The Blank Page

The blank page. Every writer’s nightmare, or if not a nightmare, the fear that bugs us most of the time. What shall I write about? If only I could write a novel. But it is not given to me to write novels, or anything at all at the moment, though I have stories to tell.

Whatever it is that occludes my thinking right now, the blank page represents an awesome reality. Awesome is  a word that is used far too lightly nowadays. To be in awe of something is to reverence it, to be subject to it. A writer is always subject to the blank page. They are subject to the work. They owe it.

The blank page isn’t just about not being able to write anything right now. For the writer, being faced with the blank page represents a kind of death, not some elevated intellectual state trying to give shape to itself with words, but more what it must feel like to lose physical speech after a stroke or accident and be unable to articulate thought, unable to convey need.  

The blank page must ultimately convey something to the reader. It must resonate in some way with their need. What is written must be to the reader what Joyce described as an ‘epiphany’. It must reveal a sudden understanding of truth, not a specifically empirical or exclusively moral truth, but something the reader has always known but never realised they knew until the moment of reading. Writers enable us to discover for the first time something that is intimately familiar. God perhaps. They may or may not intend doing this.

The blank page, which is too often conflated with writer’s block, makes for an end of the road feeling. You will tell yourself that things will open up when you feel less tired, have a coffee – or something stronger, smoke a cigarette – or something stronger. Or perhaps you should just stop and take up crochet instead.  But the blank page admonishes you. It does not give you permission to shut the computer down or close the notebook. From the moment you first put finger to keyboard, or pencil to paper way back in your school days, when your English teacher thought you showed promise, you were committed. The commitment was not a decision on your part. It was made by someone else, voiced through someone else (your English teacher, perhaps) or else through accruing experiences that cohered into plots of one kind or another, or ideas that needed to be given shape so that they could connect with people and give shape to their own ideas, or a meaning of some kind to their life.

None of this is guaranteed to fill the blank page, of course. Thoughts do not flow in a mystical way onto a screen or notebook. They are honed, often out of nothing, or out of the mere whisper of a thought. But it is not the thought that counts right now. It is the blank page which exists for itself. It has its own life. It makes demands. Perhaps, in this sense, it has a certain religious side to it. But treating any creative process as a religious exercise of some kind is dangerous. It invites self delusion, for one thing, and grandiosity, which is death to writing and to any genuinely creative work. So you could say that it is best to keep self completely out of the picture, whatever the picture is, because we are not talking about self expression. We are talking about the kind of creativity which only comes to fruition through self discipline.

In art, as in life, self discipline is not a very exciting exercise, so it has to be learned early. I learned the need for it from the nuns at school whose parting words of advice to sixth form leavers were to get up in the morning at whatever time you’d resolved you would get up, no matter how late or early. It seemed inconsequential at the time, as a life resolution, but it has been invaluable to me as a writer. Sit in front of the blank screen or page regardless of what it gives, or doesn’t give, at any one time, but do it at the same time every day. Do the same thing with prayer, along with anything else you might resolve to do on any given day.

Holy Week: Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday. The Crowd Scene. So often filmed but so seldom experienced for what it was and what it still is. It’s easy to see it as another cameo image, one to add to other snapshot moments of the Gospels that hang around in our minds, like the Christmas manger, or the feeding of the five thousand, or the Sermon on the Mount. The first tends to get stored in our memory attic, along with the Christmas decorations. The others have a habit of popping into our consciousness, or sub-consciousness, when we are reminded of them by association, a summer picnic perhaps, or a public gathering of some kind.

But what of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem which marks the beginning of the most solemn time of the Christian year? To what might we compare it? Is it a mass gathering of fans? Is it a momentary escape from the harsh realities of ordinary life, both for Jesus and for his followers? Does this young Galilean give us a reason and an excuse to lay branches and garments at his feet as he passes by and to hail him as leader and deliverer? What is he thinking? What are the authorities thinking? What should we be thinking?

There are, of course, no straight answers to any of these questions, perhaps because the questions themselves are more important than the answer we might give to them at any given moment. They invite, instead, a much deeper understanding of what they really signify, of why the questions return to us. It is an understanding that takes us beyond words. If it were not so, the moment would have disappeared. But it does not disappear. It returns to us in our own most private consciousness as an invitation to follow this young leader. It questions and invites us to throw caution to the winds and join the crowd, even if, like me, you are not really a crowd person.

It seems, judging from his rather detached expression, that the young Galilean isn’t much of a crowd person either. He accepts the crowd but remains detached from what it offers him – adulation, instant fame, empty political fantasies. Instead, you get the feeling that he knows every single person who is shouting and waving as if he has known them all their lives. Perhaps they sense this as they shout and wave. Most crowd idols give their fans the feeling that they matter in a uniquely personal way. That is part of the art of being famous. But the young Galilean does not give off this kind of aura or convey this kind of knowledge. It seems he identifies with their suffering, their collective suffering as a people under occupation and the private most secret suffering of every person there. It is as if he knows each one, as he knows us right now in this moment.

