we dare not own even to ourselves, and in exchange we are offered freedom. We are free to face the truth about ourselves in what is hidden and dark and to bring it all to the cross and nail it there, so to speak, leaving us with the kind of peace which only comes with being made OK with God, or, to put it in more formal language, being justified before him.

All of this invites us to look at people who have committed horrendous crimes in a different way. This is not to say that we should think of them as innocent, which they are not, but that we should mentally drag them, and the evil which they represent, to the foot of the Cross where they can see and be seen by Christ in their ordinariness, as we are in ours.

Hassan Rouhani - Hoping for Hope

It is easy to be cynical about politics. No one trusts politicians, either here or abroad. In any case, Syria is not happening down our street. The social and the political turmoil which is overwhelming Egypt and Turkey does not pertain to our immediate neighbourhood or affect us in any direct way. Neither, for that matter, does the occasional bit of encouraging news, such as  the recent election of Iran’s relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani as that country’s new President. It is easy to be cynical about this too, given that Mr. Rouhani must strive to maintain an equable relationship with the conservative supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, while at the same time enabling a much needed warming of relations with the West. Cynicism is what happens when we give up on hope, or simply lose interest in it. Hope has to do with transformation; in this case the transformation of the political scenario not only in Iran, but in the whole of the Middle East.

Call me naïve, if you like, but I work on the presupposition that Mr. Rouhani  is not a bad man and therefore should not be presumed to be the enemy from day one. Rather, he should be thought of as someone who has it within him to change, even transform, the life of Iran and thereby to free all of its people, and it is the people of Iran, as well as those of surrounding nations, who matter most. If we are to support the people of Iran and those of the Middle East, as opposed to the ideologies many of them claim to be fighting for, we must keep good faith with those who voted for Hassan Rouhani and, of equal importance, we must believe in his capacity for wisdom and goodness and for a change of mind and heart on certain key issues. As things stand at present, Hassan Rouhani could be the one who breaks the deadly cycle of violence now engulfing most of the Middle East  threatening global stability, and thereby you and me.

He will be directly or indirectly involved in making difficult and perhaps compromising decisions on a number of issues, ranging from the present conflicts in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey and the growing unrest in Egypt, to the use of nuclear energy as a destructive force, to the treatment of women and to relations between Iran and the wider world. All of these issues will weigh heavily on Mr. Rouhani and he will need more than gestures of good will from others to give him the confidence he needs if he is to embody hope for his people, including those who did not vote for him.  He cannot do this work alone.

One of the texts set in the Church in Wales lectionary for today is ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Ps.40:10). We, along with our Muslim brothers and sisters, need to take this text to heart. We need to meet each other in it and let it first transform our hearts and minds, by replacing cynicism with hope, and then allow it to flow on through us into the troubled regions of the Middle East, not to mention the layers of misunderstanding which divide Muslims from Christians, and all of us, from what is blithely termed the ‘secular’.  Meeting others in the stillness of God is not a spiritual game. It is nothing less than the confrontation of despair with hope, through the work of prayer undertaken in faith across the barriers which divide one people from another. 

We can begin this work by being present in the stillness of knowing and being known by God. The stillness embodies the kind of love which transcends our feeble and all too human attempts at trying to resolve seemingly impossible conflict situations. It makes demands on the whole person, so the one who prays must be wholly given over to the reality of the love of God at work in the power of his Spirit, and to the possibility that it can be worked on the most violent jihadist or potential terrorist. If every Christian, every Muslim, and all who believe themselves to be in any way spiritual were to stop for a few minutes each day and takes these words literally to heart, holding those who most need God’s stillness and compassion in the forefront of their consciousness, we would,  I am sure, see a transformation of the politics of Iran and the Middle East.  Try it and see.

Eternity

Yesterday, I had an eternity moment. We were meeting our grandchildren at Heathrow. There were delays and we were starting to feel weary. We had been standing at the barrier in the arrivals hall for a couple of hours when I spotted our six year old granddaughter. In the mutual sighting of a moment, as she ran towards me and as I ducked under the barrier, I heard her ecstatic cry – “Granny!” 

People say that bits of your life are played back to you in the moment of dying and I am sure that this minor episode will be one such playback. I am sure of this, not because I am privy to what goes on in the immediate aftermath of life, but because the love of a six year old, so expressed, is transformational. You could call it transcendent. It draws us out of ourselves (which is possibly what dying feels like) and into something exquisite and full of light, the unconditional, unquestioning embrace of a loving God in which there is no darkness whatsoever.

