No Laughing Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alive

Dawn (author generated)

Perhaps the less said the better when it comes to Easter, as opposed to Christmas with all its its carolling and food preparation. There is a different kind of build-up to Christmas. Setting aside the present-buying hype with all its attendant pressures, Advent, if you take it seriously, is about light and darkness. The days shorten as, each Sunday, another candle is lit, insistent light piercing the growing darkness.

Easter has a very different prelude. There are the long weeks of Lent, coinciding with the lengthening days of early Spring as they lead us into Holy Week. Lent was originally intended as a time of preparation for baptism, culminating in the deep darkness of Holy Week.

Holy Week is an invitation to re-learn the art of remembering aright, remembering how things are, coming to terms with the reality which we can only bear in very small doses, given the weakness of human nature and our capacity for self delusion. The triumph of Palm Sunday leads almost immediately to the betrayal which follows the last supper, and the hours of agonised prayer in a garden near the city while others slept.

Our lives are summed up in these six pivotal days, as our mortality is defined by them. Many churches end their Maundy Thursday liturgy by a stripping of the altars, followed by the resounding closure of the church bible. The sound will echo around the darkened empty church, a reminder of the transience of worldly things, the fickleness of popularity and success, and the fear of oblivion with which we associate death itself. Good Friday follows, and then the long wait through Holy Saturday when tradition tells us that Christ descended into hell to rescue Adam and poor old Judas. The Church waits in silence for his return.

Then comes Easter, the most unexpected kind of return, redolent of the silence and subtlety of the beginning of all things. The reality of the Resurrection has a way of dawning on us quite gradually, as it must have done for those who first witnessed it. It happened, we presume, at first light, that moment when after a long night of sleepless watching, we realise that the night darkness is not darkness any more. There is a softness and a secrecy about this realised moment.

Belief in the Resurrection is about realisation. It is something understood at the deepest intuitive level of the human psyche, what we might call the ‘soul’. The triumph of the Resurrection is commensurate with the triumph of the Cross. It is about forgiveness. There is a deep and almost hidden joy about it, a joy which takes hold of us as if by stealth. This is what we experience as new life in a moment of real forgiveness.

The dawn moment, for those who take part in the great Easter Liturgy, is subtle. It is ‘silent as light’, to quote a certain well known hymn. It returns us to the silence of the beginning of all things, a beginning that simply was, rather than ‘existed’ in any kind of mathematically construed time framework. It also returns us to the defining ‘yes’ of a young girl’s acquiescence to God’s invitation to be at one with her and, because of her courageous obedience, with us.

So it is also about the relatedness which is intrinsic to God’s being. To talk of the ‘existence’ of God is to limit God’s being, to try to render it down to our level of understanding, to deny the mystery of what we call the Trinity and to deny his relatedness to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection was not a matter of reviving a corpse. It was, and is, about the risen and glorious body, something which we will ultimately share in, as we shall fully share in the relatedness of God’s own life.

The Resurrection is divine mystery. As Christ said to his friends shortly before his death, there is much more that we could know but, like his friends, we would not be able to bear such knowledge. From this it follows that the Resurrection is a mystery because we cannot fully understand its implications,  or perhaps we are not ready for them until we understand them in the moment of our dying. We are not yet able to fully embrace the mystery of the Resurrection because of our inability to live with the kind of joy which is unique to Easter, or, put differently, because of our unwillingness to live in the contemplation of God.

Never Alone

‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7) Passive resistance enacted for all time in active submission. There is something there for all of us.

When it comes to suffering, sanity and survival depend on duality of purpose, on both accepting and resisting whatever situation we are going through personally, or perhaps as a nation. We cannot resist until we have learned to accept reality. I think this is especially true of what we are seeing in Western politics at present. What is happening in both Europe and America is neither a dream from which we will soon wake up, or some kind of game which will end well, even if we are taken to the very brink of self annihilation. It is reality, but it can be resisted. The same goes for our own lives. If we are going through hell, even a hell of our own making, it is still hell. But it can be resisted, rather than simply endured.

