THE WAY OF CHRIST Being Truthful in a Time of Meaninglessness
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Becoming a DIY Believer / 4 Winter Series, 2010
Rev Dr Raymond Pelly
THE WAY OF CHRIST Being Truthful in a Time of Meaninglessness
We do not want you to be unaware … of the affliction we experienced…: for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Paul, 2 Corinthians 1:8
He said not: Thou shalt not be tempted, that shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love LXVIII
One way of getting a handle on this question of whether Jesus makes a real difference to our lives is to give it some gutsy focus (or testing ground). The one I propose is how we move (if we do) from being a victim to becoming a victim-survivor. What is meant by that will emerge as we go along. In fact (& I mean this literally), moving along, keeping going, seeing ourselves as pilgrims, is central to the ‘movement’ I’m going to be talking about. In this, I will speak personally, but also in a way that, I trust, will draw in the experience of others.
My personal experience was at once personal & social. The personal bit was to lose two children, one by cot death in 1965, Gail, & another, Cathy, by drowning in 1984. In neither case was there any convincing explanation of how either child, one aged 3 months, the other nearly 17, came to die. In the case of Cathy, a thorough police inquiry was deployed. Had she been attacked by a swan? There was a nest nearby in the River Dart where she drowned. Or was she murdered? There was a suspect, but not enough evidence to convict; & I had the weird experience of being driven by this individual, who had become a taxi driver, for 40 minutes across the Devon landscape. All this was compounded by the ending of my first (20 year) marriage in 1984, a marriage that had begun & ended with a death; with a partner who turned out to be a manic depressive & largely unpredictable from one moment to the next. 1984, further, was the year when my job as Warden (= Principal) of St.John’s College in Auckland came to an end after eight years of killingly hard work & with a family disintegrating around me. Nobody in the Church wanted to know me.
If that was my personal story of meaninglessness, the social side of it can be sketched very briefly. Aged 18, I did two years of National Service in the Army, most of it on active duty in Cyprus (a place I re-visited in April this year) where, in the ‘emergency’ (95 UK soldiers killed), I saw a whole society falling apart, people killing each other & etc.. Subsequently, partly as a way of finding out what had happened in my own lifetime (I was born in 1938), I began to look into European History, in particular the Holocaust, that outbreak of barbarism, this abyss of evil, at the heart of Western civilization.
These were questions, I felt, that I personally, & that we collectively, had to face & work at. So rather like a navvy in a leaking ship, I resolved to go down into the bilges, to see if I could find the leaks, & do my bit to plug them. This, if you like, is what a theologian does.
I.
By 1995 I felt able to begin the task of writing about – & making sense of – all of the above. In an extended reflection called, ‘Touched by the Wounds’, I began by comparing writing a book like this to putting up a tent in a high wind. I went on:
‘On any street in any town there will be people who have lost children, been betrayed by colleagues, friends or spouses, whose careers have been destroyed by ‘downsizing’ or ‘re-structuring’, whose lives have been ruined by accident or illness, who have been abused or raped, whose families have disintegrated under the impact of enforced re-locations. Bomb attacks, air crashes, earthquakes, fires, crime, poverty, prejudice. Not the tragedy of classical drama or high art, but the tragedy of the everyday …’
I then asked:
‘Suppose we commit ourselves to recovery, what will this involve? Can there be recovery of a shattered life? I concluded that there are three areas of potential recovery. In the high winds of bewilderment, rage & moral confusion, certain pegs or markers can be hammered into the ground.
The first is cognitive & has to do with what we believe. Once we have experienced the world as a tragic, unforgiving place, is there any way we can re-discover it as having promise or potential? … The second is affective & concerns what we feel. Is prayer (or any act of deliberate reflection) stymied post-tragedy by deep-seated feelings of rage, resentment, bitterness, resignation, cynicism & despair? … The third is active or ethical & bears on the values we act out in our lives. Tragedy is like losing your life. One life is dead, another (perhaps) waiting to be born. What will the ethical shape or profile of it be?’
II.
