Power and nakedness

Posted on 09/04/2011 by Rambling Rector

As I write, the UK is effectively at war with Libya. We are told it is to ‘deliver’ the people from an oppressive regime. Since we are not at war in Bahrain, I suppose we must assume that the Bahraini regime is not oppressive. That does not seem to be what the Bahrainis think. In my previous life I spent some time in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. I was not over impressed by the liberty I encountered in Saudi: women prohibited from driving; women spat at for not having faces covered; shopkeepers in trouble for trading during prayer times; religious police beating women’s ankles with sticks if bare skin is showing. If we deliver Libyans from oppression, why not Bahrainis and Saudis too? The answer is a three-letter word, oil. It drips and trickles over the sensibilities of our politicians to produce a bar of hypocrisy. And we are expected to swallow it. Consider a few vignettes. (1) You live under a regime that imprisons and tortures your relatives because they disagree with those in charge, and say so. (2) You work for an organisation that presents circumstances to the advantage of those in charge, and belittles or ignores your experience. (3) You are mature in years and live alone. You are distressed by the begging letters, the hard-sell language, the appeals to emotion and better nature, the manipulative tone suggesting that by not responding you are cruel and inhuman. (4) You are angry that, despite the recklessness and financial impropriety of the last few years, you are still being shafted by banks and bankers, your taxes funding their bonuses.

What have all these in common? The answer is the abuse of power. The powerful dumping on the powerless. It can be amusing to say there’s no point in having power if you don’t abuse it and yes, I hope only for a laugh, I’ve said it myself. But the more power we have, the more responsibility that comes with it. The abuse of power stems always from the abuser’s need to bolster up her or his ego, to disguise the fear and barrenness within. And when we abuse someone else, we stop growing and harm ourselves. Miss Havisham wrapped herself in the cocoon of grief, living the same day over and over again, in the dark, and infecting Estella. The witch in Hansel and Gretel wants to consume the children rather than let them grow free. How many children suffer abuse like this from parents who can’t let them go? Gollum, obsessed by the ring of power that perverts him and all around him. We retreat into these self-generated enclosures, living behind the gates that insulate us from the world. In the words of Psalm 17, ‘they are inclosed in their own fat: and their mouth speaketh proud things’. We put on masks that hide our true selves. We make ourselves feel good by ignoring the truth and thus harming others.

To reach resurrection (Easter), we must pass through crucifixion (Good Friday). We take up our crosses and deny ourselves. This is not self-flagellation and making ourselves miserable. It is that we must break out of the cocoon of our enclosed self-obsessedness by confronting our fears and accepting them, loving those parts of ourselves that we try to cover with egocentric behaviour. Pulling down the walls that money can buy. This is the way to eternal life, what Christ called the Kingdom of God—nothing to do with life after death, everything to do with quality of life here and now. The Kingdom is experienced when we acknowledge the futility of egotism and all the things that we allow the ego to build around us. ‘My Kingdom’, said Jesus, ‘is not of this world’. It is an inner kingdom. In order to enter that kingdom we might try to rid ourselves of these spiritual cosmetics to become naked before the Divine.

This is taking up your cross: recognising the props for what they are. This is laying down yourself, laying down ego. This is spiritual nakedness. This enables the butterfly of resurrection to escape into the stratosphere. ‘Made like him, like him we rise’. And when we do, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

We have no power. We are powerless. We are absolutely dependent upon the Divine (laws of nature if you like). This means being like children – or rather, as unlike suspicious adults as it is possible to be. We need shed the skins of suspicion that have grown up around us as a result of the experiences of this imperfect world. We emerge from the cocoon lighter, less encumbered, more lovely, more delightful and more delighting. Easter is liberation – salvation – spiritual nakedness. Happy nakedness!

Spring, ordure, simplicity

Posted on 09/03/2011 by Rambling Rector

Spring is sprung, de grass is riz, I wonder where dem boidies is? Dem boids is on de wing. Ain’t dat absoid? De wing is on de boid.