Life is not given to us to be simply endured. It is to be lived. But we cannot live, or even endure, without a sense of others being there, or perhaps having been there before us. In the context of neo-conservatism, which is the new fascism, and its subliminal nastiness, we know that others have been there before. Knowing this, we are sustained by the memory of previous generations, of the passive resistance of millions who lived under occupation in the last world war and in the active resistance of those who fought, even if their natural inclinations were to peace. It takes courage and humility to go against one’s natural inclinations when needs must.

 

Something comparable goes on in our own individual hard times. If we have known unconditional love, if we have been the centre of someone else’s world, with or without our knowing it at the time, the realisation of that love and the memory of that person keeps us company. Such memories sometimes consist of no more than a single passing moment of kindness, as the validation of one’s pain, of one’s humanity, perhaps by a stranger. 

The knowledge of this love supplies what is needed when it comes to both accepting and resisting whatever pain and suffering we are currently facing. The effect of that memory is to place us outside the pain, so that we can, for a moment at least, observe it and learn from it. We learn from the pain and suffering in experiencing once again the love. So in it, we also learn to love more deeply and, later perhaps, actively respond to the pain and injustice endured by others. Learning to respond to others in this way is the purpose of life and of all its hard moments.

It is also the essence of what we call hope. Where there has been sacrificial love, love which has perhaps gone unnoticed, there has also been hope. Love makes it possible to believe in a future, for ourselves and for our world. To live in hope is not delusionary. Delusion is more often comprised of a mixture of fatalism and blind optimism which, taken together, amount to very little. They do not require anything of us, or commit us to anyone. 

Fatalism is a kind of passive acceptance which simply returns us to ourselves. It does not enable any life giving connection. It does not feed the hunger of the heart, or assuage the mind’s restlessness. We are still left asking ‘why?’ Optimism, in its thinness, also returns us to this same place of non-acceptance.

The Isaiah passage I have just quoted refers to a deliverer, one who would restore a nation to itself, to what it was intended to be. For Christians it speaks, rather enigmatically, of another deliverer, one who in his own acceptance of suffering meets us in ours, wherever we are and whatever spiritual path we are currently travelling along. He validates our suffering there. He meets us on that path, using the language and thought processes with which we are most at home. 

Where human beings accept this invitation to be at one with him, even if only in a fleeting moment of recognition, they are no longer alone in their suffering. The Saviour of the world keeps company with them.

What's Needed

Fiction is good for the soul. Other books, like the one I’m reading now about girls’ boarding schools, have a rather different effect. This one is what I would call a ‘trigger’. Read Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979 and you will be immediately transported to a time and place where you were made to gargle with TCP or had grazes and cuts swabbed with barely diluted dettol – though admittedly not something described in the book so far.

Wounds healed pretty quickly with the Dettol treatment. I think this book is a healing book, even if painful to read for those of us who endured the boarding school experience at any time during the period it covers. It rekindles associations; the smell of polish and Dettol among others. But far more significant than these sensory associations are the buried memories of toxic relationships which these associations trigger in later life. 

It is strange to think that adult women – nuns in my case – could with impunity vent their internalized anger, frustration, loneliness and perhaps bitter loss on a select few among a couple of hundred girls aged 7 to 15. No physical abuse occurred, but the memory of Sister Dismas endures. She would appear silently in a dormitory, gently stroking the leather strap the nuns wore around their waists as she raised a single dark eyebrow, her attention bearing down on one terrified child, until a frozen silence gripped us all and, in some weird and disturbing way, bound us to her for the rest of our lives. You don’t forget such people.

There were times, when you were still quite young – 8 or 9 perhaps – when you wanted to love these nuns. You might even have tried to hug them. But they did not know what to do with a hug. They had lost the knack. I think they sometimes wanted to return it, but could not, because their straightened lives had accustomed them not to need whatever it is that an eight year old’s needy hug might elicit from them – what needs of their own it might trigger.

Perhaps our own needs as children were channelled into a kind of ornate beauty which stood out all the more because of the starkness of these emotional surroundings. There were the Corpus Christi processions, the silence and safety of the chapel, a sensed presence of something or someone coming through all the Latin and the incense in whom we small girls in our veils (repeatedly darned by the nuns during the holidays) could confide with complete trust. We learned very quickly, I think, that there was no need to say anything or even to think holy thoughts, although I did admittedly once ask to become holy.

