John Sherbourne

This post begins with an extract from a feature that appeared in the Guardian on April 15th. It tells of the many difficult conversations that had to take place before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It continues with an article by Haddon Willmer in which he writes about the need for similarly tough conversations to take place now and argues the importance of Church facing up to and debating the “disagreements, frustrations and fears” of the current Brexit crisis. 

From the Guardian 15 April 2019 Blair and Ahern

Of all of the meetings we were involved in leading up to the Good Friday agreement, none were more difficult than those with family members of victims of the Troubles. Widows of British army soldiers and RUC officers, sons and daughters, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers of nationalists, republicans, loyalists. There were those who could not understand why we were seeking a deal with people who had killed their loved ones, or releasing from prison people who had committed horrendous crimes. Yet there were also those who made us promise to make the process work to ensure that others would not have to go through what they did. These conversations made us determined to ensure that such courage would form the basis upon which those following could build a better future.

Yet in practice, it was also time away from these conversations and from the media storm that enabled the Good Friday agreement to come together. It was time in the company of rivals with differing versions of what was right, and what was wrong, what was possible, and what was not; people with the personality and resolution, when surrounded by uncertainty and competing visions of the future, to put together a new power-sharing agreement.

Nobody should compare the tragedy of the Troubles to Brexit, but … the necessity for calm matters even more

Of course, nobody should compare the tragedy of the Troubles to Brexit, but as the rhetoric becomes stronger, the language becomes more divisive and inflammatory, the divisions in the Tory and Labour parties more evident, the need for calm matters even more. Having conversations with the public matters. Speak to those who voted remain, the 48%, alongside those who voted leave, and try to understand both. Speak to those who do not tweet incessantly or rage endlessly on radio phone-ins, as well as those who do. Understand that the public are undergoing the same process of churn and reflection as the politicians, and give them permission to be honest about that. Getting away from the media chaos to do this matters. Getting the right personalities together from across parties matters. Teams of rivals must be built.

From   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/14/good-friday-agreement-ireland-brexit-tony-blair-bertie-ahern

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Above is part of a longer article by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern relating the achieving of the Good Friday agreement to our task now of working together to make the least damaging outcome of the Brexit issue that we can.  

It is a call for engaging in conversations, which have become more difficult than ever, across the gulfs of disagreement, fear and frustration, which now divide us. The conversation is not only for politicians but for people in general.  Not only for those who ‘tweet incessantly’ but also for those who don’t. Not only for those who talk freely because they are excited or fearful, but those who tend to keep quiet and take shelter in fraught situations – even while they worry in private. We are all already living in the confusion of the way to Brexit, and we will all have to live with it as it unfolds for years to come.  

Politicians talk and show how demanding it is for ordinary human beings to deal with a complex of issues like Brexit – or the Northern Irish situation as it was in the 1990s. We expect them to do the talking for us and to solve the problem and we criticize and despise them from failing, from our positions of superior evasion. Blair and Ahern remind us that many different people were engaged in difficult conversations out of which real if imperfect change happened, a working agreement to work together in future. In those conversations many people, half-politicians or un-politicians moved from their silos to talk with the enemies next door. That was not easy, either to start or to persist with.   

On Brexit many of us are still in our silos, Leave or Remain. Families and friends avoid breaking up by never talking about it. What does it do to our relationships when we live closely together, feeling that some issue is real and important, and yet being unable to talk about it together, calmly and constructively? It is like a disease that makes holes in the bones. 

Questions about the UK and the EU have been pressing on us for the last four years. All through those years, many of us have been going to Church, indeed trying to ‘be Church’.  But there has been virtually no conversation about Brexit amongst us. Why not? Does following Jesus make it a matter of indifference to us? Is Church for us a haven of peace, in a troubled world? All through this time, many of us in Church have been deeply concerned about Brexit and its consequences but we have not shared them, though we would like to think being Church implies a deeper than average sharing of life. We see the peoples of these islands divided, bewildered, drifting towards a cliff-edge, while some deny that there is such a thing. But we don’t talk with one another.  

We don’t talk because we fear falling out with each other. Why should we fear that would be the outcome of talking? We are aware of our passions and sensitivities, and those of others, and we don’t want to let them loose. But why could we not keep them in check enough to talk calmly and constructively? I think there are two reasons. One is that we can see that such a conversation would require us to be ready to get beyond our ready-made, slogan-like opinions, and work together to understand the whole situation better. Hard work like that requires patience, humility, curiosity and comradeship.  

The second reason is that when we pause to contemplate the mess we are in because of Brexit we get a glimpse of the road ahead, and it is, whatever happens, hard and steep. Whatever side we come from, Leave, Remain, of Don’t Care, it will require us to accept and live with uncomfortable outcomes. And yet, unless we can accept them with goodwill, unselfishness, care for the poorest, and the readiness for sustained hard work, we will not be able to live the future that is coming with peace and joy, love and justice. We hold back, hoping there will be an easier way, even praying for a miracle, a happy outcome achieved by a power greater than our own.   

Like it or not, the people of the UK are set a task by Brexit: it has to be lived through somehow or another. Christians in Church are set a life-task, to be salt and light, living in and serving in the world.  These are not two distinct tasks, as though we could concentrate on one and ignore the other, or be faithful and effective in one and careless about our failure in the other. In the grace of God, they have been given a large overlap, a deep intertwining. They are not identical, but they are not separable, for us now. This is why we should talk about Brexit in our secular contexts, but have the conversation in Church.  