Profound poetry for this time of year. Days are lengthening, and len(g)t(h) gives us Lent. Time for a spiritual detox, a spiritual spring clean. Get rid of what you don’t need any more. What don’t I need any more? It’s funny how I repeat behaviour from my childhood, behaviour that was necessary and productive then, but has outlived its usefulness and is counterproductive now. If I have any defects at all, one of them might be related to this. I could profitably use Lent to resolve to explore the reasons why I react to certain situations in the way that I do. I need to learn to stand outside myself, as it were, off centre, on the edge. I learnt long ago that the view is better from the edge, and it’s easier to see the big picture when standing on the edge that it is when one is in the middle of the crowd. I’m going to try to remember to stand outside myself and observe what is going on in my mind before I react to circumstances that try my patience. And there are many.

I am struck once again by the randomness and unpredictability of life. The hip joints that misbehave. The sun-spots that threaten to disturb our communication systems. The despots of the middle East that get their comeuppance—with heaven-knows-what consequences for the oil supply that feeds our lifestyles. The movements of the earth’s crust that devastate cities. The diseases and other natural events that disturb our lives. We never know when the cells in our bodies will start to behave differently and begin to multiply unchecked. We never know when the bacteria that live in our guts helping us to digest food will find their way to places where they cause trouble. Coping with uncertainty is part of life. We can’t change the past and we can’t control the future. Some people imagine that illness or disasters are brought about by ‘God’ as a punishment. Are they really so egotistical as to think that God plans his activities around their actions? The beginning of Luke 13 is a text that should be wheeled out when people spout this self-absorbed rubbish. Luke tells us that there’s nothing about what happens to us that speaks of God’s judgement. Rather, the point is that life is unpredictable – tragedies occur, in this case brought about by an oppressive governor (Egypt? Bahrain? Libya?) but they say nothing about God. Punishment: no. Consequences of choices: yes.

In the same Biblical text Jesus speaks of the value of manure as fertilizer. Some commentaries go so far as to suggest that Jesus—shock, horror—had a sense of humour. Let me tell you, girls and boys, how deeply satisfying this is to someone like me whose sense of humour extends well into the scatological. When I am confronted by someone laying down the law, I find few things more comforting than imagining that person on the throne of a morning. I spent 30 years earning my keep by teaching anatomy, with my hand in body parts that other hands don’t reach, and any of you involved in politics, especially Church politics, will know how important it is to be able to dodge flying dung. Manure is the product of digestion, the residue of what we take in. Manure is a fertilizer. The baobab tree needs Elephant dung for germination. Rowan berries and others need to go through the gut of a bird to help them germinate. To put this in a psychological context, you might say that we can let the manure of our experiences provide the fertilizer for personal growth.

So this is my suggestion for Lent: let’s take time to use the residue of our experiences and learn from them, allowing them to fertilize growth within us. We might be able to shed old ways of doing things, old ways of thinking, when we see that they have become unnecessary and possibly counterproductive. Like a snake shedding its old skin as it grows, or the pupation of larva to adult. There’s no point in making ourselves miserable by giving up stuff we like: Lent has nothing to do with being gloomy. It’s about letting go of what we no longer need. Happy Lent!

And the product of shedding our old skins …

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be out delight
‘Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Joseph Brackett 1797-1882