My father visited me shortly afterwards (a rare occurrence) to reassure himself that I wasn’t going to become a nun. I wasn’t. Such moments of wanting ‘something else’ for one’s life often come, and then go, in a person’s early years. But they leave behind a sense of need for something like holiness. It might re-surface later, triggered by circumstances or a crisis, or by something evoking what the Corpus Christi processions left in their wake, like trailing incense. It is easy to confuse holiness with ‘atmosphere’. But worse is the way we can render ourselves incapable of recognising holiness, and our need for it, when we come across it in other people, which we do whenever love is returned.

Children feel holiness initially as having to do with being made to feel uniquely significant and wanted. The same is true of the elderly and the vulnerable. So governments, though secular, have a duty to be holy and to nurture holiness in others, beginning with children and all vulnerable people. Their duty does not lie in shoring up the system but in loving the people. The same could be said of the Church.

Governments might begin such a systemic transformation by focusing on schools where there are insufficient teachers, or where teachers are hampered in their duty of loving care by the kind of perverse legalism which forbids them to hug a child or tend to him or her physically if that child is hurt. Governments could focus their attention, and their funding, on hospitals where cuts have rendered whatever medical care they can give ineffectual in the longer term. Or they could look to the real needs of understaffed care homes where loving care is sometimes in very short supply.

As with the convent of my school days, holiness, which is love, is no less available to policy makers or senior clergy than it is to children. Indeed, it is required of us all and is there for the asking. Christ has promised as much.  

What Ever Happened to the Cure of Souls?

Is ‘leadersmithing’ what the Church really needs these days? An article in last week’s Church Times (Comment, Church Times 3^rd March, 2017) has left me wondering about this. 

Leadership, as the article suggests, is becoming more than ever a skill, ideally to be learned in one of those hothouses for training talent-spotted future bishops and archbishops. 'The word 'leadersmith' implies something like 'coping'. It also has a rough hewn edge to it. It resonates with the earth and the workaday business of the factory shop floor. But the sad reality, when it comes to leadership in the Church, is that it is more often about stress of management. Perhaps the emphasis on the kind of skill needed to achieve and then survive in high office in the Church also involves learning how to engage with the kind of rivalry that goes on beneath the surface when career clericalism is revealed for what it really is.

  

While ambition and personal advancement are to be expected, though not necessarily desirable, in the context of secular organisations, is ‘leadersmithing’, really how the Church of God should be shaping its future leaders? I seem to remember Christ warning his disciples against such an approach, offering them instead a young child as a model of true leadership. Perhaps he was thinking of Isaiah 11:6. Admittedly, the child must have been very young, given that most children, once they are old enough to go to playgroup, very quickly learn how to fend for themselves in regard to power and territorial ownership. Chanel 4’s The Secret Life of Four Year Olds ought to be mandatory viewing for those picked for high office in the Church.

Power and being childlike are, of course, incompatible. Furthermore, power is seldom accompanied by authority. With a few notable exceptions (Barack Obama and Pope Francis being two of them), powerful people are often more childish than childlike, especially when their grip on power is threatened. More than one world leader springs to mind in this latter regard. These people have little genuine authority. They are an example of how childishness, if not outgrown in childhood, becomes dominant self interest in later life. Dominant self interest, and the envious rivalry to which it too often gives rise, does not elicit respect or bestow the kind of authority needed for true leadership.

True leadership brings with it the authority which comes with transparent love for the people a leader is called to serve. This is what Jesus meant by being childlike. A leader who has this quality will be instantly recognisable and trusted because the nature of their love is essentially sacrificial. For clergy, whatever their rank, sacrificial love is what is entailed in what used to be called ‘the cure of souls’. It remains the essence of our calling today.

Having the cure of souls involves commitment to God. In other words, it involves all the time that it takes for a person to be able to see themselves and others as God sees them. In terms of how they perceive themselves, this will inevitably lead to a ‘refining’ sacrifice. The cure of souls involves the refining of one’s own soul first. For one thing, it will demand that the ordained person be prepared to let go of all that they hold to be important in terms of their career in the Church.

