Colouring in reality

Source: youtube.com

After thirty three years of unremitting pain, Kim Phuc’s scars and nerve endings are being treated by a leading scar tissue expert who specialises in the effects of napalm. Many of us know Kim Phuc. We met her when she was just eleven years old, fleeing naked from her village on June 8^th, 1972, caught up in a South Vietnamese bombing raid.

We are entering the season of remembrance, a time when we remember not only those who have died, but also the living. We are remembering those whose lives have been so traumatised by conflict or abuse that they are alive in a quite different sense to that which most of us take for granted. Kim Phuc, having defected to Canada, made a new life out of the scars left on her mind and body by the Vietnamese war. Since then, millions of others have had their lives shaped, and distorted, by their memories of conflict.

The traumatised Syrian family landing on the Greek island of Kos will eventually make a new life in Munich. They will live that life in, and because of, their memories, memories which will also shape their identities as victims of humanity’s inhumanity. Unless they experience the kind of joy which precedes healing at the deepest level, these memories will destroy their future. But the father of the Kos family is beginning to smile again, and his children are laughing for the first time in months. Their laughter makes them instruments of healing for all of us.

The remembrance season is a good time to reflect on the fact that the victims of war are also the means of our own healing. They are to us the suffering Christ whose ‘stripes heal our wounds’. They show us not only how to survive but, more importantly, how we are meant to really live in these inchoate times. We live not by turning away from reality, but by embracing it and allowing ourselves to be forgiven, rather than seeking a way out  via some form of infantile escapism.

Yesterday, after news of more unrest and violence in Turkey, brought about by the heightening of tensions between the government and Kurdish resistants, and as a prelude to forthcoming elections, we immediately hear of the latest adult colouring-in craze. Apparently, the digital age, and the instantaneous access which it brings to the horrors of conflict, are proving too much for us. We need, it is said, ‘something analogue’ perhaps to soften things a bit, to give our eyes a rest, and possibly our hearts and brains as well, from what we see on our screens. 

But it is not clear what realities colouring-in books are designed to soften. Perhaps they are just supposed to remind us of safe designated areas, so also indicating a tendency to avoid that level of reality which takes us into the unknown, outside the safe designated area when it comes to making sense of human suffering – and to doing the right thing.

At the same time, the blank areas in the colouring books (the safe designated areas) also provide time. They provide a mental space, as they do for children, into which things can fall into place, so allowing questions to surface, as they also sometimes do for children, with respect to the inequality and random injustices which life seems to have dealt to many, while leaving others untouched. These are questions which the person doing the colouring-in would often rather not face.

The moment of truth might come suddenly and unexpectedly. As they inadvertently colour over a line, they get rattled, as we all do when certain lines (especially ones which suit our purposes at the moment) are crossed. The irony of the recent House of Lords rebellion is an interesting case in point. They are unelected. How dare they break out in the cause of justice?  and possibly, one might add, in the longer term healing of deep social divisions within our own nation. They pertain to an outdated system of class and privilege. How dare they cross the line? Colouring-in will reinforce the dubious notion that things need to stay safely in their allotted spaces, especially if the space is a contentious one. The negative implications for human well being are enormous.

Perhaps colouring-in for adults will be the means to finding something more than a coping strategy when it comes to remembering and healing the wounds of nations, and our own as well. Perhaps the blank spaces will oblige us to think of how we could colour-in the bleak lives of those who call on us for relief, asylum or fiscal justice and so begin to heal their memories with the beginnings of a joy which we so badly need ourselves.  

A life worth living

“Keeping busy?” is the question which often gets asked of people who look over 65 or so. Perhaps the person asking it reckons that the over 65 year olds have nothing left to live for, apart from filling the dreadful abyss left by the ‘busyness’ which has been taken from them through retirement – voluntary or otherwise.

The question is loaded at both ends. On the one, for the person being asked and, on the other, for the one asking it, who may be worrying about their own impending retirement and the spectre of idleness which it raises. In both cases, it leads into far deeper questions which pertain to the meaning of life itself. These are the questions many people face in retirement or possibly, as a result of adversity, much earlier on in life.