What To Do About Lent

            I admire those who can claim that Lent is a time of renewal and refreshment. Right now, I doubt many of us can think of it in that way, if we’re honest about it. We have had almost a year of Lenten privation, but without the sense of joyful anticipation and purpose that should normally accompany this season. People are too tired, discouraged and generally fed up to be able to take on Lent. But the season is upon us, so what are we to do with it?

            Here I’m not just writing what I imagine a lot of Christians are feeling. I also sense that many people look forward, if those are the right words, to a period of abstinence in the calendar year. We all need to get a grip on ourselves from time to time and Lent provides us with an ideal opportunity to do this. But right now many of us simply don’t have the emotional reserves to do it.

            This being said, I think there is more than one way to think of Lent and to set about making the best of it. The first consists in braving out the inevitable feelings of guilt and worthlessness that accompany this season, however we choose to think of it. If I give something up and after a couple of weeks give up on giving up, I feel bad. If I banish Lent altogether and pretend to ignore it, after a couple of weeks I feel just as bad and, added to that, I also feel I’m missing out on something positive and good. This year, the last thing we need to be feeling is guilt but we don’t need self-induced ‘feel good’ techniques either, as these seldom work even at the best of times.

            In these times of deprivation there are three things that we really do need: companionship, a sense of purpose for our lives and the experience of hope. Given the present circumstances, I don’t think giving things up, aiming at spiritual goals that are way beyond our capabilities, even when we are at our best, and generally trying to become someone that we’re not, are going to deliver on any of these fronts. So why not try something more modest, and more humble this year?

            Christians reading this post will remember that Jesus tells us to take upon himself his ‘yoke’ which, he says, ‘is easy’ and in doing so to pattern our lives on his gentleness and humility of heart. You may think that this is a soft option, but it is in fact quite hard. For one thing, it will not give you anything much to feel pleased about in regard to having achieved anything, because the point of the exercise has nothing to do with achievement. The ‘yoke’ is the Cross which, at face value, is the opposite of achievement. It is the sum total of failure, all of our failures, both real and imagined.

            So we could spend some time this Lent unpacking our ‘failures’, sorting the real from the imagined. I think we’ll find that most of these failures will prove to have been imagined and should be binned. The space they leave could then be filled with gratitude for the realisation that we are not failures. This will be quite a difficult exercise for some of us to do. If we can stay with it for long enough, we might also take the opportunity to thank God for the fact that we are talented, marvellous, beautiful and in every way loved. Again, quite a difficult exercise.

            Another thing we could be owning this Lent is our sense of loss. We are experiencing loss on any number of fronts, but what we are most experiencing is the loss of companionship. We are all lonely. Even people who have family or partners with them are experiencing loneliness and loss. Being cooped up with the same person or people for months on end can be a lonely thing to experience. So during Lent, we could practice being in solidarity with other lonely people. We might even begin with those closest to us. How often in a single day do we ask our partner what they have been doing, how their work is going and engage with it intelligently? Do we notice if they look particularly down? Do we lovingly encourage them with a joke or a gentle reminder of how valuable they are to us? All of this has to do with being in solidarity with the lonely.

            I wrote about solidarity last week in the context of prisons. We are all, up to a point, prisoners of the Covid pandemic. We are prisoners in our own homes, but also prisoners of uncertainty about the future and all the anxieties and stresses which that places on us. Being in solidarity with the lonely means being present to the anxieties and stresses that pertain to the particular kind of loneliness that others may be experiencing. We get out of our feelings about our own situation in order to enter into what others may be going through and keep company with them in it for a few minutes every day. Having done this with those close to us, we can also do it for people we will never meet. We can hold them (thinking of them as individuals rather than as a broad category) and their experience of loss and loneliness, even as we are held in our own loneliness, in the love of God.

            The sense of purpose and hope that I spoke of are, I think, bound up with what comes out of the Lenten exercises involving gratitude and solidarity with others. To start with gratitude: It is only when you thank someone for something that, in a sense, you truly receive what it is you are thanking them for. The gift becomes a reality in the word or gesture of gratitude. If we are never grateful for anything, we never fully receive the blessings and gifts bestowed on us – which returns me to the discussion about failure. If we can’t bring ourselves to own our strengths, as well as our weaknesses, and be thankful for them, we will never learn how to deploy them in a way that becomes a blessing for others and which also honours God.

            This takes us back to solidarity. Being a blessing for others involves giving. Lenten giving can also be a source of guilt and a general sense of failure, but if we learn to be a blessing to others in gratitude for what we are and for what we have, it will very quickly be made clear to us who are the people or situations most in need of our material giving, be it money or any other kind of material asset.

            Having followed this meandering Lenten thread to its conclusion, we arrive first at the Cross, which is God’s absorbing of all that we hate about ourselves, and then at the empty tomb where we are met by the Risen Christ who is the embodiment of Hope. We don’t have to wait until Easter Day to experience this Hope, because it is not an event that we look forward to as a reward for having done Lent properly. It is with us now, in the moment of hearing our name called from within the silent space that these Lenten exercises has created in our own hearts.

