Haddon’s Blog

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

——————————————————————————————————————————–

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.’

Haddon Willmer became friends with Elizabeth Davey (pictured below) in the years she was working for her doctorate at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, resulting in her book, A Persevering Witness: the poetry of Margaret Avison (Pickwick, 2016). Avison was a Canadian Christian whose often teasing mysterious poetry is there for us to read as Christian witness, as modelled in John’s Gospel, with its two directions, ‘Come and See’ and ‘Go and Tell’.

On her retirement from Tyndale University, Toronto, Elizabeth gave the Convocation address. Here it is. Elizabeth says: I would be curious to interact with anyone who has an interest in the literature that I love. 

Today is my 42^nd commencement here at Tyndale. I think I have a better sense of your feelings and thoughts—more empathy–than I ever have.  I expect you have a myriad of emotions—celebration, relief, nostalgia, fear of what lies ahead. Some of you are buoyant, excited, even impatient, because the way seems clear; others are not so sure – maybe a little reluctant to leave . . .

I, like you, am not going back to my office after this ceremony to look at books and syllabi, planning for next year’s courses or to exchange ideas with colleagues for some administrative issue to solve.  I, too, am packing up my belongings to head to the next part of my journey—in newness and uncertainty.  I need the same kind of assurances, advice, and motivation for the unknown as you do.

When we talk about a journey to describe our lives we turn time into a spatial metaphor to heighten the significance of unfolding events.  At the same time, the metaphor is so common we cease to notice its significance—whether it be Homer’s Odysseus, Virgil’s Aeneas, Dante’s own namesake—or our own.

John Bunyan’s 17^th century classic The Pilgrim’s Progress is an adventure story of the pilgrim from the City of Destruction who exclaims, “What must I do to be saved?” and responds to the admonition to “flee,” starting on the straight and narrow path towards a new home—the Celestial City. We follow his journey through the Wicket Gate, to the Cross, through Vanity Fair, down the Valley of Humiliation, and on to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, into Doubting Castle.  We appreciate his companions Faithful and Hopeful. And of course, the allegory pushes us to make intimate connection with our own lives. 

One place in The Pilgrim’s Progress we are tempted to gloss over is Christian’s stopover at The Palace Beautiful. In this Way Station, he meets, in Bunyan’s quaint and charming language, four “beautiful damsels”: “Discretion, Prudence, Piety, and Charity” who ply him with questions about his journey and in return offer him wise counsel and equipment for the next part of his journey. 

These four “damsels” catch my attention because, first of all, they are women in a tale devoid of positive female figures.  And they are functioning in the story as teachers—mentors to the traveller. I make the connection between Paul “teaching” Timothy in his farewell letter and these lovely ladies, as I draw on several women writers who have inspired me and spur me on my pilgrimage—even into the yet unknown.

From prison, the great apostle Paul writes to Timothy that his “time of departure” has come. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. . .”  There is urgency to his words: He calls his journey a race. And he has wisdom to impart to his timid protégé: 

            Do the following, Timothy:

            Rekindle the gift of God that is within you

            Guard the good treasure entrusted to you . . . .

            Because: God saved us and called us with a holy calling

            and because: I know the one in whom I have put my trust. . .

Timothy, “You guard the good treasure entrusted to you. . .  and God will do for you as he has for me–guard “until that day” what we have entrusted to him!”

These last words of St. Paul warm our hearts and steady nervous feet as we stand in the doorway, ready to leave this Way Station. 

A delicate rendition of Paul’s sentiments is reframed in an excerpt of a poem that is a prayer by the Canadian poet Margaret Avison (right):

Unclasp my heart

from my own cramped story

to new, in-threading light, a start

Towards searching out your glory.  

 The poet beautifully identifies the components of the master plan for the journey:  “Unclasp my heart”:  release me from my own confining and limiting—cramped—story . . . and send me out: start my searching out  God’s glory . . . however elusive the idea seems to be.           

The retreat leader and Anglo-Catholic writer in early 20^th century England, Evelyn Underhill, challenges us to embrace what she calls “the spiritual life.”

She sounds surprisingly contemporary when she asserts, We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do, forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in the fundamental verb, to Be.

Craving, clutching, and fussing—don’t you love her colourful descriptions of our inner state—craving, clutching, and fussing, at times on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual—even on the religious—plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest,” she concludes.

