Morning

Source: nedhardy.com

What gets you out of bed in the morning? In a way, I find this question harder to answer as I get older. It has to do with old habits wearing thin. The things that used to get me going are either no longer relevant, or no longer exist. When it comes to relevance, after 43 years of being together I’ve finally had to accept the fact that my husband really does not like hot tea, so to trek back upstairs to bring it to him the minute the pot has brewed is a waste of time and effort. I now pour it and leave it for him downstairs. Then there’s the other reality. The children have long since left home and now lead lives of their own at some considerable distance from ours. The only reason for getting up early for their sakes has to do with fitting in with international time zones. This we manage to do at other times of the day.

But I still get up an hour earlier, and I still have a reason for doing so. For one thing, there is the silence, both external and internal. We live in a silent place. In other words, silence is consistent. It is a given. There is no ambient traffic noise. There are no times of the day when we are even particularly conscious of noise, apart from the change of predominant bird cry. Buzzards are very active at the moment and the swallows have not yet started marshaling the troops for the long flight south. They will get noisier when they do so in a couple of weeks time. Also, we have cut down the old elder in which the crows used to nest, as well as fight with the magpies. Their departure has made the silence almost palpable.

External silence has the effect of quelling internal noise. In the first hour of the day the busy mind is subdued. It has not yet woken up to mundane preoccupations, although it is not asleep either. In fact, I find that it is more awake than at any other time of the day. It is open, in every sense of the word. For me, the first hour of the day is a time of openness to the Real Presence, but it is not a mental vacuum which I expect God to fill. Instead, I find that I am involved in a kind of three-way dialogue between the mind, the senses and God. But rarely is anything said. Instead, the heart is allowed to have its own mind, to speak from its concerns and from its fears.

Today, it spoke of North Korea and the US, and of the threat to our very existence which the leaders of these two nations represent. The mind, and my personal fears, being quelled, I was able to sense the impact of the situation on its most helpless victims, the ordinary people of North Korea. What came to mind was a picture of its baby-faced leader peering through what seemed like an old fashioned pair of binoculars while two of his adjutants stood by. One wore an army uniform. The other was dressed in a thin fleece type jacket. The army character looked thin. His companion was emaciated. Their leader was wearing a warm well cut heavy coat. He looked very well fed.

The memory of this picture, seen either on line or in a newspaper, speaks to me of the deeper evil, and of the most pressing danger, which is at the root of this crisis. It is the total disregard for other human beings which comes when two narcissistic leaders are sated or infatuated with power. No doubt if these two leaders were to disappear, others would replace them, so the solution to the crisis does not lie in praying that they, and the danger they represent, will simply go away. In fact, when we are engaged in the kind of three-way dialogue I have been describing, the idea of a ‘solution’ to the crisis of potential nuclear holocaust recedes a little. We realise that something more than a solution is needed, because a solution would be no more than a political construct designed to get these two leaders out of the impasse they have created and so allow the rest of us to breathe a sigh of relief, at least in the immediate present.

But whatever calming devices are deployed, in respect to the two antagonistic leaders, they will not make a jot of difference to the suffering endured by tens of millions of North Koreans. Their suffering will not be diminished, even for a moment. The silence of the early morning tells me that it is their suffering which matters most when it comes to any kind of meaningful solution to the Korean crisis. There is no particular logic for thinking this, and it will appear naïve to many, but for those who know the value of silence, engaging together in God with the suffering of ordinary North Koreans is vital spiritual work. If you have read this far, please reserve an hour of mentally uncluttered time to join me in this work.

Dreaming Up a Church

At school, when it was too wet to play lacrosse (O happy day), we did country dancing in the gym. One of the dances involved going to the back of the line and partnering the last person on it, so that you would both eventually end up at the front. I think the dance was called ‘Strip the Willow’. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I am right in my recollection of ‘Strip the Willow’, or even if I am confusing it with another dance, the basic pattern has stayed with me as a blue print for ecclesial life; how the Church could yet be, and how this new joyous way of being could liberate it into becoming the kind of Church which the Lord of the Dance might like to be a part of.