We do not live, in the fullest sense, by keeping busy.  Neither, for that matter, are we truly rich when we have simply made a lot of money or acquired power or status, which are only of use to us in this lifetime, in any case – if they last that long. There is still that part of us which achievements and attributes fail to satisfy, or ‘reach’, to allude to an advertisement from the seventies for a well known brand of beer.

Retirement focuses this truth, until now only vaguely apprehended, into reality. Left to ourselves, we are faced not so much with the past (although the past is significant in shaping our thoughts about the present) as with the present moment and with infinity itself which is couched in the present moment, though it does not begin there. Having to be still and resisting the need to be busy allows us a glimpse of infinity, also called eternity, and eternity might be like when our very brief lives enter into that ultimate dimension.  It begs two further questions; will we be wealthy in the only way which matters in this infinite dimension? In other words, will we have lived richly towards God? And will we have lived gratefully?

So the question we are faced with is whether or not we are living, in the fullest sense of the word, rather than just keeping busy. By living, I mean has our creaturely life been in tune with the greater life of God’s creating Spirit, with his generosity and joy, as well as with his grieving over the violence and greed which are the cause of so much suffering for human beings and creatures alike?

The creative ‘rush’ that makes for fulfilling work is of a piece with the energy of a creating God. Have we, in our working lives, ever sensed this and been grateful to him for it? And if our own working life has been demanding, but unrewarding and uneventful, have we sought that creative God in our colleagues and helped them to develop their gifts wherever possible?

Gratitude ought to inform the whole of our life, not just that part of it when we were in work, because gratitude is about meeting God at the deepest level of our being. Gratitude is also at the heart of the meaning of eucharist, and we are called to live eucharistically. In other words, we are called to live richly and gratefully towards God at whatever stage of life we happen to have reached.

We are also called to be open to what is good in retirement, even if it does not, on the face of it, feel very rewarding. When we consciously live like this, we are able to discern or know God meeting with our own spirit, so making retirement creative in the fullest sense. We are not just getting through another day by keeping busy, because each day is the beginning of a whole new phase of creative living.  

Praying into the politics of fear

Source: mg.co.za

A good novel or poem reveals a truth you always knew, but never realised you knew. The same holds for the Christian gospels. They tell us things we always knew but now, in this moment of reading, discover in an entirely new way as if for the first time. They are ‘true’ in this moment in a way they were not true in the past, or even five minutes ago. All of the sayings of Jesus were spoken with this idea in mind.

When truth is suddenly come upon it becomes a ‘moment of truth’. Moments of truth (and there can be many) often occur at that particular point in our life’s trajectory which intersects with that of the world in such a way as to allow for perception, understanding, or a creative ‘eureka’. A greater reality declares itself. Such moments do not only come about through the reading of a sacred text. They could just as easily happen through a novel or a painting, or in the few vacant minutes we find ourselves resting in while standing in a queue or waiting for the lights to change, or in encountering someone’s gaze as you shake their hand. James Joyce would have called these moments of truth ‘epiphanies’.

Such moments are not neutral. They are ‘charged’ with something. But they are also unknowable in the sense that they elude any kind of definition or analysis. Allowing for the advances made in the language of mathematics, it is artists and poets who probably come the closest to being able to define ‘truth’ when it is spoken of, or experienced, in this way. The truth they reveal to us (without always knowing they are doing so) is also the ‘unknown’ of quantum mechanics and the ‘unknowing’ of all that pertains to knowledge of God.

We are sentient beings whose perceptions have been sharpened by our memories, the memories of our own continuing pain, and by the suffering of the world. Here, and in our memories, we encounter a God who takes into himself the effects of our tendency to selfishness and violence as these are worked out in the politics of fear which continue to exercise such a hold on us and to dominate our world.