(1) Her antidote and my first principle for your and my success in the days and months and years ahead, is to be intentional in cultivating our inner lives: We need to attend to two worlds! We have a double obligation to the seen and the unseen world. . . while we find our jobs, build our careers, make our living, establish our homes, make new friends, settle into our churches, seek out entertainment and recreation.

What else do we do, and want, and expect to have?  How do we nourish our souls? How do we rekindle the gift of God in us? How do we guard the good treasure entrusted to us? What will that intentionality look like? Perhaps this injunction is our new assignment with papers and projects completed!

(2) Second, sometimes we have a misplaced inferiority complex, seeing our faith experience as limiting our accomplishments in the world.  We can feel overwhelmed, not unlike Timothy who Paul admonishes, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather of power and love and of self-discipline.”

A small Christian university is especially vulnerable as we try to compete with larger academic players.  Individually and collectively we will be tempted to cowardice and fear.

Flannery O’Connor, the southern American Catholic writer of provocative and jarring short stories is commended by her critic Robert Ellsberg for her capacity to see the world in the light of faith—my second recommendation for our future success:  As she is wont to do, O’Connor flips our expectations of reality.

The writer herself wrote in a letter to a friend that “the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox         Christian and a novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe.”

Her perspective transformed her art into compelling stories that have intrigued readers for decades.

How might that look for each of us to see the world—our fragile and faltering world around us— in the light of faith? A quick perusal of news on the internet each morning is sometimes enough to make us quake with fear and immobilize our efforts to bring light and hope in our own local spheres of influence.  How do we people of faith maintain perspective and act accordingly? 

Further, what might it look like for each of us to see our own world—our equally fragile and faltering world inside of us—in the light of faith? I have on my computer a recent video of my 3-year old grandson sitting on the floor of our church nursery beside one of our college students. Frankie is singing with enthusiasm, “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty. There’s nothing that he cannot do!” Know the song?  The clincher for me is at the very end with all the hand motions: “There’s nothing that he cannot do—FOR YOU!” Out of the mouth of babes, as we say, comes our message of hope.

Not only does the Christian novelist live in a larger universe.  So does the Christian teacher in our public schools.  So does the Christian nurse in our hospitals; the Christian social worker among broken people. So does the Christian businessman or woman, so does the Christian Starbucks barista! . . . We bring Jesus with us wherever we go!

Let me tell you of my encounter with a former student Sokreaksa Himm.  At the beginning of a Literature and Composition class in 1990, I asked my students to introduce themselves by writing a story of some “spiritual experience” that impacted their lives.  A polite Asian student in somewhat hesitant English came up to me and said he did not think he could do that.  I encouraged him to try to think of something . . .  A challenge of wills I thought.  I was unprepared for the essay I received—it was about lying under a pile of dead bodies and hearing a bird from a tree as if a signal of direction. 

I called him into my office to ask him about this painful image, and he assured me it was true.  I listened in horror as he told me the details of his story. You see, Reaksa was a member of a large family in Siemreap City, Cambodia when the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975.  Forced to join the exodus to the jungle villages, the whole family was marched to a large grave and killed—hacked to death—one by one.  Somehow, he survived, wounded, but covered by the bodies of his family members. In time, he escaped the killing fields and fled to a refugee camp in Thailand.  Eventually he made his way to Canada and to Tyndale and to my English class.  I sat in my office across from him and just wept with him. What more could I do? Help him with his English? His writing? Offer one safe place among many he would need where he could unburden himself of his pain?

But there is a sequel to his story that connects with this idea of seeing the world with the eyes of faith. After Tyndale and subsequent education here in Canada and the States, he felt called to return to Cambodia, now with a wife and children. (You can read about him under our distinguished alumni award, 2010). He wanted to have a ministry to his own people who had suffered so much and needed to hear the Gospel. But first, he had one passion—after many years of therapy and healing—he wanted to meet the people who had murdered his family and offer forgiveness. In his book After the Heavy Rain one can see a picture of him standing between two men who accepted his miraculous embrace!  All the negotiations that must have taken place for that détente. But he believed it was necessary and possible.

Most of us have not gone through that kind of horror, but we too have our own experiences that require eyes of faith.  In a larger context, our institutions—our own school here—need people who see the world in the light of faith, and act accordingly.

I turn to my last—and perhaps hardest principle to apply:

(3) to be attuned to almost imperceptible intrusions of grace—a phrase coined by Flannery O’Connor.