In Jesus Christ, God the Father is always seeing us and crying out our name as he runs towards us and embraces us, even in our dark times. Such moments can come unexpectedly, or they can be sought. When a person seeks to know God and to be welcomed and forgiven, the moment has come for a kind of inward ‘turning around’ and running towards the source of love itself. It is a response, a recognition that the time has come for that person to recognise their deeply rooted need for a loving God.

 Perhaps it can be compared to the baby, still in the womb, turning around in preparation for birth, seeking out the light. The baby's present environment is an unbearable constraint, not only physically but in some measure, emotionally, even spiritually, just as our own way of life, our patterns and priorities, can suddenly feel unbearable and constraining. Perhaps the movement, or repositioning which occurs just before birth, also has to do with the self needing to begin the process of existence among other selves, a turning and reaching for love. 

The eternity moment which I experienced at Heathrow, was one of instant and mutual love between us, coming from my granddaughter and her younger brother who tumbled into my arms a second or two later. It was immediate and unconditional. It was also held in eternity, so it will never cease to exist. Such moments are to be experienced with God, in the person of Jesus, beginning now.

If you feel the need to know that you are loved and valued by God in Jesus Christ, but find it difficult to own this, or to connect with him, you can message me privately on facebook.

Church Reorganisation - What Are We About?

The Church in Wales is having a clear out. As with all clear outs, this is a worthy and no doubt timely exercise. But, whatever it may tell itself, the Church is engaged in an exercise which is mainly about the practicalities of managing decline.  We are to have ‘ministry areas’, ostensibly adapted to the needs and resources of local communities, but it is still not clear what we are really about. There is talk of mission and of the apostolic nature of the Church. There is talk of various kinds of lay ministry which supplement or complement that of a dwindling number of full time and stipendiary clergy.

While all this may be necessary for practical reasons, it does not feel very exciting. If I speak of ministry areas to anyone not familiar with the Church, a kind of glazed look comes over them. They are instantly bored. I sense that the deployment of resources, both human and fabric, is not what they want to hear about. What they really want to hear about, even if they do not admit it to themselves, is how can the Church facilitate friendship with Jesus Christ? How can we make it possible for people who may never come to church to meet him in the here and now of their lives and in the here and now of a world torn apart by violence and every kind of injustice?

I do not think that this depends on how we organise ourselves. It depends on the kind of people we are. This is especially true of those who are called to public ministry, whether ordained or lay. They need to be people whose minds, hearts, preferences and priorities are entirely shaped by love for Jesus Christ. Such people embody the Kingdom and draw others into it without them even realising it. I do not think that this takes years of training. It takes prayer. The Church needs to learn to pray in such a way that it hears people’s real needs, before these have been spoken, or even recognised. You cannot train someone to do this, but you can walk beside them as they struggle to understand God in new ways and as they struggle to give voice to the mystery of his abiding presence among us.

Too much training, and too much energy expended on organising ourselves and running things often occludes the real purpose of the Church’s work which is to enable people who do not feel that they belong in the Kingdom of Heaven to know that it is they who are most qualified, they who matter most to Christ. The Church should be making it possible for them to be real with God. It should be opening new doors for them, creating new paths in the wilderness of modern anxiety, guilt, drivenness and all the other emotions and distractions which end up destroying us. 

But first of all, the Church needs to be real with God in its own life. It needs to be reconciled within itself, by breaking down the two biggest barriers to effective ministry which are those of prejudice and professional envy. These things sap its life blood, leaving behind a spiritual vacuum. So the Church needs to rediscover its passion for God and re learn trust between its own members. Then it will be free to focus outwards, discern where his love is most needed and minister to that need. If re-organisation and ministry areas make this their primary concern they will have served their purpose. 

The Future of Retail - What Are Shops For?

A couple of years have now passed since the first self checkout gizmos made their appearance in my favourite supermarket.  Now we have online shopping as well, which we are told is the future of retail, implying that we had all better get used to it. Personally, I don’t much like the word ‘retail’. It smacks of cost effectiveness, which I resent. The handheld gizmos are cost effective presumably because they make it possible for shops to hire fewer people to run their checkouts. I like shops staffed by people. Fewer people running checkouts also means more people in my community without jobs. 

Added to this, is the sense of panic and the feeling of exposure to looking stupid which these gizmos induce. The gizmo seems to be waiting in its neat little rack for the anxious customer to do all the wrong things with it and finally have to turn to another human being for assistance, all of which takes twice as long as it would have done had the person opted for queuing at the checkout in the first place.

