Heat

In the early morning light, a kangaroo appears in the paddock across from the house we are staying in, here in Australia. We are told to expect kangaroos at dawn and then again at dusk. A whole troop (the collective noun for kangaroos) appears later in the afternoon – and I miss it. I spot the single but miss the collective. At night, it is the ‘collective’ of the grass bull frog which makes itself heard from the creek nearby. You feel the effect of the frogs’ composite existence, rather than see it. The single and the composite are constrained at this time of year by heat and sudden chill, by light and almost light.

We went out yesterday. There was heat, intense, heavy, bright, with only the occasional breeze for respite. The heat slows you down. It forces you to attend to the moment. There is neither time or energy to pass too quickly to the next, or to dwell too long on the previous, and on the past. Everything is held, almost imprisoned, within the heat and this present moment, including the tragic young woman who, for a while, shared our picnic space.

The heat, which has increased today, served as an initial reminder that she, and millions like her, can never be entirely of the past, even though she remains a memory. Her parting words to us were “Bye. See you again, maybe”. I doubt that this will happen, and yet her words and the memory they evoke, will endure as a present moment, a reminder of the heat of the Australian summer and of our responsibility for all whose lives are made winter by their memories.

She talked a great deal about her life but she was not in a condition to make herself understood and yet having to pay attention to her, to the memories which had brought her to this moment and to this place, made the incoherence of her speech comprehensible. She needed to be heard, but had grown used to being ignored. She had probably been homeless. Quite a few homeless people are billeted to this outlying area of Melbourne. She needed to be understood without feeling pressed or in any way accused.

I kept my sunglasses on, so as to avoid direct eye contact. Sunglasses were a kind of prop for me, the listener, buying me a bit of personal space. I could respond to her sideways on, so allowing the jumbled flow of her words to bypass me without, I hoped, causing her offence and without obliging me to engage with her in a direct way. Direct eye contact means that we move into another person’s space, if only momentarily, and this obliges us to take responsibility for them, whether we like it or not.

Taking responsibility for someone who is suffering begins with allowing the suffering person to occupy our inner space, or consciousness. In the case of this tragic young woman, allowing her to occupy my inner space initially meant ignoring the impulse to physically distance myself, and those I was with, from her, which we could have done by choosing an alternative spot further along the river to have our picnic. It also required that each of us resist the urge to ‘protect’ my small grandson from some vaguely perceived malign influence.

This vaguely perceived influence is what defines our fear of the ‘other’ when it comes to suffering. Our own unease about the woman in front of us was a microcosmic rendering of the xenophobia felt towards millions of homeless people, refugees, or any person or group who make us feel threatened because they are not quite like us. We feel threatened because in some cases we have been allowed, and even encouraged, to think of them as dangerous. But most significantly, they make us feel threatened because we do not know them as persons. This ignoring of their personhood renders us powerless to help them in the immediate moment.

Later, when the heat finally became too much for the woman (she was wearing a leather jacket and torn leather trousers), I was saved from my feelings of inadequacy in the face of her brokenness by her simple parting words,  “Bye – See you again, maybe”. One of the most damaging effects of our fear of other people who are suffering is that we can miss out on their redemptive words and on the hope they bring.

Please breathe

Source: Wikipedia

Children and babies cry in an alarming way. Once the crying really gets going, there comes a point when the child stops remembering to breath. He has no conscious method for letting go of the inhaled breath so that the next one can follow. A terrible momentary silence ensues. Were these fits of rage and anxiety to continue to be expressed in this way in adult life, you would think of such a person as suffering from some sort of narcissistic personality disorder in which hysteria can be usefully deployed for recording feelings and preferences and getting other people to gratify them. There are no prizes for guessing what adult in the public eye might fit such a description. For one thing, his inaugural address has been described as the angriest in his nation’s political history.

The question this leaves us with is not so much whether he will or will not follow through with his insane agenda, but how do the rest of us handle the anxiety which his behaviour generates for each one of us personally? I think we begin to handle it by remembering to breathe in a particular way. Most of us are not in a position to urge him to ‘breath’, although we still hope that there are people of power and influence who might still be able to do this, but it is not likely to be you or I. Instead, our task is to behave as we would if we were present at the scene of any other kind of emergency –we begin by making sure we are reasonably safe, lest we become a casualty ourselves, and then start looking around for those in need of help.