In 1995, Rudyard Kipling’s  If  was voted the most popular poem in England.  Like much of this great writer’s work it is embarrassingly controversial.  There are lines in this poem that make us say, That’s right – it would be good to be like that. There are others where we shake our heads, as a whisper warns us, Not that way.  

As an example, I would be glad if I always achieved what he says right at the beginning: 

            If you can keep your head when all about you   

            Are losing theirs and blaming it on you….

But I am not so sure about:

            If you can make one heap of all your winnings

           And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss….

There is a difference between courage and recklessness. 

When we come to the core of what Kipling thinks will make his son ‘a Man’, we find it both alluring and alarming, truly human and yet dangerously inhuman: 

             If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

             If all men count with you, but none too much…

Is this not a fanciful invitation to be impractical and radically untruthful: human beings cannot put themselves beyond being hurt? The attempt to be invulnerable leads a person to shrivel inside a hard protective shell, whose real message is not, ‘I cannot be hurt’, but ‘I will not let myself be hurt, even if it costs me my soul’. 

The second line here is specially teasing. It is good to say, If all men (viz. ‘all people, everybody) count with you – if you respect everybody and aim to give them their true worth, though you can never do full justice to them. But then this is cut back by the ‘but none too much’. Is it not a goodly characteristic of human being that Others can and do come to count with us boundlessly, beyond our counting, beyond our measured control and protection of ourselves?  Is that not one point where we get closer to our Father in heaven (Matthew 5.43-48, Romans 5.1-11)? Is this line miserly rather than generous? 

And so to Kipling’s climactic promise, for the one who has fulfilled all the ‘Ifs’: 

             Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

             And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

There is danger here: ‘What shall it profit anyone if he gain the whole world and lose his own life?’ (Mark 8.36). Is Kipling saying what Jesus said? His phrase, ‘which is more’, goes some way to reflect the scale of values Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount: life is more than food, the body is more than clothing (Matthew 6.25). But the ambition to be a self-sufficient person, ‘possessing the earth and everything in it’ is hardly compatible with the Psalmist’s contention that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’ (Psalm 24.1) and Jesus’ word and example of the meek inheriting the earth (Matthew 5. 5). Is Kipling’s Man meek? 

Kipling’s ‘Man’ is not peculiarly British, or dated around 1900. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the temptation of Kipling’s Man, both as a noble ideal and in its perversion in Hitler’s Nazi culture.  And as a disciple of Jesus, seeking to follow his Lord closely as he lived fully in his time and place, not running away from its complexity and pain, he came to spell out  his own ‘If’ and ‘Then’.  He wrote to Bethge, the day after the bomb plot failed on 20 July 1944, saying simply that he had learned faith through living fully in this world as it was. And key to this learning, was to ‘abandon completely trying to make something out of oneself’. Is that not what Kipling was exhorting his son to do? If he fulfilled the conditions set out in all the ‘Ifs’, the Earth would be his and he would be ‘a Man’. The Man would be the outcome of his self-making. But Bonhoeffer saw it quite differently: 

Living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities… we throw ourselves completely  into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.  That is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a human being, a Christian.

Well, that’s my reaction to Kipling’s great poem. What is yours? Tell me if you think I need to be corrected. But above all, think about it for your own sake. 

And don’t let yourself be put off by Kipling’s ‘Man’. It’s easy to think ‘Woman’ all the way through – though it would spoil the rhythm to put the word ‘Woman’ into  the final line. We are all human, and what this poem is getting at is the question of being human.   

If you can keep your head when all about you   

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

 And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

 And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

The Poems.  In his ten prison poems, Dietrich Bonhoeffer  breaks out of the disciplined reticence of a learned Prussian theologian, and comes into the light as a human being, struggling with loneliness and fear and anger, suffering  as war and bad government and loss of faith and love destroyed humanity, all  the while trusting in God, following Jesus, and being sustained in the good company of God’s grace. 

If the theological letters only speak to a few, the poems are accessible to many. 

In this talk, large parts of the poems will be read in English translation so that everyone has the opportunity hear  Bonhoeffer for themselves.  

Bonhoeffer is famous for  his resistance to the Nazi regime,  which cost him his life.   And for some of his  ideas which have been stirring up theologians, for and against,  even to the present day.   It is easy to lose the man in the fame and in the thousands of words of his prose that were smuggled out of his cell. But the human being can’t be missed in the poems. There, we can meet him, person to person. 

The  Season  This talk is being given at 7.30pm on 9 April 2019, the anniversary of his being killed in Flossenburg  concentration camp on 9 April 1945.  He died just after Good Friday and Easter Day, which, that year, were on 30 March and 1 April.  We will be reading his poems just a few days before Good Friday this year.  

We can live this season together as Bonhoeffer lived it – with Jesus Christ.  He loved life and looked for its fullness, in company  with the Easter  Lord and Giver of life.   Keeping company with Jesus  means staying with him in Gethsemane,  and  Bonhoeffer had for many years not evaded the dark Gethsemane he along with many others was called into. 

He wrote about  the ‘constant knowledge of death and resurrection’,  which goes with   ‘living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.  In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but the sufferings of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith;  that is metanoia, and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf.Jer.45!).’

And in his final poem which is full of joy and love and hope,  there is an unflinching yet peaceful  reference to Gethsemane:  ‘And should you give us  the difficult cup,  the bitterness of suffering, filled to the very brim, we will take it thankfully without trembling, from your good and beloved hand.’