Restlessness, lust, delight

Posted on 09/02/2011 by Rambling Rector

I love trains. Modern ones. The Pendolinos on the Euston lines are a wonder. Take yourself to Rugby station, and wait for a northbound non-stopper to zoom up from the south tilting round the bend, and through the station at 125 mph. So, to recap, I like trains. Which means that Susan and I like trains. At the end of February, we’re off to Venice and Ljubljana. Train all the way. Paul Theroux said ‘I have seldom heard a train go by … and not wished I was on it.’ That is me absolutely. The first thing I do when I go to a new city is want to go somewhere else. Continual movement, new experiences, ultra-low boredom threshold. An inability to understand how people can survive day-in-day-out sameness. A total lack of sympathy with ruts (although as the Headmaster in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On said: ‘when one is in one, at least one knows exactly where one is’). Some would say—and I can picture finger-wagging aged relations telling the childhood me this—that it indicates a ‘spoilt’ nature, ‘he’s never satisfied with anything, and he should learn to accept what the Lord provides’. In this vein, there’s a verse of All things bright and beautiful, expunged from today’s hymn books, which goes: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate’. If that means that we all have our own gifts, skills and characteristics, and we have to accept them and work with them rather than denying them, then I see the truth in it. But if it means that we should stay still, meekly accepting what is thrown at us is, then it’s absolute pish. If we never wanted to explore we would still be living in caves. Restlessness is a good thing.

Is restlessness simply a lust, a craving, for new experience? Lust, they say, is bad. I don’t believe it. Lust can develop into love. It often does. We are animals, at the mercy of our hormones, and lust is part of life. It’s not just about sex. Spiritual lust, longing for something better, must be good. Holy Scripture is full of Hebrew and Greek words exploring cravings: urge, lust, longing (eros), delight, pleasure, passion (inordinate affections that render us almost incapable of action). Restlessness can most certainly be a good thing. It can result in easing pain, raising standards, exposing injustice. Sure, it can be dangerous when it leads us to become whistleblowers, so we need courage. The Christian story is that new life results from such courage. I suggest that we need to be mindful of our restlessness and lusts, channelling them to increase delight in the world.

I see how difficult it is for people as they get older, who have been active and restless, to come to terms with restriction, for whatever reason. It can be a real challenge for someone to accept that they have to rethink the way they live. Physical immobility forcing the need for spiritual agility. As I get older—I am 60—I see physical circumstances simply as the consequences of random events, earlier decisions, earlier restlessness, earlier lusts. And now, none of it matters like it once did. I can’t undo the past, and I can’t control the future. This means I can try to be more attentive to living in the here and now. And this, boys and girls, is Jesus’ message. My kingdom is not of this world—or the next—but an inner kingdom in which this world and its toys are illusion: here today and gone tomorrow. Rest comes when I lay aside my own attachments, interests and convenience. Self-obsessedness, the self-centred ego, the ‘me first’ attitude, are curiously lacking in nourishment. Maybe rest will come when we lay down ‘self’. But we must beware: it is easy to say we do things for others when in fact we do them for ourselves. St Augustine knew all about lust. He prayed ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’ He was a restless man, but saw the eternal truth of our human ramblings: ‘my heart is restless until it rests in thee’.

We need to learn to be alone

Posted on 09/11/2010 by Rambling Rector

Dealing with the ups and downs of life is tiring. Emotional tiredness is, if anything, more debilitating than physical tiredness. It’s really important that we look after ourselves by resting, and finding something or someone that lifts the spirits and makes us smile: maybe spend time alone, find a friend who radiates energy. Some of you might have heard me say that some people are radiators, who fill one with life and in whose presence it’s always a pleasure to be, and drains, who suck the life force from you, like vampires. Find a radiator. Avoid drains. Lionel Blue is always a radiator, and his advice for starting the day is to recall some proud moment of the recent past. Be glad! Rest. Take time to be on your own.

