Forgiveness

Sometimes, on a blog like this, it’s hard to know whether to dwell on the deeper questions of faith and belief (the two are not necessarily the same) or the meaning and purpose of life as it is to be lived in today’s multi-choice world. Or perhaps living and faith itself, along with belief, are different facets of the same thing. They just need to be viewed through both lenses of life’s telescope, in order to get the full 3-D effect. Or, to deploy a slightly different image, to keep rotating the view so as to get the full benefit of all the possible permutations it has to offer. Here, I’m thinking of one of those telescopic toys we had as children. The end of it was  filled with coloured crystals which changed their configuration and patterning as you turned the ‘telescope’. The patterns changed with every turn. At least, I don’t remember them ever turning out the same in any two or three viewings. But perhaps that’s just a comment on my childish impatience. If I’d waited long enough perhaps the object would have run the full gamut of its possibilities and returned the viewer to the place they started from.

I sometimes think life is a bit like that. You pass a certain life bench-mark (no specific age, but you know when you’ve reached it) and realise that you are being returned to the emotional place you started from, however many years ago it was. The difference lies not in what you’re feeling right now, because all the old feelings are there pretty much unchanged from the minute they were sown through some careless remark made by a family member or teacher, or by life events themselves, but in how these feelings have been ‘ploughed under’, how they’ve been used to enrich, or possibly contaminate, the soil of your own life and of other people’s. Quite a lot of this has to do with the question of faith, though not exclusively with questions of belief, since faith and belief are not invariably connected to each other.

In terms of the ploughing metaphor, faith matters as much, if not more than, belief. I sometimes get asked, as a priest, whether what you believe matters. The answer I give is not really an answer because in a sense it’s the wrong question, or at least it’s a question that is framed in the wrong way. Whether, in the context of faith and belief, it matters, is a question only the individual can ask in regard to the purpose and meaning (I hesitate to call him or them the object) of faith which is God. That person may have been asking the question, one way or another, for as long as they can remember – way back into early childhood. Or perhaps they’ve never considered it worth asking until this particular moment which also may be their last, or not far off it.

The urgency with which the question is asked will depend very much on the moment. Very young children who come, as the poet Wordsworth puts it, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, ask it with a particular kind of urgency which may have to do with the need to recapture something they have known but which is fast receding from their consciousness, although it will never quite disappear from their memory. The person at the other end of the life spectrum will perhaps ask it with a more pressing and immediate sense of its urgency, or they will blot it out, along with the urgency itself, with whatever amnesiac method is available to them at the time.

In the case of the latter person, assuming they feel the need for faith, or sense that it matters, there is an avenue that remains open to them until they draw their last breath, and possibly for far longer, but that is pure conjecture. There are some things we cannot presume to absolutely know for sure. The person in the very final stages of life, if they are afforded the possibility (hence my not wanting to pass what might be taken for judgment if they die suddenly without a last chance to make this necessary choice) will reach for something like forgiveness. It may be the first time they have ever done this in all earnestness. In other words, unconditionally. It may be that unconditional forgiveness is not something that has ever made sense to them. It defies logic. Forgiveness, for them, must always depend on something in the way of retribution. They imagine that it depends for its own existence on conditions that need to be met. It is understandable that they should think this. Most of us when it comes to the need for forgiveness, our own need for it, or for our need to give it, equate it with terms which must be complied with for the forgiveness to be valid, or even possible. But the dying person does not, at this point, have anything to offer, to bring to the party, so to speak, when it comes to laying claim to forgiveness. But they need it and, or, they need to give it.

But how? Suddenly, the matter is a life or death issue which takes them way outside the bounds of belief. It takes them into the realm of faith. They need something more than belief to lay hold of, so that they can know themselves forgiven, or be able to forgive another and so find peace. They need to accept that they are loved irrespective of their need for forgiveness, whichever direction forgiveness needs to travel in at that moment. They perhaps don’t know how to go about accepting this love. They have never been shown or, if they have, they have not wanted to listen. It was too embarrassing at the time. So there is nothing really left for them to do except the one thing, which is to know, more than they have ever known anything in their entire life, that they want forgiveness now. Furthermore, they want to give it in equal measure to wanting to receive it. They need to surrender to it. The two needs, the receiving and the giving, are of a piece. They will also know, no matter what state their mind or body is in at this moment, that it is theirs in the wanting, and in the surrendering.