So the stage is set. Where do we go from here? The agenda is too vast to go into in detail. Rather, I want simply to evoke what turned out to be points of light for me. In doing this, I first want to make a distinction between answers & insights. The child in us wants answers; the adult realizes that there aren’t any, only insights which enable us to move on, get ourselves a life. Something more fundamental is required, akin to a conversion, to get us going. I would, alternatively, describe this as the moment we discover a root metaphor for what our life may be about, given what has happened.
In 1985 when Gail died, I was a newly ordained Curate working in a huge Parish in Newcastle in the North of England. My Bishop, Hugh Ashdown, wrote me a letter. It went something like this. ‘You’ve just gone through an unspeakable tragedy: the loss of your first child. But why not look at it like this? All the pain of that loss may (in years to come) give you a depth of sympathy with other people & their suffering that you wouldn’t otherwise have, which will be a gift you can offer them as priest & as pastor’. That was good advice, words that hit the spot, that I took to heart. More fundamentally, & as I reflected on my losses, sometimes in a way filled with self-pity, I heard Jesus saying words to the effect, ‘Being crucified as an innocent victim is about as meaningless as it gets. Call yourself a Christian? Do you want to share my sufferings as I share yours? And I say this because my cross turned out to be the very place where all the life is’. Under the impact of these words, I recalled what Paul says. ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead’ (3:10-11). There occurred, in other words, what is called a ‘paradigm shift’ or change of ‘root metaphor’ in my self-understanding. It went from an experience of life dominated by loss & self-pity, to one turned towards the possibility of new & unexpected life: resurrection, slow-burning yet real, drawn out yet transformative. A word like ‘transfiguration’ began to make sense to me.
III.
Once we have crossed this bridge from death to life, we have to work out what this means – as I hinted above – in our thinking, feeling and acting. Let’s take each (somewhat impressionistically) in turn.
1. The relevant bit of ‘think’ stuff is called Atonement Theology; & it’s all about how we become reconciled (or made one) with God (& our own best selves), given that we are alienated or cut off from both. Here there are two venerable lines of reflection, one called ‘victory’, the other, ‘exchange’.
In some ‘Stations of the Cross’ that I wrote for Good Friday at the Cathedral in 2006, I wrote:
‘The cross was a victory or ‘lifting up’ – a standard held aloft by the victor after a battle; or a trophy by an athlete after an event. Why? Because his [Jesus’] actions, whether active or passive, were powered or motivated by love, by an abyss of love that is of God, a love that goes deeper than the abyss of evil; is not overcome by its darkness; and can never be overcome by it.
In this way the cry of dereliction, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? is not a cry of defeat or an announcement of the absence of God. It is a cry of victory; of yearning desire for the true God; the great cry of freedom in all the triumph of love. Like the birth cry of a child entering life and audible through the house, Jesus’ last cry from the cross was the birth yell of the new creation echoing around the universe!’
I then went on to ‘exchange’.
‘St.Augustine puts it like this: He carried out a wonderful transaction with us … through mutual sharing: he died from what was ours, we will live from what was his.
In his fathomless and proactive love, Jesus took upon himself our sins, tragedies and atrocities; our lovelessness and hatred; our bad luck and cruel fate; our injustice, violence and disrespect for life. To get some insight into the horror of all this – in ourselves as in others – is one of the learnings of Good Friday.
That is one part of the transaction. The other, and by far the more important, is the way – through the loving mediation and mercy of Christ – all our deaths, dying and deadness are taken into God, the one place where alone they will ever find real and lasting healing.’
The question is, do we really believe this & take it to heart? Now we are talking about prayer.
2. Prayer, then, is about sharing in this victory (or overcoming); about experiencing this exchange for ourselves – allowing our own ‘bilges’ to be pumped out by the one fully respectful of who we are – as people with ideas about life, a spirituality, & ways of doing things – Christ who is fully connected to us (‘the fellow-sufferer who understands’) & yet ‘from the heart of God’. To evoke that, just a few quotes.