The Season of the Angels

Today is the feast of Michaelmas, the beginning of the season of the angels.

As a child, I did a fair bit of travelling, usually on small airplanes. They were small by today’s standards, to the extent that I don’t remember there being a central block of seats, just two sets of three on either side of the cabin, which meant that most people could see out of the window. We children were invariably given the window seat or, if not, the one next to it, so you always had a reasonable view. The flights were fairly short, so I spent more time looking out of the window than filling in colouring books.

One of the things that I took for granted, and came to expect the minute the plane had become fully airborne, was to see someone who I took to be a mechanic positioned towards the middle of the plane’s wing. He appeared to be slightly bent over, as if he was investigating something. I took him to be a ‘he’, although gender was by no means a distinguishing feature of this personage. I occasionally asked my mother what he was doing there. She declined to comment, which was wise of her.

I’m not sure at what point in my travelling life this person no longer appeared on the wing of the plane, but I do remember realising that he or she wasn’t there anymore. I took this to be a normal aspect of growing up, that perhaps this guardian was no longer needed, or that I didn’t need to see him. It never occurred to me, and still doesn’t, that he might have been a figment of my imagination. This is because I assumed that it was perfectly reasonable for someone to be on the wing of a plane at thirty four thousand feet, or perhaps a little less in those days. I just noticed him there and thought little of it.

When you notice something, you don’t think about it beforehand. It just seems to occur from nowhere. I have had one or two similar experiences in later life, but very few. As with the guardian figure on the plane, they were never imagined.

To imagine something involves a degree of suspension of disbelief which, to begin with at least, involves a willingness to let go of one reality in order to grasp another. Both realities are true in a prosaic sense, although as we grow older we tend to distinguish one realm of truth from another. The film or story is true for as long as we are caught up in it, but ceases to be true in the same way when we close the book or turn off the television.

There are exceptions to this. The two truths, the two realities, can become one in moments of extreme need. Take the story of the apostle Peter who was led out of prison by an angel and ‘awoke’ to find himself in the street, his companion having disappeared (Acts 12: 1-11). This, I take to be an event that happened in real time, real space, but it had its origins in an altogether different dimension. Put in the clumsy language of ordinary mortals, it would seem that this liberator stepped from one reality, the reality beyond time as we know it, into another, the reality of time and the constraints, challenges and ultimate death that come with the passage of mortal time. In Peter’s case it was the reality of prison.

All of this raises a host of questions about the nature of belief and faith. There is plenty of scope for cynicism and for the despisers of religion to make what may seem like a convincing case against belief in angels. But, to my way of thinking, their arguments only convince to the extent that we confuse belief with faith and try to separate them, when ideally they should belong together.

Children remind us that confusing the two is not the right way to arrive at an understanding of faith and an appreciation of what informs true religion. A child who sees what they presume to be an angel, sees that entity without questioning its ‘existence’. Existence means nothing to the clear visioned child because the idea of existence demands proof and rational explanation. The child does not have the means for this at their disposal, especially if they are very young. The child sees, knows and believes. Very often the child does not even need to see in order to know and believe.

A person who arrives at this stage in later life might be described as a person of faith. They may arrive at this point of knowing as a result of a long and painful intellectual or spiritual search, or they may simply arrive at what can only be called a place of deep understanding, which is also a place of knowing. This can also happen in the aftermath of grief, illness or personal trauma.

I think this returns us to the season of the angels. Angels seem to be around people who are more interested in the understanding that leads to knowing, rather than in proof. This is what happens to the prophets. They have to be brought to a place of knowing, so that they do not burden themselves, and distract others, with the need to prove that what they have seen, heard and said is true and provable. They need to be in a place which allows them to be, in a sense, transparent interfaces with that other realm, so that they can assure the rest of us that the world and all that is in it is somehow held in the power of an ultimate goodness. Prophets and their angels are badly needed right now, but I can’t help thinking that they are very much around.

Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Trinity

Matt. 16:13-20; Is. 51:1-6; Rom.12:1-8

“Who do you say that I am?”

 

Most Sundays, it’s quite clear which text is the one the sermon should be focusing on, but this week is an exception. All three readings are, in a sense, enmeshed. There is the urgency of the prophet Isaiah, each verse prefaced with words like ‘listen to me’, ‘pay heed’, ‘raise your eyes heavenwards’. There is the exhortation of Romans in which Paul, just as urgently, ‘implores’ his readers to offer their ‘very selves’ to God. And, finally, the stark question put by Jesus to Peter, and to all of us, “Who do you say that I am?”

Who, indeed, do we say Jesus is? And what kind of an answer is expected of us? I don’t think we need to look far to find it, because we are being asked to consider and answer this question with nothing less than our very selves, and with our whole lives.  

It is a question that brings together all the questions that have ever been asked about anything that pertains to the human condition, to the future of the human race, to the meaning and purpose of each of our lives. And yet it is a question whose answer eludes us, while also demanding a definitive response. It brooks no conditional half measures. It brings us to the place that Peter finds himself in, having no other words than those given to him by the gift of faith itself.