So, to look into the ‘unknowingness’, or darkness, of God is also to look into the world’s darkness and not to flinch from the fear it generates. But we need to look into our own darkness first. Looking into our own darkness, and thence into the darkness of the world and its politics, is not an exercise for the faint hearted and it is certainly not an exercise for those who think of themselves as spiritually strong. But it is vital work.

Those who are called upon to do this work will have known fear in one or more of its many psychological manifestations. They will be familiar with their own dark place, in the way a blind person or animal is familiar with the layout of a room because they know where the furniture is. The furniture is the cause and effect familiar to us in whatever our fear syndrome happens to be. We should know the furniture of our own dark habitation because it defines the limits of the space from which we can pray into the world’s darkness and into the politics of fear which emanate from that darkness. We should have the humility to pray only from within these limits.

The image I have chosen for this post is by now well known. Here is a spiritual exercise to go with it. It takes only a few seconds. 

Try looking at the faces of these two men while holding on to the truth revealed to you about what they represent for the future of millions, and perhaps of the whole human race. Yes, it is something to be fearful about. But if you look closely you see that they too are afraid. They are afraid because they cannot trust each other and they cannot trust each other because they are afraid. Allow all this to reveal itself as you look at the cold and hesitant handshake.  Look at the fear and take it into your particular dark room. Leave it there with the familiar furniture. Then look at the men again. 

Now, keeping your eyes on the men while remaining open and vulnerable to the unknowingness of God, to your own darkness and to that of the world, pray this: Lighten our darkness, Lord, we pray; and in your mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

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.

.

Cross purpose

Coventry Cross
aprilyamasaki.com

As you go down the stairs to the café at Coventry Cathedral, you pass the burned cross which was made of two pieces of wood found in the rubble of the bombed out original building. They were found lying together in the position of a cross. The stone mason, Jock Forbes, who was working on the new building, tied them in that position and there they stand behind a glass panel engraved with the words ‘Father forgive’.

If you are a first time visitor to the cathedral, you might not expect to come across a burned cross on the wall as you hurry downstairs for a cup of coffee. You are surprised by it, as if you were being accosted by a stranger. You are unsettled by the encounter even though it proves, after all, not to be violent or in any way threatening, although you find that the disparate thoughts which are swirling around in your head as you hurry down the stairs, are suddenly interrupted, as if they were being held to account, in a way which is profoundly disturbing.

It is as if this fleeting and seemingly inconsequential moment encompasses the whole of history of which you are an integral part. It questions it. The charred cross is a reminder of the horrors of war and of the violence wrought on the earth by every generation, and you are a part of that too. The moment of ‘encounter’ allows you to see this and to know it at the deepest level of your hidden inner self, as you read the words ‘Father forgive’ etched into the glass in front of the cross. Seen against the charred cross, the delicately wrought words disturb and shock.

There is another cross in Coventry Cathedral, a replica of one made of nails, nails which were also found in the ruins of the old building. The original nail cross was given to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin as a sign of repentance for the Allied bombing. There have been, and will continue to be, many crosses. But the words ‘Father forgive’ will always remain the same, wherever they are placed and whenever they are said or thought.

Perhaps they will remain because they are not our words. Most of us, if we are honest about it, are not capable of speaking these words for more than a split second before falling back into a place of unforgiveness, hence the continuation of violence at all levels and in every context of human existence. Violence is the only language we really know and feel confident speaking. It is the language of unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness takes many forms. It is not just a perpetuation of hatred. It is more a matter of not being able to let go of fear, something to which we seem to be perversely, if unconsciously,  addicted. So someone else needs to say the words with us and for us, and keep saying them, until we learn not to be afraid of forgiveness and of what it entails. This is the purpose of the cross. It is also what makes an encounter with it both disturbing and life changing.  

Last week I wrote about the politics of hope and one commentator remarked, rightly, that hope, in politics, can be construed in many different ways, depending on individual or collective interests. I think the hope which comes with the forgiveness of the cross takes us beyond these narrow limitations. I also think that faith is sometimes revealed in the way hope is worked out and that, in this respect, it is acceptable for faith to remain undeclared or hidden.