Silent Witness

        

 

   The difficulty lies in knowing what to think, despite all that has been said about how so many of us feel in regard to the events that took place on Capitol Hill earlier this week. They were unprecedented events, shocking, existentially disturbing.

            The attempted destruction of democracy; was it the end of civilisation as we know it, or the beginning of the end of the world, as some Christians will be thinking. “Bring it on” the millenarians among them will be saying. Or has Yeats’s ‘blood dimmed tide’, briefly ‘loosed’ on Wednesday, having built tsunami-like over the past four years whilst most of us were in denial, been stemmed? If so, by whom?

            Because the question all this obliges us to face is; are there in fact checks and balances at work that somehow re-calibrate the off-the-cuff decisions of a megalomaniac in such a way as to avoid the catastrophic? In time, no doubt, we shall learn the answer. Meanwhile, or at least until this week, many of us have continued to believe that the democracies we take for granted are indestructible, that there are always checks and balances, or discreet individuals, civil servants of sorts, quietly managing the day to day affairs of the country, so that World War III is avoided simply by removing a crucial communiqué from the desk of Donald Trump before he has the chance to see it and fire off a tweet that would bring us to the brink of destruction. Or, then again, perhaps there are not.

            But Wednesday’s coup makes even these simplistic questions more opaque and therefore more worrying. Were there discreet individuals oiling the works on Trump’s side too? Why did the National Guard take so long to get there? Why the shaming discrepancy between the way his mob was dealt with by the police in comparison to the military operation that was called in to brutally suppress the Black Lives Matter demonstration? Were the police, understaffed and seemingly badly trained, set up by other discreet individuals from within a now sophisticated and well co-ordinated conspiracy theory movement, manipulated like puppets by their top man, who was safely out of harm’s way, watching all that was going on from his TV screen in White House?

            All of this is to say that small people working behind the scenes, if there were such people and I think it is not unreasonable to suppose that there were, along with a parallel phalanx of clever social media operatives, can turn the blood dimm’d tide. How then, is it to be turned back?

            Joe Biden will do everything he can, as will his vice-president, advisors and supporters. But they can only work within the constraints of their professional limits and there are only so many hours in the day, and there is so much to do. But it is the turning of the blood dimm’d tide that must take absolute precedence over anything else, or at least before anything else can begin to be effected, including putting in place a national disciplined plan of action for halting the exponential growth of Covid 19. So who will be the ‘little people’, the undercover ‘civil servants’ who will work now for a righteous leader, with the same discretion and determination of those who perhaps worked for his predecessor?

             They will not be people in his immediate surroundings, although some may be. The vast majority of them will be completely anonymous. They will be you and me.

            There will be no visible road map for us to follow, no plan of action, no call to take to the streets or launch social media petitions. What there will be is an imperative to first return in silence to the memory of these past days and ‘stand’ in it, stand in it silently. By that I mean hold steady in it. Remember it in its shocking and brutal reality. Refuse to deny or forget it. Refuse to hate the participants. Regret deeply what it has done, especially if you were a participant yourself and then, especially if you are an American, remember that America calls itself ‘one nation under God’, so do this standing and remembering under God.

            God’s time is not linear. Moments in the past, even the very recent past, are redeemed and thereby opened up to new redemptive possibilities by the way we choose to remember them and then think of them in the present and by the way we all take responsibility for them. This is about acknowledging wrong from deep within ourselves, whether or not we were party to that wrong or complicit in it, whether we tacitly condoned it or went along with, or were perhaps indifferent to it. Indifference has played as big a part in the loosing of the ‘blood dimm’d tide’ as any amount of conspiracy theory rhetoric. Indifference is the wrong kind of silence when it comes to crises of the kind we have just witnessed.

            But, ironically, it is now silence that we most need, a different kind of silence. The silence of a call to collective prayer and repentance for which we must all take responsibility. First, we need to find repentance in ourselves, a place where we can be silent before God, bringing to mind the events of the past few days in the way I have described and then, for churches and people who pray, asking through the appropriate authorities, to be allowed to physically stand on Capitol Hill, silently holding candles signifying hope, light coming out of darkness, signifying repentance before God. The world will be standing with you in that hope and in the spirit of repentance that it requires.