So really what we are dealing with in these texts is faith, faith as a gift. The problem with faith, though, is that it is a gift that even though it is freely given, depends on our wanting to receive it. Where there is indifference to God, where there is no desire for God, there is nowhere for the gift of faith to go. In fact, I would go so far as to say that downright hostility towards God is better than indifference when it comes to faith. The angry and the hostile are at least feeling something in regard to God and perhaps trying to express that anger with good reason. They may be angry on someone else’s behalf because of whatever they or another person has experienced at the hands of the Church, or of religion in general.  Anger and hostility embody passion and the God we read of in the passage from Isaiah is a passionate God.

So there are no half measures in regard to how we feel and then respond to the question put by Jesus to Peter. We are obliged to respond to it with our whole being.

I am willing to bet that in the solitude and isolation that many of us have experienced over the past months, and may still be experiencing, that we have been confronted by this question on numerous occasions. When we are alone, afraid or vulnerable, questions about the meaning and purpose of life and our own particular life trajectory tend to loom large, especially for those who have difficulty sleeping at night. Sometimes we find ourselves in that half waking nightmare (a favourite of Jung’s, by the way) in which we feel that we are falling into a great emptiness, a great darkness. Sometimes it feels as if the whole world is ‘falling’ in that way too. These are frightening moments and we live in frightening times. But it is precisely from such moments that we hear the question being asked by Jesus of Peter, and of all of us. Who do we say Jesus is?

We do not hear it as judgment. It is not a test. It was not a test for Peter either. Jesus’s response was not to say “Well done. You got it right, so now you can relax in the knowledge that you’re saved”, or going to heaven – or some other equivalent. He says “it was faith that made it possible for you to know this”. Peter must have wanted that gift of faith. I wonder if he was surprised by what it felt like when he got it.

I ask this because I think the gift of faith is not only there for us when we want it, but that it does not always turn out to be what we think it is. It is not about making a magical transition from a place of not believing anything to believing everything the bible says, literally as written, or the Church teaches, as given. Faith is not about gearing yourself intellectually and emotionally to ‘believe’ things. It is about knowing. By that I mean the kind of knowing that was given to the prophet Job, and to Isaiah who speaks with such urgency in the reading set for this Sunday.

The ‘knowing’ of faith comes with experience, the kind of experience that demands our total self-giving as a response to God’s invitation to listen, to take heed, to raise our eyes heavenwards. The empty days that we may still be experiencing as a result of Covid ought to make it easier for us to do this self-giving, or self-emptying.

The whole of Jesus’s life, leading to his death on the Cross, was an act of self-emptying, or kenosis as it is also called. He prepared for it for forty days spent fasting in the desert, an empty place. He knew emptiness as hunger, as fear and as loneliness. But he knew it most importantly as the culmination of his willingness to be given over to us in our emptiness and in the spiritual emptiness of our materialist society, a materialism that drives our lives for most of the time.

Interestingly, Christian mystics who have spent time alongside holy men and women in India have found that the language of kenosis is not at all foreign to them and is even at the very core of their own belief systems. Who is to say that Jesus does not meet them with the same question he put to Peter, and puts to each one of us? And who is to say that their answer, if they have one, which they probably would not presume to have, differs in essence from the one given by Peter? At the heart of kenosis is the strange silent ‘not knowing’ that leads into the deep knowing of God that Isaiah speaks of.

These are difficult things to speak of without sounding overly abstract which is why Job, at the end of his tribulations, is reduced to silence. So, in effect, must we be. Remaining silent is not a matter of giving up on the knowing of God, as something far too esoteric and difficult. It is more about allowing the presence of Jesus in our lives to be his presence to a world and society that is badly in need of it. So it would be wrong to ‘accept the gift of grace (which leads to faith) in vain’ as St. Paul writes to the Church in Corinth (2 Cor. 6:1). We accept the gift of grace which leads to faith in whatever capacity it is given to us to accept it, and we live our lives accordingly. We do not live in a self-interested way, protecting our precious beliefs against all comers, lest our faith be compromised. We live in a kenotic way, emptied, as Christ was, so that we can be filled with God and with the world’s need for God’s love and God’s passionate desire to heal it and restore it to himself, just as the prophet Isaiah promises.

 

The Wheat and the Tares

 

Sermon for the 6^th Sunday after Trinity

Matt.13:24-30; 36-43

Two sermons about seeds and sowing on two consecutive Sundays. Someone is trying to make a point. You might say that it’s Jesus himself, but then is he talking to the same group of people on each occasion? Some of them will be the same. His disciples were following him around, so they would have heard last week’s story about the seed that fell on the good soil, as opposed to on dry stony soil. Or is it the editor of Matthew’s gospel? Editorial privilege allows for a certain ‘slant’ on things, even for manipulation of the facts, as we know from the newspapers we choose to read. If you want one particular view your ‘go-to’ paper will give you what you want to hear, even reinforce your prejudices at times. This is something we know we have to be wary of, especially in the digital age we now live in. Anything can be done to the news.