Career clericalism is arguably one of the aspects of Church life which most undermines the work of mission and evangelism. There are few things more incompatible with the good news of Christ’s gospel than a distant and overly busy bishop who has little time for his or her clergy – or the priest who, when the peace is being shared, is too busy looking to see how many people are in church that Sunday to make eye contact with the person in front of them who is in need of a small moment of their undivided loving attention. Those who turn to the clergy for wisdom or understanding may want to speak of their hidden fears in regard to the state of the world, or to someone they love. They expect to see, or sense, the loving kindness of God working through the priest or bishop. They expect to see the face of Christ in that person. Sometimes they do.

 

The Giving Up of Lent

orcgg.org

When it comes to Lent, at home, we are a mixed economy household. There are some who have grown up in the catholic end of the Anglican tradition and others who are more protestantly inclined. For the former, Lent is a season in the Church’s liturgical year. It is a season for growing in love and in knowledge of God. Giving things up, or fasting, is meant to aid and abet this process. For the more protestant among us, and among our friends and acquaintances, Lent barely figures at all. It is Good Friday that counts. Easter is a bit of an afterthought.

In the excellent Anglican theological college where I trained for ordination, I knew someone who had never heard of Lent. At first this seemed surprising, in an Anglican College, but it was also quite salutary. It obliged me, as a more catholic Anglican, to wonder why we are doing Lent at all.

Perhaps such uncertainty is to be expected on Shrove Tuesday, as I write this post. It is the last day for coffee, chocolates, wine, or whatever.  Who knows what lies ahead in the way of tortuous self recrimination and personal goal striving? I read somewhere that a job contemplated is a far greater challenge than a job just begun. This is certainly true for writers and bloggers. It is also true of Lent. Once you get past the first week or so of giving up, it starts to resemble habit and the job gets easier.

The down side of this easing of the yoke is that guilt takes over. If it’s becoming easier then it’s not really giving up at all. It’s not a genuine fast. So we now find ourselves in a position of aiding and abetting the one thing Lent and Good Friday itself is designed to quash for good – personal guilt, along with a form of Pelagianism, the belief that we can get better if we try hard enough.

My more protestant friends, on the other hand, live much of the time with a sense of unworthiness and with the conviction that there is little or nothing that they personally can do about it – except repent. Some of us who are more catholically inclined will save their formal repenting until Shrove Tuesday comes round. Shrove Tuesday was traditionally the one day in the year when you were ‘shriven’ or received sacramental absolution following private confession to a priest . More protestant Anglicans do this shriving more publicly. When done formerly it amounts to confessing and repenting of manifold sins and wickednesses, something which users of the Book of Common Prayer do quite often.

So where does this leave our mixed economy household, when it comes to the meaning and purpose of Lent? There is something to be said for both approaches. On the one hand, the more protestant members feel that spiritual exercises should be undertaken solely for God and not involve a covert agenda of personal improvement. Furthermore, such exercises should be neither defined by, or limited to, a particular liturgical time of year. At the catholic end of the kitchen table, we welcome these seasons as given by God for our general well being, as well as for growth in the discipline of prayer. Ideally, whatever is given up should lead to deeper and longer periods of prayer and to the giving of alms. But it is also perfectly OK for them to lead to the betterment of our own physical health as well.

Insignificant as these theological meanderings may seem, I think our mixed economy household represents a sort of stumbling onto the real meaning of unity among Christians, and invites reflection.

Whether or not Lent is formerly observed, we could use the season to reflect on how God ‘holds’ us all in love, in both our feeble attempts at fasting and in the integrity and reverence which goes with not wanting to use the season as an excuse for putting in extra time at the gym or cutting out alcohol. Instead, we could pause in loving reverence for God.

We need more reverence for God in our lives, and not only reverence for God, but reverence for the earth, the food it yields and all who labour to produce it. We also need reverence for each other. Perhaps there are ways we could give up ‘giving up’ and start ‘taking on’ instead.

We could ‘take on’ the other members of the household in small acts of patience, or in unsolicited kind words. We could ‘take on’ the refugee, if not physically, because circumstances might not permit this, we could do the ‘taking on’ financially and by bringing their helplessness to God while recognising that we can do nothing to change ourselves or their situation without God’s grace.

