No anger in God – 29 May 2020

On 8 July 1741, the Rev Jonathan Edwards preached a long sermon in Enfield, Connecticut, which was subsequently published and became famous.  It was entitled, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  We are told that Edwards was a quiet and reasonable man.  The sermon was not loud or fiery.  It was what the congregation expected to hear, and it was what Jonathan Edwards and many others deeply believed.  So what did he say?

Jonathan Edwards stood on one side of a “great gulf fixed” (to this day) in Christian understanding about God and about Jesus.  In Edwards’ understanding we are all “fallen”, defaced, defiled and disqualified by sin, cast out as Adam and Eve were for their disobedience.  God is angry with us, and all our woes stem from this fallen state, be they plagues and pestilence, malignant disease, droughts and floods, the rule of tyrants… we are getting what we deserve, the wages of sin.  But God, in his infinite mercy, sent his Son to be the sacrifice necessary to appease, to satisfy this divine wrath.  In the death and resurrection of Christ we are accepted again as sons and daughters of God – our debt has been paid, we have received mercy.  If, said Edwards, we are unresponsive to this sacrificial love, then we die in our sins and we go to hell.  That was Jonathan Edwards in the mid-18^th century, and it is, in various forms, often confused and watered-down, the theme of much Christian teaching and preaching today – it is called Substitutionary Atonement.

Some 400 years earlier, Lady Julian of Norwich taught differently about God.  Hers was a time of waves of Black Death, the terrible Peasants Revolt, misery, disease and poverty.  But she says:  I saw no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love.  Indeed she added:

From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord's meaning.  It was more than fifteen years after that I was answered in my spirit's understanding.  'You would know our Lord's meaning in this thing?  Know it well.  Love was his meaning.  Who showed it to you?  Love.  What did he show you?  Love.  Why did he show it?  For love.  Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more.  But you will not know or learn anything else — ever.

He came singing love… In grown-up faith, we review this tribal legacy of an angry God.  It does not accord with what we find in Jesus.  A just God does not mean a vengeful God.  An angry God may be our way of attributing our anger and frustration to God, thus making God in our image which is idolatry.  Jesus, writes Paul, is the icon of the invisible God[1], and in Jesus we find a different God, love truth and justice operating by changing hearts.  God is love, writes John, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.[2]  In contemplative life and prayer we are setting aside our fears of an angry God – along, one hopes, with all our idolatries and superstitions.  Atonement, at-one-ment, is atonement in love, by love, for love, since God is love… Θεὸς ἀγὰπη ἐστίν . 

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[1] Colossians 1:15

[2] I John 4:16… see also vv.7-12

How to pray in a plague – 22 May 2020

Rabbi Stuart Halpern met a friend who, the rabbi knew, had a relative critically ill with Covid-19 in hospital.  The friend said to the rabbi, You know, I’m having trouble lately finding any kavannah.  Kavannah is a Hebrew word, and it means serious purpose.  One biblical form of the word means the arrangement of the permanent furniture in the house; another usage actually denotes the place in the innermost part of the holy temple where God dwells.  This friend is telling the rabbi that he is feeling the opposite, all over the place, scattered and distracted.  Perhaps you know that feeling.  One of my colleagues phoned me shortly after his father had died, and he said, “I can’t concentrate, I can’t settle to anything”. 

An observant Jew prays three times a day.  Rabbi Halpern comments:  Kavannah is the intentionality we’re commanded to muster when praying… real and true and unmitigated gratitude to God for all His bounty.  And if my friend, a rock of quiet faith, couldn’t hack it, even in a time of a plague, I thought, we’re in trouble.  I think there are two things here, and they have to do with the nature of life, faith and prayer.  The first is a Benedictine insight, that work and prayer are inseparable.  They are interdependent – the hours of prayer in the monastery are called the Opus Dei, the work of God.  Simplistic Christian teaching tends to separate work and prayer, Martha and Mary are seen as different from each other.  But the man who couldn’t find his kavannah may need simply to go back to work. 