 When we hear the word “grace,” I think we often get a little sentimental.  It’s a lovely word and we associate it with some of our favourite hymns and worship songs.  As people of faith we know that we been given grace and journey in the light of that reality. 

Again, I turn to this blunt and unsentimental author who makes startling assertions stirring us to some vigorous thinking and re-thinking:

She remarks that conversion is “a kind of blasting, annihilating light, a light that will last a life time. . . At the same time, conversion is an evolving process—a matter of “continually turning toward God and away from your own egocentricity.”  Here is the nature of our journey: we will be pressed by the One who bled and died for us with almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.

We think of the apostle Paul again. We forget he was a very good man, a highly educated and religious man—who thought he was doing the right thing in defending his Jewish faith against what he saw was the imposter teaching of The Way.  His Damascus conversion—an intrusion of grace—was all that O’Connor identifies—that annihilating and blasting light.” Now at the end of his journey, he is saying with deep passion and humility: “I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.”

Those words must come from many additional stabs of grace—“thorns in the flesh,” disappointments, betrayals, judgement, pain and suffering he could not have imagined.

Are we surprised, with O’Connor’s observation that “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful?”  And yet we know we need grace—God’s grace.

Consider one more journey story, this time from the land of fairy tales, which C.S. Lewis maintained, helps break the spell of modern enchantment:  Remember the childhood story, one of the Narnia Chronicles, The Horse and His Boy about the boy who does not know he is really a prince?

The boy Shasta living with a poor fisherman among the Calormenes, runs away towards Narnia with two talking horses and a girl. Their journey is filled with peculiar adventure, difficulties, and trauma. At one point the storyteller notes, “Shasta’s heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no   strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one!”

Do you remember the climactic moment in the book when Shasta meets Aslan, the Great Lion, who tells him that he had orchestrated each of those difficult points in their journey? Aslan had directed the fisherman to rescue Shasta as a baby from a boat. Aslan was the seeming two lions that had directed the two groups together; Aslan had been the cat at the Tombs keeping Shasta company when he was separated from the others. Aslan had chased the group when they needed to make better time to warn the Narnian kingdom from danger of invasion, and now he was walking beside Shasta in the fog, comforting and protecting him going through the mountain pass. All these hard experiences were preparing him for his true identity and role as a prince in the borderland of Narnia.

As adults revisiting the story, we know the power of retrospection: As we look back on our lives we can see how difficult and painful times can be hinge events to something transformational in our lives. Those are intrusions of grace, often almost imperceptible—markers of God’s particular care. He is preparing us to be a prince or princess in his kingdom!

So there we have wisdom from three remarkable women, Margaret Avison, Evelyn Underhill and Flannery O’Connor, reinforcing Paul’s instructions to Timothy, and sending us on our way:  

• Be intentional in cultivating our inner life
• See the world with the eyes of faith
• Be attuned to almost imperceptible intrusions of grace

 In closing, I turn to one more woman, reaching back into the past into the late fourteenth century . . . Julian of Norwich, an anchoress, living alone in a cell attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich.  Any journey she undertook was internal!  Her book The Revelations of Divine Love was the first book to be written by a woman in English. 

Her words can ring in our ears as we leave this Way Station:

He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’ And answer came, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small. And the answer came into my mind, ‘It lasts and ever shall because God loves it.’ And all things have being through the love of God.

 In this little thing I saw three truths. The first is that God made it. The second is that God loves it. The third is that God looks after it.

 What is he indeed that is maker and lover and keeper? I cannot find words to tell. For until I am one with him I can never have true rest nor peace. I can never know it until I am held so close to him that there is nothing in between.

In light of Julian’s symbol of the hazelnut’s assurances, I embrace King Tirian’s words from Lewis’s The Last Battle, “Let’s take the adventure Aslan has for us.” We know, of course, who Aslan is in our world!

Two quotes from George Monbiot’s article:  The earth is in a death spiral  –  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/earth-death-spiral-radical-action-climate-breakdown

 

It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?

A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling.

 “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?”

We had no answer.

……

Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing ourselves at the possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is doing, slight though this possibility may appear; and preparing ourselves for the likely failure of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is.

Both tasks require a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet.

If you dislike this sermon, blame it on this, that I have recently been reading both Jeremiah and the Guardian.   So I think I ought to talk about climate change, though it is difficult to do.  May I do so?