I think he probably is a part of it. It’s just that the Dance has moved on. Reels and country dances have a way of moving on by shifting the focus and altering the plane of action, so transforming the action itself. It is this shifting and re-focusing which the institutional Church needs to allow itself to do, if it is to keep dancing with its Lord, and if it is to survive at all. I say allow, because the movement is not a plan to be decided upon by those at the top and then enacted by those at the bottom as best they can. It is not a strategy for keeping going. It is the energy in which the Church should live and move, the energy which it breathes and then releases into the world. Or which it wilfully refuses to breathe because it is afraid of the risks entailed.

This is not as abstract as it sounds, any more than the Dance is itself an abstraction. Nevertheless, it does require some right side of the brain thinking, to acknowledge and borrow from a much more complex line of thought.[1] The Dance is a pattern, a collective creation, energised by the measure of its music which is its heart beat. The music is too fast, too compellingly joyous, to allow for strategy, for watching one’s back lest a fellow dancer fill our place unobserved. The Dance is not a competition in which one person or group feels threatened by another. Fear plays no part in it.

What makes the Dance a living Church, as opposed to a fearful and disconnected institution, is the will to love, at least for the duration of the Dance itself, in other words on this side of eternity. It moves in tandem with the changes, chances and inexplicable suffering (seemingly allowed by God) of this transient world. Given such a fluid, and at times frightening, situation, there is little time to do anything other than love. This is another skill which the institutional Church seems to be in danger of losing. The momentum of its collective inner life is slowing down because it has forgotten how to love. So it is losing the measure of the Dance.

Part of the problem, indeed most of the problem, is one of separation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel puts it well ‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”'. (Matt.11:16) One half of the dance, the clergy hierarchy (especially those at the top of the line), has become dislocated from the other, from the people who the clergy exist to serve, the people at the bottom of the line who are ‘playing’ and ‘mourning’. So it feels to those who are either at the bottom of the line or outside the Church altogether, that the clerical hierarchy is doing its own thing, its own private dance, one which is completely detached from the people, despite the fact that the people are the other partners in the Dance.

What practical solutions can we offer to save the Church’s true life in the Dance? We could begin, perhaps, by breaking the existing clerical caste system, which is still redolent of class and privilege, though not restricted to either, and which is currently stuck in a mould, or cast, of its own making.

The cast reveals striations of love which have become set in stony hearts. In order to break these hearts – and they do need to be broken, so that those called to be bishops, priests and deacons, can relearn to love their people, the people at the top end of the line need to link up and partner with those at the bottom. This is fundamental to the sacramental commission given to them. We love in and through our sacramental ministry, particularly in the celebration of the Eucharist which we take from the altar to the world.

In terms of ecclesial life, such a partnering would require two ‘givens’; the first that no ordained person should be doing a desk job and the second, that every ordained person should be mentored, or partnered, by a lay person. All clergy would be non-stipendiary. In regard to mentoring, we would begin by drawing on the skills, life experience and wisdom of older lay members of our churches, who might well be paid. These older members (aged at least 60, but preferably older) would mentor those clergy from whom current leadership expectations are the greatest; in other words, bishops, archdeacons, area deans and/or ministry area leaders. These expectations ought, one hopes, to diminish as the existing hierarchical structure is gradually dismantled. We could begin this dismantling process with all clergy being elected or sponsored by the members of their church (as happens already in some denominations) and bishops being elected for a fixed term by clergy.

But what, the reader is now probably asking, is to be done about the running, or management, of the fabric of the institution, its buildings, real estate and pension schemes, to name only a few? To which the answer might be, is it too hard to believe that there are not willing, and perfectly able, retired people who could do this (remunerated) work? Perhaps someone reading this post could make some practical suggestions in this area. Meanwhile, let’s dream of a Church which recognises and honours its Lord when He turns up unexpectedly, hoping to join in the Dance.[2]

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[1] I am indebted to Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emmisary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, London (2009)

[2] This post is a development of some of the ideas I shared in an interview with Mark Tully for the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Something Understood’ July 16^th, 2017

Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. As with all good fiction and drama, you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously, I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be oneself.

Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only watched the first three episodes of Broken. I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing. Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in translation, so to speak.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the ‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed. Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers with him – again.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. There are other paths of suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in this particular case.

All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain, although it may numb it for a while.

The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also tied to a particular poem, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.

All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent. They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we see in Broken, they are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying, or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured.  God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made whole again in his brokenness. 