In April/May 1945, Berlin along with other cities in Germany and Austria lay devastated.  The central city had been flattened by 24 hour bombing and by Russian artillery.  This is what they called Stunde Null, the Hour of Nothing, Zero Hour… a shattered bewildered defeated and demoralised people now under strict orders from angry occupying powers… the end of Nazi rule and the start of something else.  This was when we began to see the Rubble Women, the Trümmerfrauen -- the men being mostly in captivity or dead or injured or trying to walk back home from far away.  The first task in all the trauma was to pick up bricks and stones.  Thousands of Trümmerfrauen got out in the ruins of Germany, organised themselves, demolished ruined buildings, cleaned up ton after ton of bricks and stacked them properly, dealt with masonry, with glass, with plumbing and wires, steel and wood… it is a tremendous story.  My point is that the work began to restore steadiness and purpose, kavannah.  Faith is sometimes, as we often say, simply taking the next step, putting one foot in front of the other, doing what lies to hand.  Faith says, never mind about miracles, don’t hang around for any deluge of comfort and reassurance, God is not about to make it all right again…  Do what needs next to be done, in faith.  Attend to the children, phone a friend, see the doctor, weed the garden… whatever it may be.  And pick up your discipline of silence and stillness in God’s presence.  Just as a ship, properly equipped with a rudder, will turn neither port nor starboard until the ship is under way, so the believer with no kavannah will get nowhere by sitting bothering about it.  Faith does not expect to know the end from the beginning or to have all the boxes ticked.  Now faith, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)    And as the plague and all its consequences seems to be shutting the doors on the familiar past, and opening new doors and possibilities, good and bad, it is time for the faith of silence and steadiness, calmness and kavannah… mostly doing what needs next to be done.

Tough truths…5 – You are going to die

Perhaps this last Tough Truth is the one no one is going to question or debate.  We are mortal, and one day we won’t be here.  We may be able to postpone that day, but as we know, it catches up with us in the end.  Death may come as a friend, or as an enemy, but it comes.  In that experience the prospect for us depends on various things… whether I have learned the relinquishing of control with gratitude and grace… whether I have that love and trust in God which enables me to leave in peace, what Jews know as shalom… whether I have done the work of sorting out memories and failures in my mind and heart… and of course, whether I am in pain or not, suffering dementia or not, well cared for, and so on.

 

Since we have embarked on this subject, we may as well make the most of it.  In Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife, the Rector is killed in a car smash.  Talking with his widow after the burial the Archdeacon comments:  The burial service is the most triumphant, the most exhilarating of all the services.  I know no music as resoundingly confident as the English of the burial service.  Perhaps that very confidence is what people shrink from now.[1]  And indeed they do.  People may shrink from what they see, or what they think they see, of God and religion, but I shrink from hopeless secular funerals held in some graceless hall and called a celebration of his/her life… and what we get, often as not, is a sentimental string of stories and memories, more or less appropriate or even accurate, and Amazing Grace on the bagpipes.  A Christian funeral by contrast celebrates the mercy and love of God in this person’s life. 

But this fifth Tough Truth is not about funerals.  It is about here and now, and the fact that, as the writer to the Hebrews put it:  Here we have no lasting city.  Or the Psalmist: …we fly away.  Or Job: …a mortal, born of woman, few of days…[2]  It is also about the fact that death remains obstinately a mystery.  When this life can no longer be sustained… what then?  We live with that question, and it is scarcely answered by dogmatism, whether by atheist or by Christian fundamentalist.  I may understand all mysteries, writes St Paul sardonically …but (if I) do not have love, I am nothing.[3]  The Tough Truth, you are going to die, has one response – in life and in death, faith, hope and love are what matters.

After a lifetime of pondering the fact of mortality, knowing for most of it that I needed more wisdom and sense than is ever to be found in Christian naïveté such as the gospel hymn, When we all get to heaven what a day of rejoicing that will be! When we all see Jesus… or any simplistic stuff about heaven and hell… I find my inchoate thoughts being greatly set in order by teachers such as Richard Holloway in his recent book, Waiting For The Last Bus.[4]  If we live in faith, we also die in faith, the faith of Abraham who went out not knowing where he was going[5] -- the faith of John who says we already have inherited eternal life, when we abide in love[6]. The Cistercian monk Thomas Merton expressed it movingly:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

I am well aware that I cannot end treatment of this Tough Truth with the ringing certainties that so pleased the Archdeacon, and therefore I may have disappointed some.  Faith, hope and love are what we have, it seems to me[7].  Richard Holloway ends his book satisfyingly for me with this quotation from Helen Waddell:

I think it will be winter when I die

(For no-one from the North could die in spring)

And all the heather will be dead and grey,

And the bog-cotton will have blown away,

And there will be no yellow on the whin.

But I shall smell the peat

And when it’s almost dark I’ll set my feet

Where a white track goes glimmering to the hills,

And see, far up, a light…[8]

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[1] Joanna Trollope: The Rector’s Wife (Bloomsbury 1992, ch.16)

[2] Hebrews 13:14; Psalm 90:10; Job 14:1. cf. Psalm 103, in the poetry of the KJV:

As for man, his days are as grass;

as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;

and the place thereof shall know it no more.