The IPCC (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report) recently warned  that  if the rise in global temperature was more than  1’5◦ above pre-industrial levels environmental problems would run out of control and could not be survived. They gave the global community till 2030 to take drastic measures, to prevent the rise to 2 and even 3◦ becoming unstoppable.  

Thus they present the challenge: will the human community together do what is necessary?  And behind that lurks the frightening question, Can we, the global community, do what is necessary? 

The signs of dire trouble have been around us for a long time, getting louder and louder. Human pressures have brought 60%  of animal  species to extinction since 1970 – in the lifetime of our children. Insects are declining: we often see them as a nuisance and too late come to appreciate how vital they are to the whole life-sustaining web of nature.

Sea levels are rising, and already low-lying countries like the Maldives have plans to move whole populations, as their lands go under the sea. What will happen along our east coast?

Polar ice is thawing; the polar bears are beginning to starve;  and the tundra is defreezing and releasing methane.

Coral reefs, on which so much marine life depends, are being remorselessly destroyed. Whales are dying of plastic poisoning.

The Amazon rainforest is being stripped, to grow soya, to feed the animals we want for food and so there are fewer trees to host many creatures and to combat air pollution.

Fossil fuels are not everywhere being left in the earth as we now know they should.  We are putting faith in fracking and China and India are still increasing the use of coal for generating electricity.  

And we are caught up in this history personally: just look at consumer patterns which we can’t get out of. 

Jane Goodall who spent much of her life learning about and with chimpanzees, says: ‘The most intellectual creature to ever walk Earth is destroying its only home’.

All this causes many sorts of distress.  I want to discuss two sorts of distress which I feel, even while I am protected for the time being from threats to my life.  

First, I fear for the future, though not greatly for myself, I imagine. What will my children and grandchildren have to live through? I refuse to protect myself from this fear by being like that dreadful old king Hezekiah (II Kings 20.12-19). When the prophet warned him that all his treasures would be taken from him by the invaders from Babylon, and his own sons would be taken away to be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon, he said piously to the prophet, ‘The word of the Lord is good’, but he exempted himself by thinking in his dark heart, ‘Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days.’ ‘I’m alright, Jack, my children are dispensable’. 

But, As Bonhoeffer said more than once, the responsible man does not think how he can engineer an heroic (or convenient) death for himself, but how the next generation will live…

My second distress is the widespread paralysis and inertia that leads to silence about this issue or evasion of its challenge.

There is nothing that can be done about it, so let’s not talk about it. 

I feel this distress acutely in church, and as I share in the kinds of conversation Christians mostly have when they meet together. The Church is a place of much talking: that is why it is valuable to many people who would otherwise be very lonely. But this talking community is so silent on many big issues. Brexit has rightly been worrying many people but I have not heard a sermon that addresses any aspect of it.  And the same goes for climate change. I think the principle behind Matthew 23.23 is not a bad guide to our talking in Church. 

Deep down, do we not want church to strengthen us in our self-esteem and to assure us that God is with us and ‘it is well with my soul’? Jeremiah criticized the people who denied that disaster was coming to Jerusalem, putting their trust in deceptive words, ‘the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord’ (7.4,8-10,15 ). We want faith as a haven from the worry of the world. But the Bible and Christian life experience tell us that is not God’s offer. Romans 8 not only tells us nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, but it invites us to live in the Spirit who intercedes with sighs beyond words in a creation which is groaning in frustration and longing. 

Jesus talked about disasters that were to come upon Jerusalem and the whole world, in discourses we don’t read much. He said  people’s hearts would fail for fear and foreboding of what was to come upon the whole inhabited earth (Luke 21.26).  

Our silence may be a sign that we are overwhelmed by the terror of what we can see may be coming. 

When Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, facing the disaster closing in on him, the bitter cup, and the Father’s will, the disciples could not pray with him, but rather ‘slept for sorrow’ ( Luke 22.45).

When we are faced with the possibility of the end of the human story on earth, and think of all the suffering, and justified disappointment, and the cruelty and ruthlessness unleashed as people struggle for survival, do we not want to ignore it for as long as we can, shutting out the sorrow which is too hard to bear?