‘What deserves to be called mysticism occurs when God’s word is heard with the whole heart, the whole being, when one is steadfast before the self-disclosure of the heart of God despite fire and night’. Hans Urs von Balthasar
‘In the deserts of the heart/ let the healing fountains start/ Teach the freeman how to praise/ in the prison of his days’. W.H. Auden
Mother Julian talks about how our ‘wounds’ can become ‘worships’ (or honours). She writes: ‘Our Lord’s intention is for consolation in our pain, for he wants us to know that it will be turned to our honour and profit by the power of his Passion, and to know that we suffered in no way alone, but together with him, and to see in him our foundation’. (Revelations, XXVIII) In the Beatitudes, Jesus simply says, ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted’. (Matthew 5:4)
3. So our view of life has turned from ‘death, deadness, dying’ to life. Reconciliation has opened wellsprings of life in God and in ourselves. We have taken this to heart (prayer). Now we have to live it out. The program or script is beautifully laid out by the Prophet Micah.
‘What does the Lord require of you but to act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with your God’. (6:8)
Or Paul, ‘Bear one another’s burdens & so fulfill the law of Christ’. (Galatians 6:3) – given that these ‘burdens’ may be the tragedies & sense of meaninglessness of others.
In these three ways, the whole person is addressed, the healing process enabled to become real.
IV.
To finish up with, some more considered reflections on the rather raw experience – for good or ill – I have just evoked. In 1995/96 I drafted the book ‘Touched by the Wounds’ already mentioned. In 2010 I completed the manuscript of a book called ‘Pilgrim to Unholy Places’, focused more explicitly & searchingly on the Holocaust. It contains 14 studies, each one what I call, ‘A Raid on the Unspeakable’. See Appendix 1. Three inter-related ideas that run right through the book are, Co-passion, Narrowing, Recognition. See Appendix 1 of DIY/1. A little, in conclusion, on each of these.
1.Co-Passion.
This is not a word you will find in the dictionary; it’s a DIY word that is achieved by biffing out the ‘m’ of compassion. It asks the question: if we want to talk ‘God’ in relation to the Shoah, what kind of God is God? Answer: the God who shares the sufferings of his people in a real way – ‘in all their distress, he was distressed’ (Isaiah 63:9)’ - and who, at one and the same time, is maximally & passionately active for their liberation –‘I know their sufferings & have come down to deliver them’ (Exodus 3:8). This is the God of the Bible, the God who is incarnate in Jesus; the God Jews & Christians have in common. From a Christian perspective, it makes good sense of Philippians 2:5-11; also of a lot of contemporary experience where people who have suffered (e.g. women with stillborn babies) are the best at helping others who suffer the same afflictions.
2.Narrowing.
One thing that Auschwitz & Golgotha have in common is the de facto narrowing down of the possibilities of life to point null. It is part of Christian orthodoxy that Jesus really & truly died on the cross [contrast Dan Brown & all Gnostics, ancient or modern]; just as there is no doubt that millions of people, mostly Jews, perished in gas chambers in the Shoah. This is the ‘context’ in which the co-passionate God-in-Christ is deployed. If this, then, is the place where we see the sharing of suffering, is there any comparable evidence for the balancing passion for freedom & life? Here I would say that an attentive reading of the Passion Narratives in the Gospels will show that no matter how deep/horrific the sufferings of Jesus, he was more concerned about others than about himself. He was the ‘man for others’, the one who cared. A few examples of this: his concern for the executioners, ‘Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing’ (Luke 23:34); his concern for the women of Jerusalem, ‘Weep not for me, but for yourselves’ (Luke 23:28); his care & concern for his mother & beloved disciple, ‘Woman, here is your son/Here is your mother’ (John 19:26). This is a love as real as it is remarkable, & appearing in the darkest & most unexpected of places. Is this a real foretaste of the resurrection? Or part of what is meant by seeing the cross as victory, as integral to resurrection? Is this the place where the ‘life <--->death’ exchange (spoken about earlier) actually became visible?
3.Recognition
As soon as we have a theology in place that (hopefully) does justice to Golgotha, it enables us to do something deeply ecumenical: to recognize in Jewish people in the ‘narrowing’ of Auschwitz some of the same heroic, spontaneous love that Jesus showed in his cross & passion. Here is an example you may not be familiar with. The story & the comments that follow are abstracted from my book, ‘Pilgrim to Unholy Places’. This is the story of the Paris Rabbi, Berek Kofman, as recorded by his daughter, Sarah.
My father, a rabbi, was killed because he tried to observe the Sabbath in the death camps; buried alive with a shovel for having – or so the witnesses reported – refused to work on that day, in order to celebrate the Sabbath, to pray to God for them all, victims and executioners, re-establishing in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power. And they could not bear that a Jew, that vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God.