With Matthew’s gospel we know that there is a particular editorial slant, but it is not the kind of slant employed by tabloid journalists or various kinds of malware that gets hacked into our computers. The writer of this gospel is writing primarily for a Jewish readership, which is why we frequently see him set the sayings and parables of Jesus in the context of a Jewish festival, or of the Law. He is concerned with, among other things, Jesus’s Jewishness and his understanding of morality, and of how his very different approach to moral questions is to be understood when it comes to the way Divine judgment works.

So bearing all these considerations in mind, what is this Gospel saying to us today? In what context does it speak most forcefully to us? As with last week’s gospel, we are dealing with questions of good and evil, and of ultimate judgment.

This week, we hear about the kind of evil that, to use a common expression, ‘messes’ with things. If we relate the story to last week’s, the good soil has indeed yielded the wheat but somewhere along the line something got in there and wrecked the crop – ‘messed’ with it.

I am reminded of the situation we face in regard to Russia seemingly trying to mess with the Covid vaccine that is being developed by other countries. The question is, why would Russia want to do this? Why would anyone want to mess up something that is so badly needed by the rest of the world? I don’t think you need to be a political pundit to find an answer to this question. People usually mess up the good that another does out of envy and spite. So much of the evil that we see happening in the world around us – in international relations, in scurrilous business deals, in countless personal betrayals – stems from this evil root. We, or ‘they’ want something they feel they don’t have.

Historically, Russia has always felt that it does not quite belong. Somewhere in its heart is a sense of being denied access to the family of nations, to being part of Europe. So it behaves like any alienated person who needs to belong by messing with the things others have. In this sense, Russia is behaving like an alienated individual, someone who feels shut out of things, but makes it very difficult for people to include them. The alienated individual is someone who allows the good that is in them to be ‘messed’ with through envy and jealousy.

The Creation story itself embodies this ‘myth’. The turning point of destiny does not lie only in the garden of Eden, but in the battleground of Heaven, where the angels of God triumph over the demons and Satan is hurled into the abyss. Satan wanted to be like God – greater than God, in fact. In more prosaic terms, you could say that this cosmic battle was in fact a battle between love and hate. The battle has been won for all time in the Cross, but it also continues today in every malicious thought and in every betrayal that invades the human heart and messes with its potential for goodness.

But the story does not end here. In both the parable we read last week and in the one set to be read for this Sunday, we hear of judgment. In last week’s story, it is as if we bring our own judgment upon ourselves, depending on the state of our hearts. The word either thrives and bears fruit, or it withers and dies of its own accord, because of the state of the soil (our hearts) that it is planted in. But this week’s is quite different. This week, Jesus tells us that the weeds are to be allowed to grow up alongside the good plants and that they won’t be uprooted until the last day. Whether he means our own individual last day, or the end of time as we know it is open to conjecture. The main point is that there will be judgment.

The good news though, is that the judgment that Jesus is talking about is a redemptive one, if we are willing to play a part in it. We are not passive recipients of evil thoughts and impulses. Neither are we passive recipients of salvation. We have a part to play. We have choice and we have at least a measure of control over the things we do and say. The judgment for us, then, involves being truthful with ourselves about the real motives that drive our words and actions. What is the ‘desire’, to use a phrase often repeated by St. Paul in his letters to young churches, that drives us? Sin, as St. Paul often tells us is driven by ‘desire’; the desire, or need, to be better, richer, more powerful or more important than someone else, the desire to win at all costs.

It is important to own our real desires before God so that he can effect a redemptive judgment on them, so that he can burn out of our hearts the desires that ‘mess’ with the goodness that is innately ours, by virtue of the fact that we are made in his image and redeemed by his Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. In the end, he will do the necessary ‘burning’ whatever happens, as the parable of the wheat and tares suggests, but we will be a great deal happier, and the world a more peaceful and just place, if we begin this work with him today.

 

 

 

Alan Bennett’s Irene

 

We watched the first instalment of Alan Bennet’s ‘Talking Heads’ (currently streaming on BBC i-player) last night, starring the incomparable Imelda Staunton. It made me think of all the people I have labelled ‘difficult’ over the years, mainly for want of the patience needed to get into their ‘heads’, to meet them on the road of wherever it is they’re coming from in life and so understand them better. And perhaps to meet myself along the way too, piecing together memories and associations, separated from each other by time, but which, taken together, reveal who I am, and yield self-acceptance.

Bennet, as always, holds up a mirror for us to behold ourselves as we are. But what is more important, on the basis of last night’s episode, is what he reveals to us about the people we, or society, or the Church, or the government, have given up on; people who are, for any number of reasons ‘difficult’, who don’t tick boxes and who appear not to care about that.