Armageddon - or possibly not

Source: BBC

I was still at my convent boarding school when the Cuban missile crisis peaked. They were thinking of ringing our parents to ask them to take us home. Maybe it was the end of the world. We were told to pray, not that we really understood the scale of the threat in relation to ourselves, still less to the wider world. We did sense something unusual, though, about the school possibly having to close down in the middle of term, so it was vaguely frightening, even if the fear was sugar-coated by the prospect of an extended half-term break.

I cannot say that I was truly afraid of what might happen over Cuba. My earliest memory of fear was on my stepfather’s boat. I was about five and the crew would play at dangling me, screaming and kicking, over the side. That was real fear. Real fear, the kind that grips and paralyses a person happens when the threat is direct, immediate and personal. All three apply to the individual and to the collective in equal measure. Those who have experienced war will recognise this.

But there is another variant on fear, which is the vague fear we have all learned to live with. It has its peaks and troughs. Right now, given the situation in North Korea and the leadership vacuum in America which has helped to ramp it up, you could say that it is peaking, perhaps like the Cuban missile crisis with which I am sure it is already being compared. And there are other fears swirling around, most of them having to do with the instability of financial and property markets, along with climate change and the medium to long-term effects of Brexit. Added to these are the ‘plagues’ said to presage the end of the world, the zika virus, if you live in South America, being one of them.

All of these fear triggers have, in one way or another, happened before, with huge cost to human life and happiness. As a result of them, many people have ceased to believe in the existence of an all powerful God, still less a merciful and wise one. They will say that those who persist in believing in such a figure are clinging to some kind of psychological prop which enables them to get through life and to manage their fear. But getting through life, whatever it throws at us, by simply managing fear, is a thin substitute for a life lived in, with and through God, as it was lived for us in Jesus Christ.

What we are given in Christ is an altogether different way of managing fear. It is the last thing most of us would think of doing in frightening situations, although with wise leadership and a less frightened electorate we might limit, or even prevent, most of the fear situations which face us today. Instead of succumbing to fear, we are told to keep our inward eye firmly fixed on the embodiment of truth, the Word made flesh, the Christ walking towards us on the turbulent water. This is the ‘way’ and the ‘life’ that enables us to deal with fear.

If we return to the Armageddon-like representations of the current North Korea nuclear threat, one thing is clear: There is unfinished business, and North Koreans, who are ruled through fear, are not allowed to forget this lest they cease to be quite so fearful. North Korea is technically still at war with the US over the carving up of the country and the ensuing Korean war. No peace treaty was ever signed. This possibly deliberate oversight has led to a great deal of loss of face for the ruling dynasty of the north, beginning with the present incumbent’s grandfather. Powerful and morally weak leaders find it hard to cope with loss of face, except through violence.

In the context of Korea, Trump has added to the existing problem of loss of face by upping the ante in regard to violent retaliation and thereby provoking the already angry Kim Jong Un who, like Trump, is a powerful and morally weak leader.  Narrow readings of religious texts do nothing to allay our fear of the end of all things being brought about through the hubris and stupidity of President Donald Trump, and the hubris and cleverness of Kim Jong Un. In fact, it is being exploited in certain religious contexts for political power-driven purposes. The exploitation of fear through religion is a long way from the kind of life Jesus was talking about when he spoke of himself as the ‘the way, the truth and the life’.

What then can Christians learn from their own Leader about managing the world’s fear? Many of the key exchanges which take place between Jesus and powerful people, as well as those who fear them, are contained by the words ‘You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you’. In other words he calls us to convert fear to something resembling the honouring of the enemy – you might call this love, although perhaps not immediately. I think Jesus may have been talking about something resembling ‘chivalry’, which is not an exclusively masculine virtue, incidentally. Rather, it is a sense of the need to brace oneself for the best we have to give when it comes to the things we fear. Those who lived through the second world war, if they are reading this, will remember what bracing oneself for the best one has to give entailed. So will the doctors and muslim taxi drivers who rushed to the scenes of the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. I think that they were able to call on something within them resembling chivalry, or honour, perhaps even love.

All of this may not seem to relate directly to what we are feeling about the possibility of a nuclear attack by north Korea, unless we can conceive of a way of ‘centering down’ to that place of goodness and honour which lies somewhere within even the worst of us. Centering down to the best that lies within us does not involve an introspective search for the good in ourselves. It is more a case of being available to it, should it suddenly emerge and surprise us. Coming to terms with our own goodness can be frightening at times.