For people who live in the country or near a small town, as I do, shops supply more than food and the basics of life. They underpin community. For some, such as the elderly, the housebound or the lone parent, the visit to the local supermarket will be the only chance they have to speak to another adult, or even another living soul, all day. The best retail shops have made it their business to be interested in the human beings who buy their products. The people who work there get to know their customers. They are not just being friendly. The result is that the shops feel more like markets than supermarkets, something which should be encouraged, not only for social reasons, but also for the environmental knock-on effect of shopping carefully in one place.

 If we plan and only buy what we are going to need for the next week and try to cook it from scratch (rather than resorting to ‘instants’) as well as grow it, where possible, the cost along with the environmental damage caused by the car is reduced proportionately. We do not need to visit a supermarket every time we run out of something and end up buying (usually on impulse) three times as much as we should. Only one or two trips to the supermarket, as opposed to three or four also means less fuel. The same could be said to be true of online delivery services, but these services come with their own problems, like having to take food which we have ordered online back to the shop because it is sub standard or not what we ordered.

All of this is about getting the balance right between being human and being a consumer. Going to the shops is not just about shopping. It is, in a deeper sense, about communion. It is the opportunity to be together with other human beings, to hear their voices and know companionship, even if we don’t bump into someone we know personally, which is rare in small towns. These chance meetings, along with the general sense of being part of the wider community reflect the hospitality of God. They also invite joy and gratitude in experiencing, be it ever so slightly, his invitation to us to enjoy the fruits of the earth and benefit from the kind of technology which brings people together rather than turning them into atomised consumers.

Without gratitude we become increasingly isolated from one another and hence from the giver of all good things. Gratitude is the basis for all human happiness. It is given and received in all sorts of ways. Most of us experience it in a shared word or two with another person about the most trivial things, tiny moments of ordinary courtesy while standing in a queue, remarks about the weather and whatever is currently of interest to any one community, bits of news, thoughts and concerns about others or about what is going on in the world. For many people, such moments only happen in supermarkets. A quick ‘thank you’ to the delivery person does not quite do it. Neither does the cost effective self checkout gizmo, for all its promise of speed and efficiency.

Fracking - The Wrong Way up the Motorway

Ambiguous road signs cause accidents. Clear and unambiguous ones have the opposite effect. They dispel in an instant the distractions brought on by tiredness, thereby focusing the mind and saving lives. Think of going the wrong way up a one way street and multiply the feeling by a hundred for the moment you realise you are approaching a motorway on the wrong slip road. See the ‘wrong way’ sign and feel the fear. Now think of fracking.

 Fracking the earth for shale gas is the ‘Wrong Way’. The implications of fracking for the future of the planet are, when you pause to think about it, as frightening as approaching a motorway on the wrong slip road, without the time or the means of turning back.  

Fracking involves drilling at great depth, vertically and then horizontally, for long distances (it is not a small local operation) under the earth’s crust, causing it to crumble and disintegrate from within. This is brought about by the use of toxic chemicals and enormous quantities of water which, when combined, release methane and combine with other chemicals to poison the water that comes out of the kitchen tap. Residents of Butler County Pennsylvania, where extensive fracking is already being employed, report not only sudden attacks of projectile vomiting, headaches, strange rashes and the instantaneous death of a dog who had just drunk from a nearby water source. They also report incidents of water emerging from taps as fire.  

We can only begin to guess at the long term possibly irredeemable effect this activity may have on the fresh water we rely on for drinking, agriculture and the ongoing sustainability of the planet as a whole, not to mention our immediate surroundings were fracking to be employed in a place nearby, as it was for the residents of Poulton-le-Fylde near Blackpool. Added to this, is the internal and barely imaginable effect of smashing the very substance of the earth, what holds it together from within and keeps its relatively fragile surface intact. The earthquakes and tsunamis we have seen in the past couple of decades would bear no resemblance to the kind of whole scale and pretty well permanent devastation which the internal fracturing of the earth could bring about within a very short time scale. A British Geological Survey linked the two minor earthquakes near Blackpool which occurred on April 1^st and May 27^th 2011 to in depth fluid injection linked to the Preese Hall shale gas drilling site. The epicentre of the May quake was within 500 metres of the site.

It is not good enough to vaguely hope that somehow the scientists engaged in researching more viable ways of sustaining human life without damaging what it most depends on will find a solution and solve the problem in time. Neither can we trust that governments and the leaders of industry will see sense and that, when it comes to fracking, right thinking and preventive action will somehow prevail. Christians, the institutional Church and all people of faith need to act on this one before it is too late. Door to door petitions, lobbying MPs, and any kind of peaceful intelligent protest are urgently needed. Praying the Kingdom and making it happen in the here and now is what the Church is here to do, rather than destroying itself from within with its own fracking activities, its injustices, limited vision and its deeply divisive internal politics.  