We could ‘take on’ God in the shocking realisation that God ‘takes us on’. In no way does he ever give up on us. He does the same for those with whom we profoundly disagree or dislike – perhaps with good reason. What kind of giving up – or ‘taking on’ would such an attitude of mind require of us? This question alone ought to keep us busy for the next forty days.

In Our Right Minds

We are only fully human when we forget to take ourselves seriously. The same goes for solemn occasions involving large numbers of serious individuals. In fact, one could argue

that serious individuals coalescing  into solemn enclaves create what we call a self interested and self sustaining system. Systems are not fully human, and this week’s Church of England Synod gathering was an example of how inhuman systems can ultimately be their own undoing..

For one thing, it revealed, if only for a moment, that a person’s underlying fallible humanity will occasionally slip through the cracks in the system and reveal itself in broad daylight as, for example, when an individual makes an all too human mistake. Truth is often revealed through paradox, as when a bishop acting through some kind of subliminal divine prompting, presses the wrong button when the crucial vote is taken, thereby making the system look a little more human and, as a result, even more ridiculous than he himself must have felt on realising his mistake. I have some sympathy for Bishop Christopher Cocksworth. He was technically challenged (something which happens to most of us from time to time) so that for a moment his humanity broke through and led him to inadvertently do the right thing, even though he apologised for it profusely later on.

Perhaps all great changes in history begin with such minor mistakes. In this case it was a kind of inversion of Benjamin Franklin’s ‘for want of a nail, the battle is lost’.  Such mistakes at least reveal the thinness of the glass casing which keeps the system together in a spurious kind of unity, requiring that the humanity and integrity of the individuals involved be trussed up and kept out of sight.

Bishop Christopher Cocksworth’s all too human mistake also invites us to question at what point does the system as a whole cease to be human? At what point, and why, did it cease to function in the way it was ordained to by its founder? The purpose of the Church, and the authority given to its bishops, being surely to preserve and cherish the whole human race, beginning with its own members, as the embodiment and revelation of Jesus Christ.  Somewhere, the system has overtaken and enslaved, or ‘bound’, the true Church.

This being the case, I think it is safe to say that many of us would like to see a Church whose authority system has been turned upside down and inside out by its founder – for its own greater good. In other words, many of us would like to see a commitment to loving service of all God’s people which begins with the de-systemisation of power. A humble questioning of the nature and purpose of real authority in the Church might be a good place to begin.

One of the symptoms of systemic power at work in the Church is the idea that power is to be exercised primarily in the interest of maintaining unity, something of an anachronism when we remember that the Triune unity, on which we base our Christian faith, is one of inter-relatedness and dynamic, or continual movement into a deeper knowledge and love of the other.

This is the knowledge which admits to itself that it understands, empathises or, to use today’s vernacular, ‘gets’ who that person is. ‘Getting’ something about someone means touching on the truth of that person in a way which can only cause us to love them more.  When persons, powerful or not, have been swallowed up by the system they themselves have created, they need the rest of us to minister to them in the deepest sense. Ministry is about being as Christ for the other, irrespective of their power status or lack of it.

So we look at the powerful from the same vantage point as that which enables us to ‘get’ what it means to be powerless and marginalised. The powerful, as we see them in formal synod settings, or fail to see them because much of the real work goes on in closed meetings, are as needy as the powerless, but in a different way. Their minds need ‘re-clothing’, so that when they come to sit at the feet of Christ, like the man described in Luke 8:35, they need not feel ashamed at having lost touch with their own humanity because they have literally ‘come to their senses’. It is their senses which need re-clothing.

The senses, understood in this way, are what lead us to take reactive measures, to act ‘instinctively’ towards those who are on the margins of our common life, not because we fear them (although we do sometimes) but because their freed humanity threatens the personal security which the existing system affords the powerful. This is at the heart of the controversy which currently divides us. The security, and the system itself, depends on doing things in the way they have always been done, including adhering to outdated Church law and to habits of mind which come with lifeless, loveless ways of reading scripture. All of these things are done by appealing to authority and thereby asserting power. The extraordinary outcome of this week’s Synod suggests that power only comes with real authority and real authority, as Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, is given from above.