When it comes to managing fear, in relation to ourselves or events in the wider world, this is only possible when we are willing to allow our fear to be ‘converted’, or turned into something else, by God. We do this in and through our life in Christ. We do it collectively as the Church and privately as every single individual who secretly wrestles with fear. We do it by wanting, more than anything, to see our fears, both public and private, finally overcome by the peace which comes with courage and must ultimately end in reconciliation.

Sick At Heart

It takes a while for living compostable material to rot down and become the stuff of life again. It’s best not to examine it too closely while this is happening. Perhaps this is what the Church of England was thinking during the decades spanning the abuse of vulnerable people by one of its prelates and by another highly regarded individual whose integrity was compromised by, presumably, the toxic mix of sado-eroticism and religion.

Eroticism and religion have long been known to serve each other, when allowed to. Only read some of the poetry of John of the Cross, for example, and the worryingly sadistic reaction it led to at the hands of his deeply religious tormentors. They were afraid of its power and equally afraid of the poet’s ability to contain and focus that power in a God-ward direction, something they were not able to do. Powerful life-giving spirituality can make others envious, especially if those others are already powerful in a worldly sense, but exercise their power in a formal religious context. Power can be erotic and, in this respect, is always dangerous.

Religion, and Christianity especially, has always played dangerously with erotic power, especially in the form of sadism. Sadism is highly flammable stuff which, for some reason, is easily ignited in the religious mind. Think only of the still enduring fascination with medieval graphic portrayals of the suffering of Christ, rendered in the visual language of modernity. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, comes to mind.

Perhaps all this is part of a processing of our own dark fascination with perverted religion, as it combines with violence and with sexual sadism of one kind or another, not to mention personal charisma and the vanity which accompanies it. Some would say that if the Church as we know it is to survive, it must keep a cap on all this dark stuff, even if its highly placed prelates and senior figures are revealed to be actively part of it. The more cynical might just write them off as ‘collateral damage’. But it won’t do. Rottenness will never do. This suggests that a radical change in the way the institutional Church is currently perceived is needed now more than ever.

It takes time for things to rot but once they have reached a point of no return, excision remains the only possible option. This is beginning to happen in the Church, largely thanks to the courage and persistence of the victims and through the action of the police. It did not happen as a result of the niceness or kindness of Church leaders. When it comes to abuse, whether in the Church or anywhere else, niceness and kindness are not enough. Niceness and kindness do not stop the rot. Many of us are sick at heart for the rottenness of the state of the Church and for its complacency in regard to rampant injustice, and some of us are angry. We are angry about the citadel mentality which dominates so much of the Church’s life, at least in that which pertains to those with power and influence. It is a mentality which is not simply limited to protecting the interests of abusers.

If you are a woman priest in certain provinces of the Anglican Communion, or simply a member of a sectarian group within it, you will very soon feel powerless in the worst possible sense of the word. You are not part of the citadel, the largely male inner sanctum which holds to status and to the power which comes with it, but which is seldom used for the common good. You will be someone who is denied a voice. All the more so, if what you say or do troubles its peace of mind and general complacency in regard to arcane laws and an unworkable authority system which is ill designed to nurture gift among all God’s people and so allow Christ to speak to our society. You will know what it feels like for ranks to close and exclude you from the inner sanctum of the powerful, though all may smile and many will be nice to you. If you are a member of the LGBTQ community, you will experience the same thing.

For people belonging to either or both of these groups, serving the institutional Church is not life in its fullest sense. It is not life as Christ promised it. It follows, quite obviously, that the institutional Church is not Christian in the sense that Christ would have wished it to be, so it is not working very well. It is not freeing people into Christ. Rather, it has been reduced to a largely self serving and introspective system with something rotten at its heart.

To be a Christian is to be a liberator, one who empowers others as Christ did. So it follows that those who hold power within the institutional Church must look first to the victims of abuse, and of institutionalised misogyny and homophobia, in order to set them free. They will do this by seeking their forgiveness before beginning to enact the kind of radical change which will enable the victims of every kind of abuse to live in the fullest sense of the word. For this to be possible, radical change is needed both within the Church’s own political system, the power games of superficial niceness played out by a select few, and in its spiritual life which is perceived by many as pallid and meaningless, bearing no relation to the dangerous freedom offered to us in Jesus Christ.