Thinking healing into the world politics of the moment works in a similar way and takes us to a comparable place. We have to be present to the anxiety and to the causes of it, without becoming a casualty ourselves. We do this through a kind of ‘breathing’. We begin by breathing in and as we breathe out, we drop down into our deep ‘centre’ – like going down in a lift, or elevator.

 This may sound like a rather introspective exercise, but it is quite the opposite. We drop down into the centre (also known as the ‘ground’) of our being in order to let go of everything we think we are – the layers and layers of false self-perceptions that have built up in our lives so far. We do this for a bit – a few minutes, a few hours, a few weeks maybe – until this ‘ground of being’ becomes our natural space, our habitat.

This is the space of the true self from which we can assess any situation calmly and objectively but also with compassion. In time, through doing this exercise, and ultimately living it, we will learn wisdom, and learn how to use wisdom in a measured way for the good of others and not for the enhancement or reassurance of our old ‘self’.

Learning wisdom is not the same thing as knowing the answers to the world’s problems or even, at times, to our own. It has to do with understanding how the tangled web which is the sum total of what is also called human ‘sinfulness’ has become so utterly intractable. The core of this understanding lies in knowing that any one aspect of human sinfulness – an individual’s lust for power and adulation and his or her indifference to the price which others will pay for it, for example – is potentially ‘redeemable’. By that I mean that it can be transformed, or better still, transfigured into something quite different, something which is in the gift of a merciful God and the outworking of God’s grace.

So, to return to the centering down exercise, we learn to encounter human sin in that deep place without being either anxious or frightened by its enormous implications, or instinctively hating or feeling revolted by its perpetrator. We remember that the perpetrator is bound up in his own darkness, in the addictive nature of his self-idolising behaviour, and we remember how easy it was for something comparable to happen in our own lives, and how disastrous it may have proved to be.

So we allow this dangerous person a little space in our deep place. We allow the light to touch him. We do not do this grudgingly. Quite the contrary. We do it as we beg wordlessly for mercy from within our deep place, so that he can be held by God, as we are. Ultimately, the grace which we make room for, as we simultaneously let go of our false self and of all the artificiality we have needed to sustain it, is felt as light and as a lightness of being. He needs to feel this too. It is the peace which literally ‘overcomes’ the world and governs our individual lives – ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’.

Glimmer of Hope

Source: cbsnews.com

Yesterday, I read of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s moving tribute to the victims of Auschwitz, which he was visiting for the second time. There was another quite different tribute from President Obama, his farewell speech to the people he has served for the past eight years. I read or listened to them within hours of each other. In between, I took in my daily dose of the goings-on at Trump Tower and other power enclaves pertaining to the incoming US President and his chosen few, some of whom are already distancing themselves from their master. Hopefully, they will at least put some brakes on the madness.

Hope is what we need right now – hope in the face of real global danger and the human capacity for pure evil, as Archbishop Justin Welby described it from Auschwitz. Hope is sustained by a basic faith in people, that people have goodness and wisdom in them, even in the darkest of times.

Most of us hope we can simply do a little better this year than we did in previous years. But hope is not just a matter of wanting to do a little better. “Could do better” was what we used to read in our school reports, the most damning indictment and signal of hopelessness that any child could receive. I think I would have preferred to have been deliberately and downright bad at something, than to be told that I ‘could do better’. I have often wondered if the teacher was simply in a hurry to get through her pile of reports. Could she (it was always a ‘she’ in my case) put a face to the name? And if she could, did she care enough to qualify that terse remark, a remark which can completely skew an individual’s life? ‘Could do better’, but somehow never will.. because.. who knows? And who cares? Next report card.

There is a connection to be made here between authentic teachers and genuine leaders. Both have power to a greater or lesser extent, power over people’s lives or over the future of nations. Genuine, or authentic, leaders are also innately teachers. They have authority. What is needed from leaders is not power but authority. Power is not the same as authority and it rarely brings out the good either in those who have power or in those over whom they exercise it. It is possible to be powerful and have little or no genuine authority (as with certain media and business moguls) and equally possible to have real authority but little or no power, Christ himself being the supreme example of this.