What we are seeing, of course, is a picture of the alienated individual, the person who, for whatever reasons or circumstances, has painted themselves into a corner in life. These are the people it is easiest to dislike, even to hate; the ill-tempered receptionist, the interfering and sometimes destructive neighbour, the carping and over critical parent or partner, the person who cannot recognize kindness, or acknowledge it when it is shown to them, the selfish, the controlling, the overbearing – all of us, in fact, because all of us have in some measure for at least some of the time, been directly affected by unhappy people and become like them ourselves. The memories associated with them continue to wound us and unhealed wounds lead to hardness of heart.

Bennet’s ‘Irene’ is not a bad person. She is a deeply wounded person. This in no way exonerates her for her treatment of the neighbours across the road, who she spies on and persecutes mercilessly. Neither does it oblige us to like her. This is a mistake that many well meaning people, especially Christians, make in regard to difficult people, that we must at least act as if we like them, that we are, in fact, under a moral obligation to ‘love’ them. To pretend to love someone who you find it impossible to like, for whatever reason, is pure hypocrisy, and yet the Church persists in communicating this impossible message to its members.

Bennet does not ask us to like Irene. What he does do, brilliantly, is to allow Irene an opportunity to reveal who she truly is, despite her new surroundings. (No spoiler here). We see what appears to be a transformation of her personality as a direct result of her being accepted by those around her. We sense, of course, the barbed nature of this ‘acceptance’. She is laughed at, but she is also given a sense of belonging and purpose. As a result of this, a new person emerges.

When a person is accepted unconditionally, either because a particular set of circumstances makes that more possible, or because love in its true guise gives them the benefit of the doubt, they get another chance at life. They can reveal their true selves to others, and perhaps to themselves, as Irene seems to do.

So what is Bennet inviting us to do in all this? I don’t think he is talking about the need for patient kindness, in the hope that our being nice to someone will somehow transform them over time. Irene gets that kind of niceness from the social workers and the occasional police officer who visit her. I think he is asking us to try to at least imagine where the annoying, mean, miserable individuals who may figure in our lives are really coming from. What is the unbearable grief that binds them to itself? What is the failure or disappointment, or heartbreak from which they will never recover? Where have they been crushed and humiliated? How can we begin to reach them in these places, without, of course, them realising that we are doing that, because that would only hurt or humiliate them further?

These are not questions waiting to be asked. They are pain that is waiting to be salved. We salve the pain of others through silence, not through superfluous, if well intentioned, words. Silence means giving undivided attention to another person, listening to them as we hold their underlying pain, even if only for a few brief moments, and then taking it home with us to hold in the ambient grace of a loving God.

 

 

 

 

A Bounded Freedom

 

It seems that these endless weeks of bounded freedom, the only name I can think to give to this period of lockdown, are drawing to a close – for the time being at least.

There will have been days which literally defy description and there will be have been others which have passed like a dream, with day and night merging into a single colourless continuum. We have been thrown back on ourselves and on our own emotional resources. For many people, these resources are now at a very low ebb. Our faith, if we have one, may have been severely tested through depression or loneliness, through disorientation and a strange sense of uprootedness and disorientation, perhaps.

Faith is nurtured through relationship, through human exchange at every level. For Christians it is also nurtured through coming together to seek God on a weekly basis, with whatever words and actions we are given, or that have been handed to us by tradition. Despite everything that is being done online, some of us miss our Sundays, the day that punctuates the week in this rather formal way. We miss our church and its regular pattern of worship and ministry. We miss the communion of it, communion through the sacrament if we have that, and communion with one another at a very real level, real in the sense of being physically present to one another in a shared space that has been used for this purpose for generations.

Church is a place of rootedness. But people are mistaken when they think of church as a sterile environment stuck in the past. If roots are simply ‘stuck’ a plant or tree cannot live. Similarly, if prayer and worship are no more than habit, if it is emotionally stuck or out of touch with people’s lives today, it will not be a channel of life. But if prayer is genuine, if it consists of everything a person has to bring to the moment, worship will be genuine too. It will also be rooted, not boring, repetitive or trite, but sourced in the unchanging nature of God and rooted in the richness of our individual lives.

God does not change and yet God moves, within us and around us. Churches exist to signal this particular reality that we experience together. In the context of a church service, we are present to God from what can only be described as our real self, the place of no pretence where we meet the God who knows us and loves us as we are.  We are also among people we trust, or at least we should be. The purpose of church is to affirm and celebrate this rootedness in God and in one another, to celebrate a trust between people that has accumulated across the generations and throughout the centuries and will continue to do so for centuries to come.

The other name for this is communion, the communion of ‘saints’. Saints are not perfectly holy individuals. They are flawed human beings, past and present, who recognise their need for Christ and try to love one another in that place of need. Some of them will come together on a Sunday and do this in church.

The responsibility for celebrating this communion, or union of people at the deepest level of meaning in God, lies with those who minister the church service. They can be ordained or lay, depending on the tradition of individual churches. Either way, it is a particular calling and one which extends beyond the confines of any one parish or church building.

As someone who is called to serve the Church in this way, I have been giving some thought to how those of us who share in this calling can best respond to it, and to how the Church is to be for people, once churches are allowed to fully re-open for public worship. What will be asked of it?