This suggests that if the Church is to survive at all, its survival and its future life will begin with speaking and acting with integrity. The abuse scandals, and the institutional misogyny of the past twenty or thirty years, have led to many people losing all confidence in the Church’s integrity, and hence in the Christian gospel itself. What people are looking for today, in the life of the Church, as well as in public life in general, is integrity. This has been the message of Glastonbury 2017: Give us integrity and we will start to re-engage with politics. It is a message which the Church needs to hear for itself. 

What Are You Doing Here?

Summer, and heat, has come upon us unexpectedly, even though it is mid June. Those of us who rely on a good crop of runner beans for the freezer were just getting used to the idea that we were likely not to have a summer at all, and hence no beans, when along it came. I still don’t think the beans stand much of a chance. The gales and the wet have enfeebled them, possibly beyond hope.

Beyond hope. How easy and how disconcerting it is to slip into melancholy and pessimism on a day like this. Perhaps we should be better prepared. Perhaps we should know ourselves well enough to see such thought trends coming and not allow them to spoil the present moment. But the present moment is far more complex than it might seem in the heat of summer. It is, after all, shaped out of a million other moments which, according to how they are remembered, define our lives and the realities we live by.

While musing on reality, I find myself remembering another hot summer day back in February, when we were in Australia (see my post of 9^th February, 2017). We were listening to someone’s jumbled, confused, and tragic memories, the realities which shaped her life in that moment, and the pain they brought, a pain which was only partly anesthetised by drink. Such present moments, our own and other people’s, and the realities they face us with, are sometimes too hard to bear, especially when they come upon us suddenly. I remember feeling that I had not served that person well, even by listening. As far as I could see, I had been unable to effect any kind of healing.

Our own realities need a time of gentle germination before they are exposed to the terrifying light of memory. Heat, like today’s heat, forces the seeds of  long buried memory to germinate, to seek the light and warmth needed for growth and healing. The light is also in the telling of them, whether spoken or written, and the warmth is in the listening, or in the kind of attentive reading which enables us to understand and accept, through the story being told, how our most private memories shape the realities we live by.

On such a day as this, in the sudden heat of mid June, these memories are revealed to us, perhaps for the first time, like a piece of pottery straight out of the kiln. They emerge, hot, in this present moment of heat and soporific silence. Silence is not the absence of sound, or even of noise. It is the ‘still small voice’ heard at the very heart of that noise and of today’s heat – out of the fire  in which Elijah heard it, as he dared to face down God’s question “What are you doing here?” Heat forces itself on us with this question, a question which waits on our memories for an answer.

“What are you doing here?” is all that is left after all other questions have been burned away, or ‘refined’ as the bible puts it. What shall I do? How can I love or make myself deserving of love? Why am I unhappy? These questions matter to the extent that they enable us to know the answer to that one seminal question. “What are you doing here?” What is the meaning and purpose of your life in relation to God – or in the fear and resistance to such a relation? Part of the refining process involves how we process our memories. These memories, and how we live with them, pertain to the reality, or non-reality, of our existence, to whether the life we lead is really worth living. Right remembering always pertains to the truth, even though that truth may need to be fictionalised, painted or rendered into music or, perhaps, mathematics. These all serve the refining process, our own and that of others.

This is why art and scientific research matter so much. Science which is pursued with the artist’s reverence for truth and life is salvific. As separate life paths, art and science yield knowledge about the kind of truth which saves us from ourselves and from the delusions which are the product of wilful ignorance. Such knowledge also pertains to justice, our own just dealings, including our thoughts and mindsets in regard to any number of historical events and current social issues, and returns us to the desire for a deep and unnameable truth. Taken together, the desire for justice and for knowledge of deep truth comprise a ‘push’ for life, or  a resistance to it. They therefore pertain to every single person’s life choices.

Being ‘refined’ begins with allowing ourselves to be questioned by God, as Elijah was and as the allegorical figures of Adam and Eve were before him. In both cases, the question remains the same, “What are you doing here?” We babble excuses and justifications for ourselves and for the life we presently live, as Elijah did. Or we blame someone else, as Adam did. We also blame circumstances, often justifiably. But silence always returns us to the same question, “What are you doing here?” because the one who asks it is the answer. 