Authentic leaders embody hope because they have this Christ-like authority. They have no need to posture in any way, to adopt a public figura. They are quite comfortable being who they are, even if they are not naturally gregarious. They do not court popularity or put themselves in a position where they are obliged to return favours. They simply want the best for the people they serve, whatever form their leadership takes, whatever the power, and whatever the status it does or does not bring with it. Their authority speaks to the goodness in people and so brings hope. As the outgoing President said in his farewell speech “Democracy works when our politics reflect the decency of our people”. Authentic leaders teach hope through example, thereby bequeathing real political authority to those they serve.

Authority in leaders is often recognised as a glimmer of hope, in small gestures which speak of mercy and the loving kindness of God. They have a certain way of making eye contact. They take a certain affectionate initiative in all their encounters with people. They often have formidable powers of recall. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury could meet someone in a local church gathering and remember their name, only having met the person a number of years before on the day he confirmed them. Years later, he would greet them in a way which signified genuine recognition, saying their name in the way you do when you meet an old friend. That is authentic leadership.

In embodying God’s mercy and loving kindness, authentic leaders are bearers of hope. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not conveyed through mere conviviality. It is not some passing joy, gone with the handshake. Optimism often comes with not being prepared to look at unpleasant realities and come to terms with the things, or the people, they fear – not being prepared to look them in the eye. For certain kinds of leaders, optimism is best conveyed through minimal eye contact because the optimist really has nothing to say to the person whose hand they are shaking. Eye contact makes a powerful person vulnerable to being asked questions. The slightest social exchange makes them accountable as leaders.

An optimist does not make a good leader. Authentic leaders will have looked at what people fear and felt the fear themselves, alone, perhaps as they pray or meditate. Such moments return them to their people in the deepest sense and return them to God who alone is the source of hope. Prayer and meditation return us to the place of our own innate goodness, and to where the wisdom of God indwells us as a people. It ought to be the bedrock of our politics.

Adoremus

Who has not known unrequited love? Who has not known what it feels like to long for even a few seconds of undivided attention from the person on whom we are fixated in body, mind and spirit? Unrequited love can take years to heal, whether or not the two people spend all or part of their life together, which often happens.

The Nativity of Christ: Gerard van Honthorst

Believing that there is total complementarity of soul between oneself and the object of one’s desire is, on the whole, a delusion. There may be complementarity but it can never be total. That belongs with someone quite different. The idea of another being in any way a ‘twin soul’ leads to the greatest expectations or, worse still, assumptions, with which come the greatest disillusions and the most searing pain.

Then there is the other kind of pain, the pain of guilt and shame associated with being loved by someone whose affections we cannot return. The guilt and shame are felt most acutely if we have wronged the person in question. There are other feelings too, ranging from mild irritation to fearing for one’s life in an age of online violence. Insofar as the recipient of unrequited love has actively fed the other’s obsession, being the object of another’s fantasy comes with being unable to love the other person with the passionate intensity they feel for us. Whichever side of the ‘love, love me not’ equation you are on, psychological damage is almost inevitable for at least a period of time. But it has ever been thus, even before the advent of social media. 

All of this is a very inadequate encapsulation of what happens in the arena of love between two human beings. It applies to all human relationships and not only to ‘romantic’ ones. There are an infinite number of nuanced variations to this simple scenario. All of them involve pain and risk – however they end up.

Into this seemingly unbreakable cycle of pain and exultation comes the Christ Child, the incarnation of Love itself. The holy Child comes not simply to show us how love should be, which he does, of course, but to be in love with us, in every sense. This means that the Incarnate Word of Love enters into the unloved or unloving heart of every human being on earth and honours their loving, as he redeems their inability to return love – in whatever circumstances love is needed.

This is not a theory, anymore than talking about the pain and shame of unrequited love is a theory. Unrequited love happens, as most of us know, sometimes more than once in a lifetime. It is often first experienced in childhood. Whatever the circumstances, unrequited love can lead to hopelessness and despair, to a person’s heart closing to the possibility of loving or being loved, because they are afraid of the pain it will cause them, and perhaps also afraid of its joys.