How hard it is to find words to pray. And if we can’t find words, how hard is it for most of us to be focused and realistic and faithful in prayer. If we simply give up public prayer which requires some words, and there is silence when each person is left to pray privately, the problem is not solved.  Rather, the burden of not knowing what to pray or how to pray is put on to each lonely  person, whatever their capacity – so I would not be surprised if, in the silence, some fall asleep for sorrow  and some think about other things.     

I think you can see something of the difficulty of praying in this time of climate change when you look at the splendid hymn we are going to sing at the end of the service. Fred Pratt Green wrote it  in the early, optimistic stage of environmental concern around 1973, when it was easier to believe that humanity would rise up to do the work of stewarding the earth and keeping it in a steady sustainable condition. 

It confesses sin honestly: 

Long have our human wars ruined its harvest;

Long has earth bowed to the terror of force;

Long have we wasted what others have need of,

Poisoned the fountain of life at its source

It affirms the goodness and beauty of the planet and the positive worth of human beings within it as God’s stewards, who in their work reveal the love and light of God in the world –

God in his love for us lent us this planet

Gave it a purpose in time and in space

Small as a spark from the fire of creation

Cradle of life and the home of our race

It witnesses to God’s love and looks for his salvation

Earth is the Lord’s, it is ours to enjoy it,

Ours as his stewards to farm and defend.

From its pollution, misuse and destruction,

Good Lord, deliver us, world without end!

But though it uses the word, destruction, does it speak from within the terrifying crushing experience of living through the destruction?  

I think for the living of these days, we need something much stronger than the optimism that once was plausible, at least to people who lived in privileged circumstances as many of us still do.  I think we are in a situation where the confidence that it will all work out, that we can muddle through, or  that, though it may be hard for a while, we will eventually reach the ‘sunny uplands’, is not enough. 

We fear we may be on a runaway train, brakes not working…

Perhaps we need to listen to Jeremiah 45. When young Baruch was in distress because he saw his future was being taken from him, Jeremiah did not try to argue him out of his realism.  Jeremiah’s advice to the kings and the people had always been, You have no choice but to face and live through the earthly reality coming to you. There would be no escape from the power of Babylon, no help in the broken reed of Egypt. The coming disaster is deserved. It is God’s judgment, and God is so serious about it, he is unmaking what he had made, unmaking creation. That is a terrifyingly way of seeing what may well be happening to the human world  in our time. Jeremiah said to the people in this situation, There is nothing to do but to live through what is coming. If it is exile for 70 years, that will mean that many of you will not see the end of it, but all the same, accept it, God has sent you into it, it is your mission. So settle, live life fully, don’t just look after yourselves, building families, making gardens: Pray for the well-being of the city where they Lord has sent you into exile. What does this say to us today, as we live our specific exile, in a time of unmaking? The message is, Don’t deny. Don’t try to escape what you are being taken into. Don’t stop being responsible people. Don’t despair. Do whatever good things you can, day by day, love others, enjoy with gratitude. And so hope with God, who is with you. 

In this situation, Jeremiah said to Baruch: 

Don’t seek great things for yourself. 

And:

 I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go. 

We are called to see ourselves between these two sayings, which don’t easily fit together. The prize we naturally want is ‘great things for myself’.  

What is it to have one’s life as a prize of war, without having great things for ourself? That is the puzzle.

The apostle Paul may help us here. He  gave up seeking great things for himself when he met Jesus Christ, and found himself ‘crucified with Christ’, with all  boasting in his life achievements empty and finished (Galatians 2.20; Philippians 3.7-11). And the life he then had as a servant of the gospel of Jesus was full of trouble and ended in prison and death in Rome under Nero. What a prize!   

But he could say, ‘What has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear.’ (Philippians 1.12-14). 

Finding our way between these two words, not seeking great things for one self and but trusting that God will enable us to live fruitfully wherever we go, may be the gift of God to us every day even when we have to live through the Creator’s ‘unmaking’. 

 

Haddon Willmer recommends this feature by Dawn Foster, a Guardian columnist. The first paragraph is reproduced below

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/catholic-church-good-parish-abuse-faith-vatican

“Have you written a will?” my doctor asked, matter-of-factly, while taking my blood pressure last Saturday, in the same tone you’d use to ask someone whether it was raining outside. To a 30-year-old, outwardly healthy woman, the question felt odd. But I was leaning against the wall for support, having woken that morning crumpled in the well of my shower, choking on soapy water with no immediate memory of how I had got there, my head and ribcage feeling wrenched apart by an all-consuming pain. Speaking to paramedics over the phone had proved a challenge as my verbal skills were decimated, and holographic lights floated across my field of vision, turning the banal familiarity of my bathroom into an experience akin to a child’s kaleidoscope toy.