We spend a lot of time cultivating friends and hobbies in order, it seems to me, to avoid being on our own and having to confront our own inner selves. The truth is, we can’t avoid this: we start alone and we end alone. As we get older, and deafer, and blinder, and as our friends start to shuffle off this mortal coil, we are increasingly alone. It has been said that a blissful childhood does not prepare one for life: an unhappy childhood enables a child to develop some of the psychological tools that enable him to enjoy the solitude of advancing years. There’s nothing worse, it is said, for a teenage boy than to have a father who understands him. Our response to solitude can be a self-indulgent ‘woe is me’, or it can be an effort (and yes, it is an effort) to confront ourselves. As past years flit through our consciousness, we may find ourselves shocked at the realization of our own folly, but when we have come through that, we can begin to accept the past, rather than rail about perceived injustices and slights, and be glad of the inner resources it has given us. It’s a matter of learning to accept that we are humans, and imperfect, and that we have made, and continue to make, mistakes. It’s a big shock for us to realise that we are not as perfect as we thought we were.

Resolutions, earth to liberation

Posted on 09/01/2010 by Rambling Rector

I don’t know what to write. I asked she-who-must-be-obeyed for ideas. She said ‘write about new year resolutions, and how if we’ve made any and already broken them, we might like to try making some that are realistic.’ Or words to that effect. Why do we set ourselves unreasonable targets? Wouldn’t it be better to accept ourselves for what we are, and set reasonable targets? In my last letter I wrote that the best Christmas present would be to accept ourselves and each other as we are. To be aware of our own gifts and skills and faults and failings means that we have our feet firmly planted on the earth. The Latin word for earth is humus (as any gardener knows), so this is humility. It has nothing to do with grovelling. Rejoice in your gifts and skills, and be aware of your failings. And then, look carefully at how your qualities affect what you do, and how you do it. All this is part of mindfulness.

If you watch Gavin and Stacey (and if you don’t, you should) you see a group of people, at the same time both ordinary and extraordinary, who simply accept each other for what they are. They don’t try to change each other, and they don’t force each other to do what they don’t want to do. Many of us are assailed by the expectations of others who want us to do what we are not comfortable doing. We are fools to try and satisfy them. It never works when we try and force a square peg into a round hole: we end up harming both peg and hole. Of course, we live in an imperfect world, and we sometimes have to try and please the boss if we want to be paid, and so on, so there are bargains to be struck, but there comes a point when we have to accept that peg and hole are just not compatible.

This is not all about self. We need to be aware of the relationship between self and society. We all have our part to play, so we can’t just do what we want without considering our impact on other people. Most of society’s problems result when what ‘I’ want takes precedence over what anybody else wants— ‘because I’m worth it.’ What a load of rubbish! But when we succeed in matching the peg to the hole and play to our strengths, we are able to let the divine light in each of us shine out to light the way for others. ‘And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.’ (Marianne Williamson). If you’ve got it, flaunt it—for the benefit of the world!

How many Christmas presents have already been chucked out? When will we realise that fulfilment is an attitude of mind, and not a product of a new kitchen, or a new 3-piece suite, or anything we buy from St Tesco’s or St Asda’s? Eternal life is what I’m talking about. Eternal does not mean everlasting, and neither does it mean life after death. It means timeless, outside time, independent of time. It means living in the present moment, not fretting about past or obsessing about future. We can’t control the future—we are not in control of anything, and the sooner we realise that, the better. We can’t control our biological processes and as we see from recent events we can’t control the weather or what is happening on or beneath the earth’s crust.

Accepting that I can control nothing is liberating. It frees me from trying to be in control and perfect— which is just as well since I am an imperfect muddle. It frees me from trying to impose my will on others—which is just as well since I might be wrong (a hard admission, that!). It’s a recognition that I’m human and will one day shuffle off this mortal coil. This is what Ash Wednesday is about: ‘dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.’ Some people think this is gloomy. Not for me. I think Ash Wednesday is a wonderful festival of being human. To be reminded of our mortality reminds us to put the past to bed, stop fretting about the (uncontrollable) future, and to get on with the here-and-now, moment by moment, allowing each other to shine for the good of all and the glory of the Creator. I do not find this at all easy. Maybe I need to stop trying.