The coming of the Christ Child obliges the hitherto impossible to happen in hearts grown cold. There is a momentary relinquishing of a person’s grip on their own closedness, on the tightness of a heart that has been hurt beyond the possibility of it ever being healed. The moment of relinquishing occurs in the split second of their allowing their attention to fall on the holy Child without perhaps having meant for that to happen. They are not religious. They are caught unawares and find themselves loving without meaning to and, for some inexplicable reason, do not allow themselves the usual safety precaution of ‘shutting down’.

Love only needs a split second to get in. The split second is as real as any other moment in the passage of time, or of any one lifetime. But it is also eternity. It is that second, perhaps only known at the moment of death itself, when a person knows that whatever has been is past and that they are held in Love itself. Then comes a realisation of the primary purpose for which they, and all of us, have been made which is to respond to Love’s invitation, to worship and adore this impossible, seemingly insignificant Child, as did the shepherds and the kings.

In Such Times

The worst politics and the greatest abuses of power invite the best satire. The best satire endures and ultimately finds its place alongside other classics of the English language, or of another language – French comes to mind. It is also honoured among the visual or theatre arts. The best satire is always metaphor or parable. It is also often courageous, although not necessarily beautiful to either read or behold. In fact, its primary purpose and virtue lies in not being pleasing or restful to the mind’s eye, or to what might be called the collective conscience. It exists to challenge and disturb.

Satire must challenge the senses by forcing the reader or viewer to contemplate the consequences of the folly of the times and of the crass stupidity of rulers, as well as of those who either support or benefit directly from their power. But even the best satire will eventually be archived. Times change, seldom for the better.

Parables and metaphors, on the other hand, tend to endure. Their meaning is not locked in to a given set of circumstances, or to any particular time. They are universal. Parables are especially so because they inevitably return us to the great mystery of life itself, bound as it is to relationships which shape and define the history of families and nations. The parables and metaphors of scripture were recorded and written down with this idea in mind.

The root of the word ‘religion’ is ligare meaning to ‘bind together’.  How we ultimately interpret the underlying meaning of religion affects how we live our lives and how power is exercised, how those who hold it know themselves as accountable to the author of all life. Do they exercise power in order to suppress? Or to liberate? Do they bind people through fear? Or liberate them through bonds created in love and held together in trust, trust which makes for civilised society? There is ultimately no getting away from religion when it is understood in this sense of binding together, so we abuse its metaphors and parables to our cost. One way of abusing them is to read them with an a priori agenda or a pre-formed mindset.

Pre-formed mindsets encompass a range of religious and political agendas, often blending or converging in the minds of those who support them. With world chaos and climate change comes, for example, a renewed preoccupation with ‘end times’, or with a focus on a particular nation or group of people who can be hated, or perhaps feared, or with promises of total economic renewal paralleled by an equally all consuming promise of religious renewal. Both have in the recent and more distant past proved to be damaging delusions. Hitler promised re-forestation and wholesale renewal of an ailing infrastructure. Trump also promises the renewal of an ailing infrastructure, along with work and prosperity for all, but beginning with those to whom he owes the most political favours. Innumerable emotional and psychological casualties resulted from the so-called Toronto Blessing, the result of the almost aphrodisiacal power experienced by some of its leaders and proponents at the time.

Added to this, a pre-formed mindset seldom moves those who hold it in a forward direction, even though it requires great energy and commitment to sustain it. A pre-formed mindset corresponds to a car’s wheels spinning in the sand. Its energy derives from desperation, an ever greater determination to hold on to delusion, often in order to maintain a grip on power, to the point that power itself becomes delusional. As a result, those who think they hold it lose their grip on reality, resulting in dangerous paranoia, such as we are beginning to see in Mr. Trump.

Such delusional determination works as much in the arena of politics as it does in religion, the two becoming at times almost indistinguishable. Think of North Korea’s particular brand of Emperor worship.  It also leads to religious and political sectarianism. The growing number of neo-Nazi rallies in Europe and America manifest a form of religious sectarianism, different only in the intensity of its hatred from any other kind of mass religious gathering.