[3] I Corinthians 13:2

[4] Richard Holloway: Waiting For The Last Bus – Reflections on Life and Death (Canongate 2018)

[5] Hebrews 11:8

[6] I John 3:14, 16-17

[7] I Corinthians 13:13. Paul says these are what “abide”.

[8] whin = gorse.   Helen Waddell (d. 1965) was an Irish poet, translator, playwright, famous for her work on medieval Latin verse, her historical novel Peter Abelard, and her 1936 publication of sayings of the Desert Fathers. 

Tough truths…4 – You are not in control

It ought to be clear by now from recent events, to people to whom control is all-important, that our grip on control is shaky.  Resuming control moreover, or at least the semblance of it, is problematic.  Others of us have little difficulty understanding this… anyone whose life has been changed by the pandemic and lockdown, anyone who has sat with a very sick child, anyone who has been swept along by warfare, anyone in the grip of an addiction, anyone in dependent old age winding up in some care facility…  You are not in control, possibly feeling helpless, perhaps humiliated.
  

Richard Rohr’s Five Hard Truths are intended as statements about the nature of human life, however.  He is saying that anyone who imagines they control destiny and events, even in their immediate family, tribe, church or social circle, is actually deluded.  Numerous powerful people in history have found that out eventually.  In pandemic and lockdown we were suddenly reminded of this hard truth.  Those of us relatively privileged are reminded also of the increasing numbers of people powerless, pandemic or not, over security of employment and income, needing to put food on the table and feed children, unable to afford health care, deprived of basic rights, prey to exploitation – and in some places existing in refugee colonies amid squalor, hunger and disease.
  

Powerlessness has always been a human issue.  It is reflected in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures such as the Book of Job and parts of the Psalms, with their narratives of affliction, injustice, cruelty, alienation.  Slavery comes in many forms besides the institution abolished by law… for instance in addiction.  The first of AA’s Twelve Steps says: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.  That inner admission of loss of control, acceptance of the situation, is the first and indispensable step in recovery.  Other forms of powerlessness have been accentuated by the lockdown… the plight of many women, children, elderly folks, subject to domestic abuse and violence.


Now, the current crisis has led to the introduction of a new word among our contemplative teachers… actually an old word redeployed: liminal, from the Latin limen meaning a threshold, a border, doorstep, a place of crossing or of change.[1]  We are in a liminal time, they are saying.  The instinct of most is to get out of it as soon as we can, resume “normality” and familiarity, feel safe again.  Obviously, governments and scientists and I suppose economists must talk about “getting on top” of this virus, as they put it.  But contemplatives recognise also the kairos, the “liminality”.  The old remedies and principles, the old shibboleths, won’t suffice now, even if we apply them harder, longer and louder.  It is a time, says Sarah Bachelard, for stillness, silence and discernment among Jesus’s people.
[2]  


What are we to do at such a threshold moment? … In moments of transition, we are simply to be.  We are to pause and acknowledge that a transition is taking place.  Instead of seeking to abruptly pass through a threshold, we are to tarry…  A new reality is emerging, but we cannot see beyond the threshold.  All we know is that we exist in this moment, where everything is in transition.  We may experience a new way of being, but we cannot yet sense what it will look like.[3]  In Richard Rohr’s words, we are …into a situation that we can’t fix, can’t control, and can’t explain or understand. That’s where transformation most easily happens.


The border is not a safe place, ever.  It is not a place of control or even the illusion of control.  That is our theme today:  We are not in control.  It is a place of migration and migrants, border-crossing, strangeness, strangers and pilgrims, transition and change, newness and difference.  It is where you may have to alter your ideas or opinions.  It is where Jesus’s people are to be found, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those who weep.  It is not a place of solutions but of faith.  In liminal space and time we may see things Jesus saw… people living without erecting walls… people flourishing without exploiting the earth, air and water, not wasting, not plundering the environment… people preferring, in the words of the Hebrew prophet, mercy, justice, humility… 




APPENDIX – Extract from Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian Weekly, 24.4.20, “Hope in a Time of Crisis”…

But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure. But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit. If you are overwhelmed – well, it is overwhelming, and it will take decades of study, analysis, discussion and contemplation to understand how and why 2020 suddenly took us all into marshy new territory.

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[1] English words such as limit, limitation, come from limen.  Think of it when you call someone the dizzy limit…  Interestingly also perhaps is the currently important word “crisis” – it comes from the Greek krisis which means a crossroads, a place where you have to make choices.

[2] Sarah Bachelard: Series of six video talks, http://www.wccm.org/content/visit-special-website-contemplative-path-through-crisis

[3] Brandan J. Robertson: On the Threshold of Tomorrow, Liminal Space.