Children, childlikeness, Christmas

Posted on 09/12/2008 by Rambling Rector

There’s an awful lot of awful news. The most awful of it all concerns the awful things that people do to children. What is it about our human nature that likes being cruel to other humans? In the rest of the animal kingdom—and look no further than the fields and the skies around us—we see creatures fighting and eating different species, but cruelty to members of the same species seems to be a particularly human characteristic. Some people say that this is what happens when there are too many of us cooped up in one place. If we’re honest, there are seeds of this behaviour in all of us, even if it manifests itself no more strongly than playing Scrabble as if it was a world war. Actually, I know someone whose aggression in Scrabble knows no bounds, evil eyes glinting in triumph as ‘X’ is edged on to a triple letter score. The Bible is full of stories about the good and bad in our nature, some of them very exciting and fantastic stories that influenced Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings—which is all about the battles that go inside every one of us: virtue versus sin, if you like.

The Bible also tells a story that is relevant at this time of year: the Christmas story. The story of how Mary allows the Divine spirit to grow within her to give birth to the perfect human nature is a model for what we can allow to happen in us. The story of how ordinary people knelt at the crib to honour a child is a model for how we might all try to honour the childlike characteristics that life on this planet tends to knock out of us: wonder, trustfulness, eagerness, willingness to explore and try new things, and a lack of guile. It is one of the privileges of being in this job to see these characteristics in the children of the four schools I regularly visit. How do we adults recover this childlikeness—which is entirely different from childishness? (I see lots of childishness in people who should know better, including myself.) The story of kings from far off lands kneeling by the crib tells the world that the Christian message is for everybody, not just the select few who were there at the time. The church celebrates this event on the first Sunday in January: the Feast of the Epiphany, a Greek word that means ‘showing to all’. Wise men gave gifts to the Christ-child, and that’s why we give gifts to each other at this time of year: every gift given and received is a recollection of the gifts given and received by the crib in Bethlehem.

The best gift that I can give, as it says in the last line of the carol ‘In the bleak midwinter’ is my heart— myself. If I aim to recover the childlikeness that cynicism and world-weariness have brought up on me, if I try and see how best to work for the common good, laying aside my own likes and dislikes, then I will be well on the road to ‘loss of self’. If I give my ‘self’ to the Lord, it no longer burdens me. This renunciation is something that all the major religions aim for, and something that’s at the core of Buddhism. This should come as no surprise: the Dalai Lama’s reverence for Jesus’ teaching is well known. There’s a school of thought that the kings from the east who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh (nowhere in the Bible does it say there were three of them) might have been Zoroastrians or even Hindus (Hinduism then was about as old as Christianity is now). Let’s resolve to try and build on the childlikeness that is within us all and be less self-obsessed, more open, more trusting, more willing to leave the rut we’re in and make the most of what we’ve got—all for the sake of the common good. As the economic situation gets worse there might be all sorts of unimagined benefits.

My theme is memory

Posted on 09/11/2008 by Rambling Rector

It would be easy to start this piece with a rant about the economy. But I am so incandescent with anger at the greed, pride and evil that has brought us to where we are, and in which we are all complicit, that maybe it should wait until I’ve cooled down. All I will say is that it’s the job of the church to seek out those who are hungry, homeless and ill. Point me to them, or them to me.

On 18 October, I went to a posh hotel in Nottingham to speak at the 25-year reunion of doctors I taught back in 1978-9. It was a lovely evening, and they received me with graciousness, generosity, and more affection and respect than I think I deserve. It brought back to me many memories of them, of our exploits when I was younger and less careworn, and of aspects of my own personal journey that brings me here. It was not altogether comfortable. Memory rarely is.