I am getting a sense of what this might be from the relationships that have been formed or strengthened up and down the lane where I live. It is more than a sense of people looking out for each other, or being more friendly than usual – notably when it comes to negotiating one or other of the few passing places we have along this lane. We smile and make eye contact with the person who gives way, which is not something that always happened in the past. Courtesy is very much part of our shared life these days. We are not in such a hurry as we were. There is deeper communion between us as a result of the restrictions imposed by the Covid pandemic.

Being in deeper communion with one’s immediate neighbours, as a result of our shared experience of lockdown, says something about what it means to be the Church. We are in fact being the Church when we practice courtesy to one another. But there is more to it than that. For the Church, courtesy is a graced action. It comes from having spent time engaging with the source of all courtesy and kindness, with engaging deeply in God. The isolation and solitude of the past months have meant that many of us have had to re-learn the habit of dropping down into silence in a way that sees silence as the source of all goodness, and of life itself. There have even been times, during these months, when silence literally ‘commands’ our attention.

To pay attention is to respond to a command from God to listen deeply to the world and to our immediate surroundings. It invites us to draw people we know into the presence of God, from within our own deepening encounter with silence and with whatever we wrestle with in moments of real solitude. But we also do this in solidarity with our neighbours, naming the ones we know, or simply holding the ones whose names elude us in the ambit of God’s love. This is what the Church of the future will consist of, a body of people who have learned how to hold others in God.

Despite lockdown, some figures suggest that there has been a marked increase in interest in Sunday church services over the past weeks. On one particular Sunday the internet briefly collapsed under the sheer weight of Christian prayer, teaching and worship. This is interesting because there are many parish clergy who have felt lost and disorientated over these past months, despite some of the wonderfully imaginative outreach that has been effected through the internet and despite the pastoral sensitivity and vision of some of our bishops. It has been a wilderness time for them.

The Church, like many people, is enduring a wilderness period, not only because its doors have been closed, and may remain so for a while yet, or because collective worship has not been possible, but because we are being invited, perhaps, to deepen into this sense of loss and absence, into the wilderness, and, what is more difficult, to not be in too much of a hurry to emerge from it.

As with lockdown itself, I believe we clergy need to emerge slowly and cautiously from the wilderness we may have been experiencing. We need to own it fully. Owning our own wilderness enables us to minister in the fullest sense to the emptiness and loss which many people experience in their lives, irrespective of Covid. These feelings of loss can be attributed to specific crises, of course, but for the most part they constitute a general state of mind, a sense of purposelessness and futility, a lethargy of the soul. If the Church, and its ordained ministers in particular, are to speak to this soul sickness, and thereby proclaim the good news of the Gospel, those of us who do so in an official capacity will need to re-learn acceptance, acceptance of who and what we are before God (and that takes some doing) and acceptance of the world and the Church itself, as they are before God. In the eyes of God, both the Church and the world are fundamentally good and deeply loved.

Herein lies the paradox of the Church’s prophetic vocation. We are to know ourselves as loved by God, and capable of goodness, while at the same time being acutely conscious of the evil and suffering that is perpetrated in the world and within the Church’s own bounded structures. Holding these two opposites together, the capacity for good and evil, becomes a way of life, not just something we do when we feel up to it, or can find the time, but as the guiding knowledge that we are called to live by.

We also do it in solidarity with previous generations. We inherit both the good and the consequences of the evil that may have begun through their actions, in both the Church and the world. We are in solidarity with the BLM movement now, because injustice and racism continue, but we also bear the burden of slavery itself which, lest we forget, continues, as people are trafficked all over the world into various forms of modern enslavement. We carry the burdens of previous generations, and of our own, but we do all this from within a place of inner silence which is not closed in on itself, but open to the possibilities of redemption and of forgiveness. We do it from a place of knowing that all that we are holding is held in God, as we ourselves are held.

Those called to the ordained ministry will need to have learned to know themselves from within that silence and see it as their ‘default position’, the place or ‘locus’ of understanding to which they continually return in order to rightly understand and live out their calling as deacons, priests and bishops in God’s Church. Lockdown may have helped some of them begin to face the realities of this calling, the seeming loss of direction and purpose, the irrelevance of status and ‘job description’, and of pointless and energy sapping meetings and committees. Without this time-consuming activity, some of them will be feeling marginalised, even redundant. They may even be questioning their calling. This is hardly surprising, since these very skills were probably being sought for when they were first selected, and subsequently trained, for ordination.

But the good news is, that much of what we clergy have become accustomed to, and even comfortable with, is not God’s idea of what it means to be the Church. In fact, without all these distractions from our true vocation, during these wilderness months, the Church’s life is only now just beginning. We can be confident then, that as long as we love one another and God’s world from within that often lonely and silent place, and work together for healing, as the apostle Paul wrote to the clergy in Corinth, we ‘do not accept the grace of God in vain, for now’ he says ‘is the acceptable time; See, now is the day of salvation.’ (2 Cor. 6:3)

 

 

 

Pentecost at Minneapolis

 

Pentecost is upon us, the season of fire and purgation. Is this what we are seeing in Minneapolis? The anger is righteous, though the violence is not. The poet Yeats might have envisaged it as ‘mere anarchy loosed upon the world’. Random chaos, in other words.

