Not Torn Apart

There was a massive falling out this afternoon in our house. It had to do with one person, (tried beyond the limits of human endurance it seemed) coldly destroying another person’s complex lego helicopter. This was a treasured object for which the instructions have been lost. As a third party trying for twenty minutes’ respite before setting off for the nearest play area (it being a damp afternoon), the inevitable uproar proved that my ‘red line’ is far closer than I had hitherto assumed it to be. I was furious with both of them – until, of course, an almost unbearable compassion, ‘twin suffering’ perhaps, took hold of the situation.

Then it became a case of who to deal with first when it came to ‘damage containment’ – and assessing where the most significant damage lay. The easiest course of action might have been to lay down the law by shouting louder than either of the combatants and to dismiss the lego as just an old toy, easily replaceable, thereby also dismissing its owner’s valid grief. Such a course of action would have done nothing to heal the far more significant long term damage which might have been done to the two individuals concerned in their relations with each other. Such moments embed themselves in a person’s memory and grow like tumors as, over the years, they become overlaid with words or gestures which ‘trigger’ that particular memory, so giving it enormous significance. Ideally, the situation needed to be resolved without the final arbitrator appearing to take sides.

But in such defining moments, one’s instincts are often correct. So the first tranche of my volcanic fury landed on the perpetrator. How then was this person to be helped to take the first step in the healing process, unless I could provide some cooling off time – time to really feel what the victim was feeling? Meanwhile, the victim continued to howl – taking full advantage of having been wronged. It became clear that reconciliation was only going to take place once the victim had stopped howling for long enough to hear the word ‘sorry’ spoken in truth, a word which was beginning to shape itself in the perpetrator’s heart, once the usual formulaic (no eye contact) ‘sorry’ had been said.

I demanded more of both of them – more willingness to take responsibility and more courage to let go.  And perhaps because by this time I was close to tears myself, I got it. There was silence, life-defining silence, followed by a deep embrace, almost painful in its goodness. And then laughter. For a moment we knew the Kingdom of Heaven.

Applied to the present fevered political climate this invites pause for thought. Hatred, bitterness and blame could be transfigured in a single moment of ‘twin suffering’. Everything might be perceived in a different light, the light of hope, which is the knowledge that all things work to the good for those who have not forgotten how to speak the kind of truth which makes for real reconciliation, but reconciliation is not what we want from our politicians – or is it?

The gospel for this Pentecost Sunday speaks of a comparable situation. A group of people holed up in a room, afraid, confused and by now probably falling out with each other over who was to blame for what happened two days ago. Everyone wants the last word. The Christ steps in to the room, seemingly from nowhere – or had he been there, unrecognised, all the time? Into the mounting tension he speaks the words “Peace be with you”. They are a command, not an exhortation, a command which comes from within the deepest compassion for the human predicament, of which my two combatants were only a tiny sample.

It is our humanity which is at stake in such quarrels because blame reduces not only the perpetrator of the original wrong, but the victim as well, to an object – something to be conquered, ‘bested’ or won over. The recent televised election debates, though articulate and at times passionate, suggest that our politics are a magnified version of what went on in that upper room, before those words were spoken, and of two children trying to have the last word over how and why the lego helicopter was wrecked. In so doing, each is trying to have power over the other, to reduce the other to something legitimately ‘won’, a kind of trophy figure.

The incident which took place in that upper room reveals that the authority given by Christ to forgive or withhold forgiveness is the only authority which really counts. It follows the command to be at peace, knowing that we ourselves have been forgiven. How badly do we want forgiveness in these elections? Or peace for the world in the longer term?  No political party can deliver on these things. It is we who must start by wanting it, working from within the system itself, of which we are a part whether we like it or not.

Hope

Source: The Guardian

Liturgical seasons are seldom in tune with the emotions of the immediate moment. Today is Ascension day, a time, we are told, when the disciples who were left behind after Christ’s ascent into heaven went down the mountain rejoicing. It seems paradoxical, to say the least. They should have been silently weeping, as we are when we think of the children and young people murdered on Monday as they were partying in Manchester. How, then, can we speak of Christian joy and the hope bequeathed in Christ on this Ascension Day?