All of this suggests that, among other things, an informed approach to the religions of the world, beginning with their scriptures, is essential to global stability. With stability comes peace and a fair distribution of wealth. This would include the basic infrastructures needed for all to benefit from the kind of entrepreneurship which leads to economic growth. Taken together, the things that bind us together in both a religious and political sense require wisdom as it is understood in the scriptures.

The proper interpretation of the scriptures, and of the bible in particular, is essential for the maintaining of a reciprocal wisdom in the sphere of religion and politics, as is the truthful recording and interpretation of events by a free and morally accountable media, and with a sense of history. The question with which we begin, therefore, is ‘Are things worse than they ever were? Or do we just know more?’ from which follows ‘is it enough to know without entering into the process of healing and making whole?’These questions pertain very much to how we view the future of the planet and the kind of lives our children and grandchildren will lead.

Somewhere embedded in these anxious questions also lies a deep yearning for the kind of wisdom which only comes with knowing and being known by a loving God. The knowing is in the yearning itself. We have a God who yearns with us, while being all powerful. This is a God who entrusts us with sufficient knowledge to overcome the evil and heal the brokenness of our world and society. He does not delegate. He entrusts. To leaders, whether political or religious, God also entrusts a certain power, and with it accountability. Again, he does not delegate..

That power is modelled and given in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It is sourced in him and finds its wisdom and purpose in him. Our own anxiety is also held in him and, in those moments where we are prepared to meet his gaze, taken into his ongoing life and into his love for the world. No power, in heaven or on earth, will separate us from that love or diminish his power to save the world from its self-inflicted destruction. 

The Power

Source: newrepublic.com

It is a kind of iconoclasm – the phalanx of suited men striding into the inner sanctum of freedom and democracy, its leader’s all too familiar jowl defiantly set. There are shades of the grim triumphant moments which augured so much ill for the free world in the early part of the last century. And in the background a super moon prompting other kinds of fears in the hearts of those whose religion risks dissolving into something like superstition – or could they be right perhaps? Added to signs, portents and Halloween is a toxic mixture of hatred in its various manifestations now legitimised (whatever he may say ‘to camera’)  by America’s billionaire celebrity President Elect. What are we to make of all this?

We are to shape hope out of common sense and right remembering, since this is also the season of remembrance. There are lessons to be learned from remembering the years which immediately preceded the last super moon. Realising that we have yet to learn from them means that it is not altogether too late. For one thing, we are being reminded that the legitimate voice of the oppressed and marginalised, especially when it goes unheeded for too long, will make itself heard through legitimate channels by the most dangerous means available to it. Or rather, it will allow itself to be used by the political opportunist wanting raw power.

Many will believe that the people have indeed spoken, when all that has happened is that their legitimate grievances, and the worst of human nature, have ‘morphed’ into one another and then been taken over by a man who wants only to win. One note of hope is that the existing democratic system will make it impossible for him to fully realise his most damaging ambitions in the longer term.

Another note of hope comes this Sunday. Many Christians will be keeping it as the Feast of Christ the King. One of the gospel readings tells us of Christ’s brief exchange with Pontius Pilate who is a weak leader desperate to hold on to power by trying to please all on whom his power depends. Pilate does not know what to do. He is very much afraid of the voice of the people. They have the power to accuse him of treason. They would have been a mixed lot, although mostly Christ’s own people who are now baying for his blood, the blood of Christ and possibly that of Pilate as well. Pilate must please them or his position, if not his life, will be in jeopardy, so he asks Jesus to give him a lead:  “What have you done?” The tone is urgent, even desperate.

The answer is silence, apart from a few short remarks, one pertaining to the nature and source of power itself and another to the nature of real authority. Jesus tells Pilate that real power comes from God. Real power is completely free because it is sustained, as well as given, by God alone in love and in trust. Pilate does not have real power, because he is at the mercy of the people’s voice, and he knows this.

The really powerful person knows that power has only been entrusted to them for the greater good of those they are there to serve. They will be accountable before God for what they have done with this power, as well as for how they have acquired it. All this would have been deeply unsettling for the Roman Procurator, as it would be for Donald Trump were he to have a similar conversation with Jesus today.