It’s easy to think of anarchy as random chaos but this anarchy, that we are seeing right now, is rooted in something. It is not random. It is the unforgiven sins of history being visited upon us, yet again. It is also a kind of holy void which God may be filling with the rage itself.

I have been reading the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament recently and it seems to me that God is not averse to the use of extreme violence, something that I have always found puzzling. But perhaps this is only due to my own partial understanding of the picture, when it comes to the Bible in relation to the violence we are seeing in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US.

What if we think of these events as reflecting something of Pentecost, the feast of fire which emboldened and enlivened the disciples and the Church of today to stand for the truth? The anarchy we are seeing is dangerous because it has spilled over into attacking one of the last remaining institutions that speaks for truth and objectivity. Suddenly what is righteous dissolves into dangerous anarchy. A reporter is arrested, on camera, while reporting these events. There is a complete absence of law enforcement – no police, no national guard. The streets belong to the angry and the oppressed.

We feel something of this dangerous situation wherever there is a failure or absence of wise governance, or of leaders with integrity who can be trusted. It is almost naïve nowadays to talk of trust in relation to politics, perhaps because politicians so despise the people they are paid to serve that their arrogant patronising of them will, they think, go unnoticed. But sooner or later, far too late, people will wake up to the fact that they are being played for fools. The rage of the oppressed (and there is none so potent) and the contempt of the powerful for their own people runs the risk of spilling over into ‘mere anarchy’, not only in Minneapolis but, as the Cummings affair suggests, also in the UK.

It is time to hold the fire of Pentecost in our hearts, so that its energy can spill over into a world crying out for leaders and law enforcers who will enact justice, speak the truth and let the oppressed go free.

How will the Church, post Covid respond to this challenge?

Social Media and the Virtual Church

 

There is a monumental twitter and facebook spat going on at the moment, having to do with whether and where it is or isn’t right to celebrate the Eucharist outside a church. It’s raised other questions too, about the validity, for want of a better word, of streaming worship and whether church buildings should remain open, and if so for whom. There is a great deal of anger and pain being expressed, to the extent that I find myself wondering whether the issues themselves are the cause, or whether other things are surfacing in our common life of which, until now, we were not aware.

The controversy seems to be largely focused on church people, ordained and lay, some of them highly placed. Perhaps it has extended itself more widely in the social media scene, and it is only because of my fairly limited following that I’m not aware of whether other people are concerned about these questions, whether they feel they have a particular interest in them. I think I can safely hazard a guess that most of my non-churchgoing friends are fairly indifferent to them.  So where does that leave those of us who, willingly or not, have been caught up in this fracas?

Where it leaves us has to do with what it is about these questions that really matters to the individual and how the whole question of public worship needs to be thought about theologically. It would take a book to answer the second question, even if it were to be limited to the contextual circumstances of a pandemic. But I think there are other more pressing pastoral issues at stake right now. These have to do with feeling very disorientated and afraid in these unprecedented times, and with the attendant anxieties which that fear brings to the area of public ministry, to its relevance and place in our lives. In this respect, it feels that those of us who are ordained are coming adrift from our moorings. It would not be fair to blame bishops or other church leaders for this sense of dislocation because many of them are probably feeling the same way.

Be that as it may, our passionate attachment to the issue of public worship and its attendant questions may also have to do with fearing the loss of a certain kind of purpose, of calling, perhaps. Ordained people are feeling vulnerable, especially those who do not have other paths along which they can minister, such as the continuation of food banks, homeless shelters and other permitted good works. Church buildings witness to the abiding presence of God in our midst in practical, as well as spiritual, ways. We all belong to our buildings, as our buildings belong to us. We also belong to one another in the context of social media.

I am not a parish priest, but I can imagine only too well how at a loss many priests must feel when they have only the internet and the phone to rely on for exercising pastoral and liturgical ministry. The tone of the exchanges on social media does not seem to acknowledge the challenges they face, still less express the affirmation which they must be needing. There is very little kindness in it all. If we were to begin to outdo one another in human kindness, we might find that questions of liturgical practice under lockdown would resolve themselves. Would the Church then look significantly different after Covid?

Quite a bit has been written about the Church’s structural future, but we also need to think about what that structure will embrace, and what it will convey to the world. Will the Church consist of people who are so anchored in God’s love that whatever they do or say will convey God’s love for them and for those they serve?

Right now, we are like the frightened disciples, huddled in the upper room when the risen Christ appears to them. They are busy arguing about the truth of the reports they have heard, as we are busy arguing about how public worship is to be conducted under lockdown. They are unstable and afraid, as we all are right now. Christ breathes peace into their individual fears, as he breathes into ours. He makes it possible for love to take hold of them again.

To be effective in ministry, wherever that takes you, is to know God’s love, to love God in return and to love his people. It also should inform how we conduct discussions online.