Perhaps the difficulty lies in part with our tendency to over spiritualise our great festivals. This one is especially hard to ground in something like reality, and yet it has to be grasped in a way which helps us make sense of the now and the ‘not yet’ – when ‘this Jesus shall come’ the angels said, in the way he had just left. Perhaps more importantly, this final parting is axiomatic to the deeper truth of the Resurrection. If Christ had not been finally parted from his friends in this way, who is to say that he did not disappear only to die again (which would nullify the first death, both forensically and theologically) and then what? Is there a long since decayed corpse somewhere, as many would like to think, waiting to ‘de-mythologize’ the Christian story?

These are the kind of theological distractions which make it hard to make sense of the Christian faith and even harder to do so in the context of the times we live in. How might the Ascension of Christ, and the joy and hope of his disciples, help us come to terms with Monday’s atrocity? I think the clue lies in the undifferentiated nature of joy and hope. The two are of a piece. In terms of Monday, and of the intended collective psychological damage it is wreaking, these are made concrete in every look, word and gesture which speaks of compassion, the kind of compassion which comes from ‘being there’.

We are all called to ‘be there’, to ‘wait’ as the disciples did ‘in the city’. But we are called to do this while receiving the blessing which Christ gave to his friends even as he was parted from them. To receive such a blessing, especially in times like these, means owning the need for it – or owning the need for ‘mercy’, which is another way of talking about blessing. It was Christ’s parting blessing which gave rise to the disciples’ otherwise unaccountable joy and ongoing hope.

Hope is not wishful thinking. It has nothing to do with denying reality. Rather the opposite, in fact. Hope is the courage to own the reality of Monday night, with all its complex causes, including the benighted nature of the perpetrators’ own reasons for doing what they did. Christ’s blessing holds all of that darkness. This does not mean that all will be well in the best of all possible worlds. It means that anarchic forces, however they manifest themselves, will not prevail in destroying our humanity, what makes us persons in the fullest sense. This is the truth to which those who have suffered through the centuries have witnessed, and it is the truth to which we are called, irrespective of the religious, or non-religious, path we choose to walk in responding to that call, provided we walk it with integrity, in a desire for the blessing or ‘mercy’.  

Being at Odds

We live in a world of difficult people, or so it is convenient to believe – until the truth dawns on us that we ourselves are among their number. This is especially discomfiting in the context of family life. We don’t choose our families. We are simply landed with them, along with idiosyncrasies (theirs and our own) which seldom mellow with age. Given the assumption that our lives are made problematic by the difficult people around us, it is likely that we are part of the problem, if there is one. Perhaps this is also true of relations between nations and communities. We all suffer from blinkered vision.

Blinkered vision happens when a nation is perceived entirely within the visual/conceptual space of one individual, or in a memory retained of one unhappy experience in the context of a nation or group.  As a result, we can’t ‘see’ the other person, or the other group, completely and might not even want to. Better to let go of the memory then, as far as possible, and widen the field of vision.

A blinkered attitude to people who we dislike, but think we know well, can lead to an involuntary protectiveness which can also be misconstrued as selfishness. Selfishness is really about fear. It is about protecting the unhealed wounds which give rise to a damaging self perception. The wounds may have originated in misunderstandings that could have been resolved long ago, but somehow lingered on until it was too late, and too hard, to heal them. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to let go of such memories. There are just not the means to do so.

To make matters worse, the memories may have been dismissed, or deemed to be unimportant, by one or more of the parties involved. The wound inflicted was denied, so that the pain remained unvalidated. Unvalidated pain devalues all parties to a dispute, and leads to long term toxic relationships. In families, devaluing often takes the form of  ‘put downs’. In these contexts, ‘put downs’ are always about fear and denial and witness to deep and enduring unhappiness. They devalue the person’s pain and deny its validity, while also reinforcing the defences of the one who is doing the putting down, without allowing for the healing of their pain.

Difficult people, ourselves included, are ‘difficult’ because, on the whole, they are in pain, though they may not admit this even to themselves. And since, in the context of family, as well as in national life, all perceive the other as difficult, it follows that all are dealing with pain. Or perhaps they are not dealing with it because they cannot even acknowledge it.

