Think Question Believe

Christians are called upon to be honest with God, and most of all honest with ourselves. We are called to account, to face what needs to be faced, to confront that which we have avoided and from which we shrink.

To show humility, acceptance of the errors we have made, the sins we have committed, the debts that we owe.

The feast of St Patrick is a day on which the thoughts of many turn to Ireland, perhaps especially for those with family ties and links to this land – the isle of saints and scholars – a place of great beauty, so many wonderful people, and a place of many tears.

And for me raised in England, of Irish ancestry, now living back in Ireland – it brings to mind a disconnect between those two countries, that remains to this day, because of past unacknowledged and unrepented sins. I speak of an Gorta Mór or the ‘Great Hunger’ – known incorrectly and reprehensibly in the UK as the ‘potato famine’.

The need for repentance is as true for nations as it is for individuals, because old sins cast very long shadows, shadows that can overcast and hide much that is good, because sins that are unacknowledged and unrepented do not heal, they only fester – as much, if not more, for the perpetrator as the victim.

Dictators and brutes throughout history have somehow convinced themselves that their violence and inhumanity will secure them power. That fear and intimidation, the force of arms will win the day. And all too sadly there seem to be no end of those who are willing to be their creatures.

Today we see the willing capitulation and self-subjugation of those who so want to be in positions of supposed power and wealth, that they are willing to abase themselves, to deny reality itself if they are told to do so, to pretend to convictions they do not have and a loyalty that they do not possess.

And while they may enjoy some temporary advantage, in the end they only achieve their own undoing, as they sew the very seeds of their destruction, as hubris and arrogance, greed and selfishness is confronted and confounded by the quiet dignity and courage of those who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a better way and a better world.

As we live through these times of mendacity, extortion, venality and toxic narcissism, where it feels as if the leadership of the world has been handed over to psychopaths and gangsters, we can reflect that in the story of the temptation in the desert, all that evil could offer, can ever offer, was and is the victory of the moment, the glory of the fleeting instant, but at the price of the destruction of those who suppose themselves to be the conqueror – but are in fact the conquered.

War and violence have always been with us, despite our experience of some decades of comparative peace, we have always been beset by the storms of life.

And sadly today, black clouds of intolerance, bitterness, greed and indifference to the suffering of others are gathering and deepening.

And an ominous warning sign, like the outbreak of bush fires all around us is the slow death of truth. No society – no civil society can hope to live without it, and yet daily it is under assault from those, who at least in the past ,paid some lip service to its defence – however tarnished the world of global politics has always been.

The tragedy of our present time, is that many leaders in our world, and their enablers, do not fear the truth of that statement, they are counting on it.

At a time when black is white, up is down heroes become villains and monsters lauded as heroes, when friends are treated as enemies and enemies as friends, when the victims are to blame and the aggressors, the abusers and the bullies are excused – what are we to do?

Too many of our more moral leaders, well intentioned, motivated by integrity no doubt, seem to feel that we must weather the storm, not be too combative, tolerate the nonsense, in the hope that sense will later prevail. But that is the way to merely slow the death of truth. It is the way of complicity.

Instead, truth must be fought for, upheld, reasserted time and again, by everyone, everywhere, all the time. We must call out every lie, from whoever, wherever and however they are shared.

We live in a world, both in terms of income and social and political power where inequality has been on the rise across the globe for several decades.

We lionize the bullies, the liars, the psychopathic and the heartless. We seem prepared to place our trust in those who lack compassion, who are devoid of a consistent moral compass, and who have only the most tenuous grasp on the truth, that they view as plastic, malleable and disposable according to the advantage of the moment.

The popularity of autocratic and authoritarian leaders and parties, even in the so called free-world is due, in part, to a desire to hide away.

Where people pretend that there is nothing they can do, so there is nothing they need do – other than to retreat into a privatized world of insular consolation.

And this is so much more than politics, although the church also has a significant duty to be active in that compromised human endeavour.

It is about our spiritual health and preparedness to identify the moral standards for which we as Christians stand and then to take a stand; to be visionary, bold and courageous.

Above all we need to throw off the cloak of helplessness that too many in our world draw around themselves as a blanket of comfort and detachment.

We are living through the rise of heartless authoritarianism across the world, itself borne out of and sustained by fear; the seeming destruction of a sense of integrity, public truth and reason before our very eyes, daily on our screens and in our newspapers.

When an immensely rich US president cancels charitable aid to the poorest and most vulnerable in the world, suggests ethnic cleansing as a way to bring peace to the Middle-East, – and now levies personal sanctions against staff of the International Criminal Court who seek to bring some measure of justice to victims of crimes against humanity and genocide – then we know that the time for Christians to be courageous and stand up is now.

And when the new vice-president of America says that a Christian teaching is that ‘charity begins at home’ – and let me remind you that the phrase received its greatest exposition in Charles Dicken’s ‘Martin Chuzzlewitt, where it was used by the villain of the book, Montague Tigg, a con man and a thief, to justify his own swindling and corruption.

The salad days are over - If our Christian faith does not inspire us to condemn, to object and to resist then we must question whether our convictions are merely fair-weather affectations – as the saying goes, ‘all for show and not for blow’.

Sometimes the most significant moments, the greatest trials of our lives are only understood in hindsight. 

As the Danish Philosopher and Theologian, Soren Kirkegaard once said: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”. 

That is the human condition.

We should all seek to take time to look back, to reflect on the journey, this pilgrimage of life that has brought us this far, but also a time to look forward, with all the freshness of hope of a child to the path we yet have to tread.

And what better to guide us, perhaps, than to hear the story of Martin the cobbler.

In the Western church, to a large part through the influence of Augustine, his genius, but also his own disabling guilt and shame, we have been bequeathed a view of salvation as the remission of punishment, by a stern and judicial God, being spared abandonment and damnation that otherwise would be ours. We might call this ‘Salvation from’, - salvation from hell, salvation from retribution, salvation from banishment.

Some traditions emphasize much more than others, of course, but whatever the degree, this perspective can create a very warped idea of God.

But there is another view, more prevalent in Eastern Orthodoxy, but also within strands of the Western Church where human sin and error are viewed, not so much in terms of crime, guilt and therefore resultant legal penalty, but in terms of illness.

In the face of which we are offered compassion, wholeness  and healing.

The American moral, legal and political philosopher John Rawls devised a concept called the 'Veil of Ignorance'.

Every year we seem to start sooner. Shops, cafés, pubs and public buildings are already decked out with Christmas decorations, the sound of Christmas tunes carries across their sound systems. And it is not even December.

There is a human tendency to only look for information that confirms what we already believe, and to reject, ignore, or even just not notice anything that is a challenge to our mindset. It’s called ‘confirmation bias’. We look for confirmation, that we are right.