Remembering Aright – How should Christians think about abuse they have suffered in the past?

The latest exposure of sex abuse by high profile men now in their eighties requires that Christians who have suffered abuse engage in some honest thinking, a way of thinking which will help both the victim and the perpetrator come to terms with the past, because this is the only way that healing can be effected. It is not just a matter of forgiving and forgetting. For the victim, and in some cases, for the perpetrator, the past does not go away that easily. We do not forget, and nor should we. The challenge therefore lies in remembering aright.

When a serial abuser cannot even remember a victim’s name, or denies abusing someone they know well, their feigned amnesia reveals the core of the sin itself, a callous indifference to another human being’s dignity and independence, something which consigns their very personhood, their existence even, to oblivion. This is the poison which is at the heart of abuse and which infects both abuser and victim alike. The abuser forfeits his own humanity as he denies the victim theirs.

How are Christians who have experienced abuse in childhood or in early adulthood to think of these men? What are they to do when seeing them in the news returns them as victims of abuse to their own ‘sheol’? ‘Sheol’ is a word used in scripture as a depiction of hell. It is a place of darkness, a place where personhood holds no meaning. Where personhood has been denied, our memories of abuse are hidden in a kind of suffocating darkness, the darkness of Sheol and for victims, as well as abusers, it can be tempting to leave them there.

But burying memories, or denying them, does nothing to restore those of us who have experienced abuse to the persons we once were before the abuse happened. Nor does it enable the abuser to face his own self and the truth about his actions. Both victim and perpetrator need to be restored to themselves, to the dignity of their own personhood if remorse, reparation and healing are to be effected. Nothing good can emerge and grow in the darkness of Sheol. Being consigned to Sheol does not allow the abuser to begin to take responsibility for his actions and for their long term effect on the lives of others, because in this place of darkness he cannot see those victims as persons, anymore than he can really see himself. Nor can he be made to face himself through the vicarious revenge many of us unconsciously enjoy at the sight of yet another high profile abuser being ‘outed’, even when ‘outing’ him is presented as long overdue justice. The public disgracing of old men has no power to heal, either them or their victims.

For those of us who experienced abuse at the hands of others, facing these particular abusive men with the fact that it is their victims’ humanity, their deepest selves, which was violated helps us to move a little further on from revenge, even when revenge comes in the guise of justice, after so many years of justice not having been done. Real justice happens when victims are finally believed and truth is admitted. It is when the victim is not believed or taken seriously that he or she suffers the greatest pain.

Not being believed about abuse makes it convenient, even obligatory, for the victim to be thought of as a liar in all other respects. Once a liar, always a liar. While being thought of as a liar, the victim also lives with the memory of being relegated to the status of plaything, of not being fully a person, and this will affect the way they think of themselves for the rest of their lives. So those who have experienced abuse in childhood and adolescence have been sinned against twice over, first by the abuser, and then by those who chose not to believe, or not to notice what was going on.

On the other hand, there are some who are being unfairly blamed for ‘hiding’ or ‘protecting’ abusers when, in fact, they were known to have informed their superiors, or those in authority, to the extent that was required and possible at the time. They too are being judged and condemned as liars. They are being judged in accordance with today’s expectations, as if the legislation relating to abuse and child protection, along with the more open channels for appeal and victim support which exist today, were in force and available to them then, which they were not.

            So what is the Christian who has suffered abuse in early life to make of this web of untruth and half truth and of their own enduring pain? It begs the question of how forgiveness and healing might work in these memories. We have to take it one day at a time. I think the best most of us can do at present is to allow ourselves to see the perpetrators of these acts, and all those who wittingly or unwittingly were connected with them, as persons who belong to a just, truthful and loving God as much as we, the victims, do. If, as Christians, prayer plays a part in our lives, we can begin by placing all these people, the guilty and those guilty by association, under his merciful regard, as we ourselves are under his merciful regard, especially when we are conscious of this during times of prayer.

Placing those who have sinned against us under the merciful regard of God is helpful in at least two ways; firstly, it prevents our own inclination to vindictiveness from getting a hold on us and so poisoning us from within. Secondly, it stops the inevitable burying of the pain (only for it to return later) because we are ‘outing’ the pain itself by bringing it to God, along with the abuser and those who may have colluded with him. We bring all of it to the foot of the cross, again and again, and leave it there, again and again. Then we accept ourselves as honoured and loved from that place and know ourselves not as liars, but truthful, and we carry on living.