There is a paradox here. When irritation bubbles to the surface as a result of an oft repeated action, word, or enduring habit, it might just be possible to experience, in the moment of irritation, or of being at odds with someone, the deepest compassion for the other party. A fleeting revelation occurs, even as the annoying words are spoken, and this revelation can be painful. It is seldom sought, but if the deadlock between two people is to be broken, such a revelation has to be desired. It might even re-trigger our own pain, but in being a trigger, it can elicit empathy which is a more demanding and a more subtle version of what otherwise might simply be called ‘understanding’.

Those who practice Buddhist meditation might describe empathy as mindfulness. For Christians, this means being mindful of our need for the grace which makes empathy possible, by validating our pain as it does the same for the other person. Grace is God’s free gift. It is given in love because God desires not just peace, but the full validation of persons which real peace both gives and requires. We cannot effect healing, or improve our relations with difficult people, without it. 

Whom Do You Seek?

The revered Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh has written a book about fear.[1] In it he speaks of a universal transition trauma – the moment of birth. He describes how the nine months preceding birth are a time of simple existence, of equilibrium and, above all, of acceptance. All that is needed for basic survival is supplied through the body of another. Whether or not that ‘other’ wills it, the unborn infant simply receives. Then, the teacher argues, comes birth, and with it fear.

Most of us have not experienced the kind of therapy which takes you back to the birth moment, but we have all experienced fear, to a greater or lesser extent, at certain times in our lives. The moment of birth is a moment of primal fear. It is primal because it is the first moment in our lives when we are forced to come to terms with need. This need is massive and, for the newborn child, wholly incomprehensible. In the moment of birth it makes itself felt as an urgent need for immediate survival – air, nourishment and the closeness of another human body, the latter two being of a piece.

The need for tactile relationship endures. Long after we are able to breathe independently, and feed and clothe ourselves, there remains a deep need for the ‘other’. As emotionally healthy adults this need is fully met when we can recognise, and perhaps meet, another person’s need as well. Those who have experienced emotional abuse in childhood (and all abuse is emotional), will go on through life trying to have their emotional needs met, either by repeating the pattern learned through their parents or, perhaps, by trying to prevent or make up for the neglect they experienced by making themselves indispensible to others, both of these coping strategies leading to further toxic relationships and thwarted lives.

This is why I find the story of the risen Christ meeting a grieving friend in the garden so significant. It is a moment of healing in which the friend is not only restored to herself  but ‘given permission’ to use her giftedness. She is tasked with announcing the good news of the Resurrection to others. But first, Jesus asks her why she is weeping and who she is seeking.

I think her tears and his questions speak of the human condition itself. We are all, at times, weeping for what has been lost or never fully realised in our lives. Even so, there is a paradox in the conversation between Christ and Mary, as it is recorded in St. John’s gospel. Mary, on realising who is speaking to her, reaches out to grasp him. She needs him. But he tells her not to touch him because he is not yet risen to the Father. Later, though, he will invite Thomas, the one who needs empirical proof before he can believe in the ‘hallucinations’ of someone as distraught as Mary (we are always a bit hard on Thomas) will be invited to touch him.

This seems a little unfair. It should have been the other way round, Mary being allowed to hold him, rather than Thomas the sceptic. Unless, of course, we think more deeply about the need being expressed by Mary. It is a quite different need from Thomas’s. Mary’s need represents what we are all seeking in that deep hidden part of ourselves. It takes us back to our first breath, our first cry of need for someone. Mary’s need is more than a need for reassurance that what she is seeing and longing for is in fact happening, as was promised. It implies hope fulfilled in a moment of deep need.

She recognises Christ as ‘Rabboni’, the beloved Teacher, as he says her name. Part of the reason for our chronic loneliness as a society, or as members of a particular church, is that we seldom hear our name being called – our name being the person we really are. It may even  be necessary to hide who we are, or to deny our giftedness, because there are some who fear us. Their fear will translate as envy and could destroy us.