Of course, we are concerned for the faraway boys in the cave in Thailand and pray for their full rescue.

We do not just feel for them, we feel with them. Though we are not in a cave under a mountain, is not our plight in life well pictured in theirs?

Lost in DarknessThose who dwelt in a land of deep darkness….

….. on them has light shone

After nine days in the darkness, there was a shining beam, a face, a voice…

Then they know they are not forgotten,

They get a bit of their story back, finding out what day it is, for in the cave they could not know night from day.

Not lost, but found…

Found by people who come through dark waters and tight tunnels to be with them…

Found but still in the cave…

Found but not yet rescued and restored…

Waters of DeathBlocked by waters, held back till they learn to swim…and dive?…

Even then, could they get through the narrow stretches where each must go alone…? Expert cavers take five hours to do it. It’s a big test.

Black waters signal death. They are not yet safe. There is no easy euphoric way to life. There is a baptism to be baptised with.

There is waiting with Noah in the ark until the waters begin to go down.

Can the waters be drained enough for the boys to wade, waist high, not needing to scuba? Perhaps.

Will the monsoon be considerate, delaying itself? Unlikely.

Might another shorter drier way be found and opened up? Air is getting into their cave so there is a continuous crack in the mountain somewhere. Unlikely.

Courage, brother, do not stumble, though the way be dark as nightThe boys might get out in the next few days or they might not…

If not soon, they must survive in the depths for months… an unthinkable time in such conditions? At least the darkness will be lighted, with lamps not the sun… at least they will be supplied with daily food and warm clothes and health care… at least they will have lines of communication with their families…

Yet they need extraordinary strength to wait patiently… to hold together… to begin to bear the trauma which may stay with them long after they come home.

Hope given in the momentThere is no slick easy uncompromised recovery for people caught in any cave comparable with this one. Scars will not quickly fade.

Hope with the One who comes into the cave bringing light, who leads out of darkness and death along the long hard way, always bearing on his hands the signs that he comes to us all in the dark night where death is in life.

Jean Wyatt, The Judge is the Savior: Towards a Universalist Understanding of Salvation

Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2015 (xviii + 223 pp)

Here is a book that comes from decades of caring thought and spiritual wrestling. Jean Wyatt begins with a story from 1974 when she and her family were worshipping in a friendly Baptist Church. The worship and preaching were dynamic and the fellowship warm, but there was one drawback: the church had a formidable doctrinal basis to which all members should assent. It was the last statement that I found so difficult: We believe in the judgment by the Lord Jesus Christ at His coming again, of all men, of believers to eternal blessedness, of unbelievers to eternal condemnation.

That provoked years of study out of which this well informed, sensitive book, rich in story and quotation, comes to us now. It could help many kinds of people to think again. Some say there is no God, who calls us to a final accounting for ourselves, with possibly serious consequences.    Some are confident that, because God is love, God will not be hard on us so no one need worry. A few still believe God is holy and just and cannot tolerate any shortfall, which implies that sinners may deservedly be sent to eternal punishment. Other Christians hold that faith in Christ assures them of escape from deserved punishment, while those who don’t believe are excluded. And maybe that leaves a lot of people who are confused and don’t know what to think, although they have an uncomfortable feeling there might be something important here, if only they could get a grip on it. 

Jean Wyatt argues in a constructive way, from the Bible and theology, that God’s judgment is not condemnatory or destructive of God’s own creatures, but that it is disciplinary and restorative.  It consistently aims at what is good, however badly things have gone.     So God’s Judgment is God’s salvation – there is not a simple Either-Or.   And this salvation-judgment is revealed and worked out in the life, death, resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, God in human being, for human being – ‘Oh, generous love! That he who smote/ in man, for man, the foe….’   God does not leave the crucial task of achieving salvation to human beings in their self-deceiving sovereign apart-ness:  God takes the business in hand without emptying human action and responsibility of meaning.  