Faith is not invariably a matter of openly declaring oneself to be of any one religion, because true religion does not need to declare itself at all. So it is not for anyone to judge whether another person has faith, or to judge others on the basis of a priori definitions about any one set of religious beliefs. Faith is about faithfulness to ideals, as well as to beliefs, as my commentator pointed out in relation to Jeremy Corbyn’s long years of faithfulness to his vision for a better society. It is also about trusting in a love that has been encountered from outside the limited boundaries of purely human forgiveness. 

Socialist Utopia - Or the Kingdom of Heaven?

The artist Ai Wei Wei, when asked on Channel 4 News (September 14^th, 2015) why his art is deemed to be so subversive by the Chinese government, replied that art is dangerous.  “It speaks the truth”, he said, by which he meant the kind of truth which inspires hope and resonates with the deepest longings of the human spirit.

www.theguardian.com

One of the most pernicious effects of self-serving power politics, in any context, is that they whittle away at the concept of hope, making it appear either futile, irrelevant or even ridiculous. Wei Wei’s art is the product of a sacrificial life which has been both sustained and given in a hope which refused to be whittled away through months of solitary confinement in Chinese prisons.

 Hope is often mistaken for a kind of naïve dreaming for a perfect world, a perfect future, but it is quite the opposite of this. Hope is grounded in, and shaped by, the hard knocks of experience. It often pays a heavy price for what it gives of itself, but the product in the end is life because hope, as opposed to wishful thinking, continually defies what is dead and decayed. This is the central message of Ai Wei Wei’s work. It is also the task to which our politicians are called.

Whatever we may think of the re-formed Labour party and of Jeremy Corbyn, its newly elect leader, his meteoric rise from relative obscurity to totemic political significance, is the single most hope-filled event to have occurred in British politics in decades. He will, of course, disappoint, not so much because many of his dreams are unrealisable at the present moment, given the global conflagration which this nation is caught up in, but because he will have great difficulty persuading his own party to grasp the hope he is offering.

The Blairites will have to forgo infighting. They will also have to resist engaging in the kind of pragmatic and publicly pugilistic politics which have made so many people, especially the young, cynical about the whole political process. Corbyn himself will have to guard against old allies, now receiving the reward which they have perhaps been promised, from persuading him to slip back into the seductive ways of ‘old labour’, a utopia which never really existed, even for those whose lives it was supposed to transform.

What then is the hope he is offering? I think it is a new and fresh vision of politics itself, but also a vision which is deeply grounded in what Jesus would have described as the Kingdom of Heaven. The politics of the Kingdom, like all politics, are worked out in the shaping of economic policies. There are some Christians who will blanche at this idea. Corbyn’s proposed policies are perhaps a little too compatible with the Gospel, a little too truthful for comfort. They also sound like the kind of Christian Marxism which has been put forward in the past by such as Thomas J. Hagerty and Ernst Block in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, (to name only two), as well as those of Oscar Romero and others who even today are held in US prisons for their Kingdom orientated political convictions. The Chinese government is not the only one to feel threatened by the kind of truths exposed in the art of Ai Wei Wei.

Other Christians will be wary of a return to the kind of socialism which stifles economic creativity and the passing on of earned assets to one’s children. They would fear the consequences of the kind of heavy handed secularism, and the atheism which is often automatically associated with it, which denies our basic humanity and destroys the life of the spirit.

Jeremy Corbyn ought to be able to speak into these fears. With his natural grace, measured responses to questions both friendly and hostile, and with his steadiness of purpose, he could be a Christ figure for the nation, irrespective of his own religious convictions, or lack of them. But he cannot be this alone, because hope is something that has to be continually replenished from outside, as well as from within. For Christians, it comes with the grace of knowing and being known by God, so that they can become ‘God-sent’ people in whatever circumstances they find themselves. They become bearers of hope – and not simply celebrities, and this is particularly important in the context of politics.