On All Saints (or All Hallows) Day at the beginning of the month, the church remembers those who have inspired us throughout the centuries—and continue to do so. There’s a mistaken notion that saints never put a foot wrong, but the truth is otherwise: ‘they wrestled hard, as we do now, with sins and doubts and fears’. St Paul says that instead of the good things he wants to do, he ends up doing the bad things he doesn’t want to do. That’s true of me too—of all of us I suspect. They did daft things, silly things, glorious things, inspiring things. Like us all. What kept them going was a vision of how things might be better, an image of beauty and perfection in Christ the King. I wrote last month of the heroes we see around us every day: maybe these people should be made saints. I rather think they should. It’s a pity that the Church of England does not have the mechanism to make new saints. It’s good to remember that the saints lived life to the full, with passion and verve, and were not the dried up, pious and ‘churchy’ objects that some imagine. They were bold, daring, and courageous in the cause of the common good. They took risks. They were not comfortable people to have around. They were disturbing. Be disturbing.

The evening before All Saints (or All Hallows) day is Hallowe’en. Like many Christian festivals it took over a day in pre-Christian culture, this one marking the end of the harvest season when evil spirits responsible for a bad harvest needed to be kept at bay. Recent influences from America seem to have driven us back to these pre-Christian influences, so it’s as well to remember that the evil in the world comes not from the dead, but from the thoughts of the living—evil thoughts that grow into evil actions. Keeping in mind the saints and all who have inspired us is the beginning of the road to abolishing evil. All Souls Day comes after All Saints Day, and it’s the day when we pray and give thanks for those who have died. When we remember friends of years gone by, we are touched by a whole set of emotions. We may feel delighted at what we had. We may be saddened by what we have lost. Saying goodbye and grieving can be very difficult, taking years, decades even. It’s no good bottling up these feelings: we need to let them out, and different people have different ways of coping.

Beauty and delight

Posted on 09/08/2008 by Rambling Rector

You can’t escape water in Derbyshire at this time of year. Wells and well dressings are famous. It’s right to use as many excuses as possible to create beauty. Well dressing brings together all ages, all skills, and mixes creativity with fun. It is delightful. It’s an act of love. Is there any difference between love and beauty? When we look at something beautiful, whether as creator or observer, we are moved by it and possessed by it. It enfolds us, and we enfold it. A wonderful exchange. A holy communion. Divine. And there is no better focus for celebration than water.

Water is wonderful stuff, created when hydrogen explodes with oxygen. It sustains its own vast community of things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts, home to the smallest amoeba, the largest leviathan (aka whale) and everything between. You and I begin life in it in our mother’s wombs. It makes up most of you and me. It’s in and surrounds every cell of our bodies. It allows nutrients to reach our cells, and allows the removal of rubbish. Without it we shrivel up and die, dehydrated.

Images associated with water in Holy Scripture are much like its functions in the body. It sustains the Hebrews when they’re wandering in the desert. Moses struck the rock and water gushed out. I’ve been to that place, Wadi Musa (wadi is a valley or riverbed that’s dry most of the time; Musa means of Moses) near Petra. It really exists. When we live in a part of the world where rain is taken for granted and reservoirs are close by, it’s easy to forget that in the middle East water is precious, not a drop to be wasted. Water cleans. We remember this in Baptism when water signifies washing away of the old, ready for the new start. One of the hymns we sing at well dressing services speaks of ‘streams of living waters’. And as water rehydrates and washes, it enables healing. For Christians, this cleansing water is Jesus the Christ showing us the way to enlightenment. It stands to reason that if water removes all the grime that we collect, we must, at the end of the process go on our way lighter—in both senses: looking brighter because less grimy, and not as heavy either, since we’re not carrying so much muck. Think about it.

Irregular verb: lighter, lighten, delight. Washing off muck is like saying goodbye to things that have done their job and that we don’t need any more. We go on our way. To where? To enlightenment. A lighter burden. Illuminated by the light of the world, the Divine light of our Lord’s teaching, the Divine light that is in us all, ready to shine to lighten the way for others. Enjoy yourself. Bring delight to yourself and others.

Rambling Rector Retired

Category Archives: Inner kingdom