Jesus spoke of his purpose which was to ‘testify to the truth’. Words like ‘truth’ as it pertains to authority, are foreign to people like Pilate and Trump. It is not the language they speak. Authority comes with speaking and acting truthfully. It comes with integrity. Integrity implies singleness of loving purpose. We see no evidence of such a purpose in a power-hungry and emotionally unstable plutocrat.  We therefore discern no true authority in him.

Furthermore, the kind of power Jesus is talking about pertains to a different kind of world. In that world, that ‘kingdom’, if there is no true authority, there is no real power. So far, we have seen nothing of true authority in Mr. Trump or in any of his aides or supporters. But this does not mean that he does not have the power to wreak irreparable damage on our planet and on the world as we know it. But we are not to give up on this world, or on the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.

True authority is integral to the truth which is born of the love of God who is the source of all power. No wonder Pilate asks, sardonically, and again desperately, “What is ‘truth’?” The power of truth, and the authority it bestows, lies in sacrificial self-giving love. For those who hold it, power’s most disturbing and defining moment comes when they must acknowledge the truth about themselves in relation to the power entrusted to them, a power which may not sit well with the authority they believe they are exercising. Pilate knew this in the moment of his exchange with Jesus Christ. When will such a moment of truth occur for President Elect Donald Trump?

Honour-Bound

When it comes to deciding the future of nations, thinking ought to be a heart and mind

Source: fox11online.com

business, rather than a matter of gut feeling. Gut feeling has nothing to do with the mind and little with what is true and honest in the human heart. Gut feeling is emotional short term reactivism. When it is pandered to as a means to acquiring power it yields toxic results. Gut feeling licenses duplicity and it is gut feeling which is currently driving the American election. It is also shaping the news, because there is nothing else to shape it in regard to this election. 

In terms of the two candidates left in the ring, one of them is prevented from saying anything for which a person could conceivably vote. The other majors on people’s ‘gut feeling’. Gut feeling, especially in this highly personalised electoral conflict amounts to a celebration and further promotion of all that is least attractive, intelligent or desirable in human beings. At present, there seems to be no end to the dark tunnel this is taking us all into. The endless celebration of what is least honourable in human beings results, I think, in something like what we used to call Hell.  

A collective ignorance of history leads, as we know, to its being repeated. Gut feeling is all we have left on which to base world-changing decisions when we have not paused to make connections with the past. The most significant of these could be described as the political and religious extremes which feed on gut feeling and lead, often very quickly, to the worst kind of megalomaniac autocracy. Nero and Hitler spring to mind. Both, in their different ways, were popular with their people. Both owed much to gut feeling.

The question we are left with, then, is how can a nation be at its best when all it has to go on for its political decision-making is gut feeling which leads to damaging and highly contentious short-term decisions? I would suggest the revival of the idea of honour.

By honour I do not mean that which is associated with rank or prestige. I mean the kind of honour which, in the poetic tradition of courtly love, equates with courtesy. There is nothing shallow or short-lived about honour, or courtesy. In fact courtesy is one of the attributes of God. 

The 12^th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, spoke of Christ as her ‘courteous Lord’. Honour, as it pertains to courtesy, has to do with principled love, love which is both of the mind and heart, love whose principle lies in a willingness to sacrifice itself for the good of those it loves. We are not seeing very much of this in the two Presidential candidates, but perhaps it is alot to ask of two people who are fighting each other to the death by fair means or foul – most often foul.

Courtesy pertains to self-sacrificial dying, as does the traditional notion of honour when honour is enacted in love. ‘Honour’ killing is therefore an evil distortion of the meaning of that word. Evil is always a distortion of the good and we are seeing quite a bit of distortion of the good in this election.  Where lies and half lies masquerade as truth we have evil in the making. Where the worst in human nature is manipulated in a thinly disguised appeal for raw power, we have the raw material of corruption. But it is never too late for light to overcome even this particular darkness.

The sign of light overcoming darkness begins in what is known in scripture as ‘the scandal of the Cross’. The current US election has majored on scandal. Perhaps in the aftermath of this no-win situation, when the nation begins to heal from the damage it  has done to itself, it will regret the passing of one who served it honourably in his leadership, and with unfailing courtesy.  Perhaps it will learn for the future that we get the leaders we deserve.