One Love

Source: Billboard.com

‘There is no fear in love’ ( 1 John 4:18). If I’m honest about it, these words strike me as optimistic, even somewhat whimsical. Most people’s life experience has demonstrated at one time or another that fear takes absolute precedence when it comes to violent defining moments, or ‘crises’, in the full sense of the word. When it comes to how we imagine we would behave in a violent crisis intentions are invariably good, even heroic, but reality, when it kicks in, often reveals us to be anything but heroes. Not that this is always a bad thing. The independent hero can be counterproductive in times of crisis. He or she can put the lives of others in danger. On the night people were randomly stabbed in a London restaurant, the u-tube footage shows police telling them to lie down and not run, or even move. They were not to be heros. If there was to be heroism, it would be a matter of holding together, and of having the courage to trust the police who were trying to contain the fear.

The lying down, and what must have been an agonised period of waiting for the ‘all clear’, suggests that fear can only be confronted, and then contained, through trust in what it means to be real community. Real community is about being in ‘communion’ with one another. In a moment of violent crisis, being in communion begins with trusting those who give the orders which will enable all innocent people to live. It is about everyone belonging to one another, so that whoever holds legitimate authority in any given situation is also fully in communion with the rest of us.  In the wider context of our shared public life, this is only possible when there is wise and competent leadership, wisdom being a combination of vision, compassion and common sense. Such leadership is vital in times of mass violence.

The present mayor of London, a wise and compassionate leader, has told people to expect an unusual amount of police presence and high level security in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. He has also told them not to be afraid, not because he wishes to delude them into thinking that these are not frightening times, but because he wishes them to know that their fear is valid and that he will do everything he can to protect them under his mayoral leadership. This is why Trump’s remarks about Sadiq Khan are both crass and dangerous.

A few nights ago, we saw another example of wise and compassionate leadership, this time coming from a twenty three year old woman and her co-celebrants at a rock concert. She was affirming communion, so you could say that her initiative to re-stage the concert so soon after the terror attack which took place at the last one was not only courageous in a human sense, but had something of the self-giving of Christ, and something of his innocence. His innocence was reflected not only in her, but in the faces of those attending the concert, as they faced down the violence that had been, and might yet be.

No doubt most of the young people attending the second Ariana Grande concert had been at the first one, with its tragic and terrifying outcome.

What brought them together a second time? I believe it was the collective will to be 'as communion', so defying those who would fragment and ultimately destroy what is good about our society and our way of life. This is what made this concert so unlike any other concert. There was an exhortation to love one another in the facing down of fear.

All would be remembering the horrors of the previous celebration. Many of those attending this one were probably there when they took place. All would have felt the fear. Some would not have known what to do with the feelings these memories evoke, especially in their immediate aftermath. But they knew, and their leader knew, that to return to that moment of naked fear, evoked by the memory of the perpetrators’ crazed envy and untrammelled hatred, as it was expressed through brutal mass murder, was not why they had come to this second concert. To remain in that moment, or to return to it by re-invoking hatred for the perpetrators, would have meant defeat for them and for all of us.

Instead, their leader, was in this moment urging them to celebrate a eucharist, a shared moment of love and thanksgiving. She was offering them a different and better way, a way out from fear, so that they would not spend the rest of their lives emotionally short-circuiting back to the lie which bred the hatred on the part of the perpetrators. But neither was she exhorting her fans to some kind of collective mental discipline involving them being seen to enjoy themselves. She was affirming and releasing the re-creative love which lies within each one of us. She was inviting her fans to be ‘as one’, or as communion in spirit and in truth. 

To love one another is to worship God in spirit and in truth. I believe that, whether consciously or not, it was to this end that she told them to “Touch the person next to you. Tell them you love them – even if you don’t know them. Those watching this at home, do the same.” It was a sacramental moment, a hallowing of the ‘matter’, of our shared humanity, in the face of the sacrilegious acts committed a couple of weeks earlier in the name of God.

In saying these words, Ariana Grande was helping us all to face down our fear of terrorism, by being in deeper communion with one another as a free society. Perhaps she was thinking of the two generations who, in the last century, fought and died for that freedom. If so, she was also inviting communion across our generational barriers – all the nonsense we tell ourselves and others about how much better things were in the good old days. Not only was the singer telling them that love was very much alive within each one of them, regardless of the envy of religious extremists, but that we are all, regardless of age, gender, race, nationality, or politics, deeply at one with each other and that we are called to worship God, as we love one another, in spirit and in truth.