The same thing can happen in families. Abusive parents fear, and want to suppress or control, the real person in their child, because that person challenges them. In being who and what they are, they show their parents the truth about themselves. Truth spoken through another person’s integrity can remind others that they are not who they imagine themselves to be, or would like others to believe they are. Truth spoken through another’s integrity, or giftedness, can make another person feel undermined or threatened. No wonder, then, that the women who brought the news of the resurrection to Christ’s closest friends were dismissed as ‘foolish’.

---

[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear – Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Rider, London (2012)

The Tactical Vote

According to St. John’s account of Christ’s Passion, it was 'expedient' that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation not perish. Whether in the Church or in society,

expediency, strategy, power games in which ‘the people’ are either duped with impossible promises or blatantly used for political leverage and then discarded, point to the fact that the message is the same: ‘It is expedient’. This, along with whatever slant or ‘spin’ is afforded by the media and powerful interest groups, seems to be the order of the day when it comes to election campaigns. It is a far cry from the freedom and democracy for which two generations fought world wars in the last century and for which many risk their freedom and their lives today.

It is also why some of us are unhappy about tactical voting. There is something ‘expedient’ about it. But it somehow goes against the grain in regard to democracy itself.  How we do, or don’t, exercise our hard won political freedom is a matter of conscience. It may be expedient not to vote, but in doing so, we risk turning our back on the true meaning and purpose of an election. A tactical vote stops just short of not bothering to vote at all and not voting at all is an abrogation of our individual responsibility for what is still a free nation.

Part of the reason for my own unease about tactical voting lies in the fact that this country does not yet have a truly representative electoral system. It is also, paradoxically, why some people justify the practice in the first place. Although untidy and possibly less efficient, because the government it would deliver might be more difficult to administer, proportional representation would at least make the voter feel more directly connected to the political process and perhaps better motivated to engage with it. But that is not the only reason why some of us draw back from strategically ‘working’ the existing system, which is what tactical voting entails.

When it comes to tactical voting, you are also working from a negative position. Tactical voting is like driving in reverse when you have missed a turning, and then finding yourself mired down off the edge of the road, unable to move in any direction. You back up to something like the worst compromise and so can end up voting for a party whose policies and values you profoundly disagree with. This leaves you feeling more disenfranchised, or unrepresented, than you would have been had you voted with your conscience in the first place.

But you tell yourself that it is expedient to vote tactically, in order to be sure you keep the party you really don’t want out of the picture. This is not to say that you are wrong to want to keep them out, but that in ‘working’ the electoral system you deprive yourself and the best political parties of a voice. Tactical voting is negative thinking and negative thinking is not about vision. If tactical voters were to vote with their conscience, the ones who have less political presence but far more wisdom, and with it far more vision, might just win a few more seats in government. The nation badly needs wisdom and vision.

This brings me back to the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, and to why I shall vote Liberal Democrat in June, even though on paper the Lib Dems may not win a seat in our constituency and Ukip could, in theory, gain a little ground, chiefly from erstwhile Tory voters. I am not voting tactically because to do so would be to vote against my political conscience.

I do not think that political conscience is shaped solely by the policies of any one party, although conscience will, if it is alive and healthy, afford a reliable guide as to the moral validity of specific party policies. Political conscience is also shaped by a desire not to betray those who in previous generations sacrificed so much for the democratic freedom we now have, even if that freedom is severely compromised by the system itself, as well as by those who ‘work’ it still further, to their own ends, once they are handed power through the ballot box.

It was ‘expedient’ that Jesus should die for the people because, in having him executed, the state and the religious authorities were able to avert a direct confrontation in which all would be losers – politically. Handing him over to the secular authorities was a tactical manoeuvre and, of course, an act of betrayal. We all participate in this act from time to time in our failure to live up to the demands of conscience, to do and say the truth and to stay focused on righteousness when it comes to the moment of testing, including the testing of our own integrity in the ballot box.

The main challenge is fear, fear of our littleness and lack of political grip, given the quantity and complexity of the data which is constantly being thrown at us, and fear of the weight of the system itself. But the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s way of sweeping aside all that makes for fear, all the doubt and confusion which too often leads us to settle for second best, including the way we exercise our political freedom in the coming election. 

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.