As I now understand the good news of Jesus Christ, it inescapably involves the quest for a ‘universalist understanding of salvation’ which is not careless about human sin and judgment.   It is good to say clearly, The Judge is the Saviour.  It is also foundationally good to say, The Saviour is the Judge. That means judgment is finally, decisively executed in the realisation of the salvation God is working at and will complete rather than in the dismissive condemnation of sinners.   Jesus, God in humanity, received sinners and outsiders into the fellowship of the kingdom of God.  He ate with them, concretely showing God did not exclude them according to some readings of the law.  And then he said to his critics, this is what the salvation of God is like:  the blind receive sight, the hungry are fed, the poor have good news given to them, the estranged and humiliated and fearful people come in.  Critics, insulated by in their own sense of goodness, were called to notice and understand what was going on in these feasts from which they excluded themselves. Jesus said, with the ultimate seriousness of final judgment,  there was no hope for such people unless they liked what God was making of, and for, the people they despised and feared. The well-off, who need no physician for themselves, are called to be glad that those they looked down upon were being included in God’s welcome. People with pride and confidence in any superior quality or achievement are not saved by virtue of what they are in themselves, but only by giving up self to find themselves with, in and through  the salvation God brings to the humble, by his own humility. 

That is how the father appealed to his older son, when the wayward younger brother returned, a broken and disgraced man.  Could the older son not see the goodness in his brother’s being found, coming to life out of death?  What does it reveal about him that he refuses to share in the joy of it, because he has ‘standards’ which prevent him seeing goodness in his brother’s recovery? Whatever his other qualities, he lacks love which rejoices in the good (I Cor.13. 6). The story in Lk 15 is left hanging at the end as the father tries to persuade his son to love generously and to have convincing reasons within his own mind for loving even this brother.  

Such a salvation enacted and displayed brings us into the place of searching and being judged.  So the Saviour is the Judge. 

As Jesus said, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him….This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people loved darkness rather than light… (John 3.17-21). 

Haddon Willmer

The poet, theologian and Christian Malcolm Guite (left) has written a marvellous book, Mariner: a voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge  (Hodder, 2017). I got it early this week and could not put it down.  Now I would like to press it upon as many friends as I can. 

Coleridge (1772-1834), a brilliant poet, philosopher and spiritual teacher, wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when he was 25, when he was working with William Wordsworth, ‘strong in love!’  in the exciting days of the French Revolution,  ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’.   They wanted a new kind of poetry,  ‘free, natural, lucid… drawn to discover the beautiful in what is close and everyday….but equally committed to finding in folktale, superstition and myth, emblems of our own inner nature and deeper truths of the human heart’.   

Guite explores these deeper truths by taking us through the poem stanza by stanza.  It never bores partly because the Rime is ruminous, and partly because Coleridge’s own life, as it unfolded after he wrote the poem, turned out to march step by step with the poem.   The Mariner is Ancient, his voyage is told in antique terms, but the telling came from the imagination of a young man, living in the modern world as we are.   When his life is put alongside the poem it turns from being a bit of charming entertainment into a searching and redeeming word for our living today. 

The Mariner and his mates sailed off with high hopes; they were blessed on their way, not least by an albatross who flew with them as they got to Cape Horn.  Then, the Ancient Mariner shot him, an act of inexplicable evil, and he was cursed, his guilt – the dead albatross –  hanging round his neck.  All his shipmates die, cursing him; he wishes he could die, but cannot.  He finds he can neither live nor pray.   Then surprisingly, ‘some kind saint took pity on me’, so that he looked on the water-snakes which earlier had horrified him with their sliminess, and saw them shining in the soft light of the moon:

O happy living things! No tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware…

The self-same moment I could pray,

And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea. 

This was not the end, but it was the turning point.  And so, he came home, living within the compulsion to tell  his story of sin and loss and of rescue and renewal, accosting people like the Wedding Guest, who misses that happy occasion, hears the whole tale, and leaves ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.  

Uncannily, Coleridge’s poem turns out to be an illuminating commentary on his whole life, which still lay in the unknown future when the Rime was written.  Coleridge was immensely gifted, full of hope and creativity at the beginning, but soon he ran into trouble.  He started on opium, a common legal medical treatment then, because he suffered from rheumatic pains.  He became addicted, which meant misery when he was using, misery when he was withdrawing, as he tried to do repeatedly.  He became difficult to live with; weaknesses in his character were exacerbated; despite strenuous efforts by both partners, his marriage failed.  He could work furiously and successfully at projects, for a while, and then they fell apart.  Instead of being carried on by ambitions befitting his gifts, he was burdened by the disappointment and guilt at the failure of his life as a whole.   He was a man of profound faith in God and strong Christian thoughtfulness, but in his despair, like the Mariner he could not pray. 