If Jeremy Corbyn is called to be a Christ figure to the nation, he will need the faith and the spiritual energy generated by those who will pray for him. An Eritrean refugee was asked not long ago why he wanted to go to the UK. He replied “because it is Great Britain”. The prayer we need right now does not need to involve words, or any kind of  mindset or formal liturgical setting. It needs to be the embodiment of the hope, directed at God, that Jeremy Corbyn will one day make this nation great again.

Prophetic management for the Church in Wales

The Business Directory defines best management practice as follows: ‘Methods or techniques found to be the most effective and practical means in achieving an objective while making the optimum use of the firm’s resources’.

‘Objective’ and ‘resources’ are key managerial words. If the objective is either irrelevant or plain wrong, and if, as a result of this, human gifts are neglected, or deployed in an unimaginative way, there is nothing substantial to manage. As a result, the organisation behaves like an old garment which has been patched with unshrunk cloth.  (Mark 2:21) It comes apart at the seams and the people it is meant to serve suffer the consequences.

Herein lies the problem which the Church in Wales is currently facing. What is its underlying objective? What does the Church mean to itself? What holds it together? (These questions carry a health warning, since answering them fully may take some time and create a major distraction from the current somewhat ad hoc management agenda) What would the Church like to mean for those who come to its doors, both in a literal sense and through how such people see the Church living out its collective life?

None of this is to deny some of the well intended initiatives being implemented within the Church in Wales’s management agenda (grants for church related projects and for new ministry area initiatives, along with renewed public affirmation of lay ministry being two of the most significant) but there is nevertheless the feeling that we are still primarily a clerically managed organisation. Some of my previous blogs on the Church in Wales will remind readers of why a clerically managed Church which is trying to behave like an organisation is not proving popular. So when it comes to best management practice we have a problem as an organisation which is unclear about both its method and its objective. As such, it is a problem about being Church.

The first thing which needs to be faced in this respect is that, on the whole, people who might think of coming to church, possibly for the first time, are not looking to join an organisation, even if they are not sure of quite what it is they are looking for. When their uncertainty is met with a corresponding uncertainty within the Church itself, they sense that the Church is drifting. And they would not be alone in sensing this. The Church is drifting, not only in a material sense but, more importantly, in the sense of its own specific corporate calling. The Church is corporate (and not a corporation) insofar as it is the corpus of Jesus Christ alive in his Spirit.

Early on in his public ministry, Jesus preached a sermon in which he announced his calling and, in so doing, reminded his hearers of theirs. (Luke 4:16-19). He was also reminding them of God’s promise and purpose for them as God’s people. Predictably, they found this so disturbing that they drove him out of town. However, his words were not meant to inflame, at least not in a destructive sense. They were a reminder of what the Church is intended to be, aflame with love for all God’s people. So his words merit being briefly and broadly re-figured and applied to the life of the Church here in Wales:

Jesus is telling his congregation, and all of us, that we are his. So we can read as follows:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. Rise to meet it and be worthy of it because in and with me, you have been anointed to bring good news to the poor. You have been given the grace to be more than yourselves by speaking and living for those you exist to serve, and to succour them in their times of need – whatever the circumstances and whatever it takes. This should  be your primary concern, even if it costs you your status, your stipend or your personal reputation. Any considerations which get in the way of announcing the good news to the poor should be dismissed as irrelevant, if not damaging.

You have been sent in my abiding Spirit to release the captive. Captives include all those whose gifts are ignored (because you either fear or do not value them) or who are excluded or marginalised on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, or of any other consideration. The proclaiming of the good news begins with proclaiming it to each other, as you ensure that none of these practices of mind and heart find a place in your midst. You proclaim the good news first by living it.

You are also to bring recovery of sight to the blind, as you let the oppressed go free. Recovery of sight begins with recovering your own sight. It means seeing yourselves as God sees you, not as you imagine yourselves to be. You are therefore called to be ‘transparent’ to God, in what you say and do, both individually and as the corpus of Christ. The one informs the other. When you become transparent to God, you will become transparent to his truth and righteousness.  Only then will you be able to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, of his loving kindness and mercy, at a time when many people feel very far from him. Such transparency takes courage.