He was difficult to help, but he had friends, old and new, who did not altogether give up on him.  After over a decade of descent into the depths, a good Dr Gilman and his wife took him into their home, managed his addiction wisely until he was released from it, so that he lived fruitfully for 17 more years.  Relations with his wife and children were repaired.    He knew, like his Ancient Mariner, that he lived by the forgiving grace of God and not by his own achievements, however good some of them were.    

In that last time, he wrote works on literature, theology and life which are still influential.  He was a prophet for his time, acutely observing what was happening and pointing to the narrow but open ways to life rather than death.  All through the book, Guite helps us to listen to Coleridge for ourselves today:  ‘Coleridge was reading and thinking for his life – and for ours’. 

Three things stay with me, after my first reading.  First, the picture of Christian faith that we are given by accompanying Coleridge on this voyage is unusual, orthodox, challenging and enriching, not to be missed.   It is focused on God, on Christ and the Cross, on the Holy Spirit engaging with human beings, who sin, despair and come to death, where the dying God meets them and brings them to repentance and new life.  This repentance for Coleridge was a lifetime of hard experience in the world, not a religious moment in church. 

Secondly, Coleridge saw that the modern material and instrumental view of nature was ‘utterly deadening’ and would ultimately crush any notion of ‘soul’ or even ‘person’.   It meant reducing persons to things, and limiting truth to ‘facts’ based on empirical observation, and belittling imagination as groundless opinion.   We feel the pressures today of treating the person as a brain and the brain as a computer, and are not so sure we can distinguish between a person and a robot.  We are caught in systems that aim to make children employable, so that they are valued and rewarded according to their usefulness to systems.  Human beings have, for long ages, been engaged in, often overwhelmed by, the dilemmas of seeking life in a world of deadly wisdoms and rationalities, like those represented by the High Priest Caiaphas, who said to the Pharisees debating what to do with Jesus: ‘You know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole people should not perish’ (John 11.49, 50).

Thirdly, Guite brings out how Coleridge speaks to the ecological crisis and guilt that is engulfing us.  The Ancient Mariner brought disaster and death to the ship and all who were sailing in her, when he shot the Albatross, treating it as a mere Thing, alien to human being, to be disposed of at a whim.  It was a gross failure to respect the Albatross as a fellow-creature, in the wholeness of God’s creation.  It was a terrible rejection of the love which is the real presence of God in all things.  

He prayeth well who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best who loveth best,

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

This points us beyond any environmental concern driven by worry about our survival, regardless of its cost to other creatures, including the inanimate earth.   As Guite points out, the ‘alls’ in this stanza are significant.   We need hearts purified from self-interest, to share in the love of God and to go along with it, so that we become free for all and with all. 

I would like to think that what I have said will lead friends to say, I want to read this book – indeed I will read this book for myself.  But I know I have not begun to do it justice – how could I in this little piece when it is a book of nearly 450 pages?    Now is that a fact I should have kept quiet about?   Have I put some friends off:  ‘I would like to read it, but that is really too long for me’.  Please don’t say that.  It is not boring, it is constantly eyeopening, informative, illuminating.  It is a beautifully structured book, taking small groups of stanzas in turn, so it is easy to read a bit at a time.  And it would be rewarding as a book for daily reflection and prayer – the poem has spoken deeply to Guite our contemporary, he hears it as a Christian thinker and shares with us what he has found.  I wondered as I read it whether it might help some readers to begin with Part II, which takes us through the Rime, and then go to Part I, about Coleridge’s life up to the writing of it.  That would be feasible. But I still think the book’s double act, partnering the poem step by step with  Coleridge’s pilgrimage has the wind of the spirit in it to carry us along. 

The Wedding Guest tried to get away from the old crazed looking Mariner when he was hastening to get to the wedding on time, but he was not sorry in the end that he compelled by the eye of the old man to stay to the end.  Please don’t succeed in doing what he failed to do, even if you have a wedding to go to.  

If you want to read the poem straightaway, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

See Malcolm Guite’s own blog about his book, including the beautiful epitaph Coleridge wrote for himself.

https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/tag/the-ancient-mariner/

Haddon Willmer