Sarah Kofman then continues:
As he did not lose faith in God on that afternoon of July 16, 1942, when a French policeman came to round him up with a pained smile on his lips, almost as if he, too, were excusing himself. Having gone to warn the Jews of the synagogue to go and hide because he knew there would be a raid, he had returned to the house to pray to God that he be taken, so long as his wife and his children were spared. And instead of hiding, he left with the policeman; so that we would not be taken in his place, as hostages, he suffered, like millions of others, the infinite of violence: death in Auschwitz.
‘Faced with this story, comment is hard. Suffice it to say that here was a man who kept the Torah, for him binding – to love and obey God; to love and care others – in a full, courageous and radical way. Not only can we say that his Gestalt was that of a believing, praying man, it was also that of one whose prayer entailed an active and very costly caring for others. Is human community sustainable, we ask, without people like Rabbi Kofman? Not only that, in a self (or sense of identity) that was essentially selfless, he uncannily resembles the One whose Gestalt and characteristic pattern of activity consisted in not exploiting his status as man of God for his own advantage, but who (rather) ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave…and became obedient to the point of death’. Both men, both Jews, both victims, the one at Auschwitz, the other at Golgotha, would, I feel certain, have recognized each other had they ever met. Did they not share a common language and a way of life? This provides us, Jews and Christians, with a double challenge. Can we at this the deepest point of overlap in our respective covenantal traditions recognize each other with all the joy and thanksgiving of a reunion of long-lost friends? Can we, further, as modern inheritors of the great gifts of prayer and active love, offer (and celebrate) these very gifts in a blood and tear-stained world which has lost sight of or suppressed them, but without which no true freedom or flourishing of human life can be sustained?’
Enough said. NB: a fuller version of these ideas/categories of Co-passion, Narrowing, Recognition is in Appendix I of DIY/1.
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Appendix 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pilgrim to Unholy Places
Introduction: ‘Raids on the Unspeakable’
Part 1: Diaries/ Memory 1. Auschwitz, 1995 2. Dachau, 1995 3. Lviv, Cernitsa, Warsaw, Treblinka, 2001 4. Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, 2001 5. Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim Castle,Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, 2003 6. Berlin: Plötzensee, Tegel Prison, Wannsee,Sachsenhausen, 2003 7. Mittelbau Dora, Leitenberg, 2006 8. Esterwegen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, 2008
Part 11: Reflections: Theology/Ethics/Spirituality 1. Hearing the Cries: The Kenotic, Pilgrim Christ Philippians 2:5-11 on kenosis
A. On Being a Pilgrim 2. Pilgrim to Unholy Places: A Definition 3. Thinking with your Feet: The Pilgrim’s Way of Knowing 4. Pilgrimage and Prayer: Kneeling and Surviving
B. Holy/Unholy 5. Unholy Places: Site-Specific Reckoning with Evil 6. Holy Places I: Paul Celan & Grief 7. Holy Places II: Paul Ricoeur & Memory
C. Jewish – Christian Dialogue 8. Rachel Weeping for her Children: Biblical Portent of the Holocaust 9. Jewish Responses to the Holocaust: Agency, Divine & Human 10. Auschwitz & Golgotha (1): Analogue or Adversary? 11. Auschwitz & Golgotha (2): Impulses for a New Torah
D. Learning from the Shoah 12. Reflections on God: Co-passion 13. Christ and Horrors: Engführung: Narrowing/Impasse 14. The Living & the Dead: Recognition
E. Last Word 15. Real Hope in the Real World? Appendix: On De- and Re-Constructing our Root Metaphors
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Appendix 2 Re-thinking what we mean by ‘person’ as an analogy/metaphor for how we think of God. Two further extracts from ‘Pilgrim to Unholy Places’.
(i) ‘Instead of talking of God as all-powerful (omnipotent) – Arthur Cohen’s ‘the interferer’ – we do better to talk of the pre-eminence of God in love. Why? Basically because if we make God the direct cause of all that happens in history, we make ‘him’ into the author of Auschwitz, an all-powerful psychopathic monster devoid of love who imposes suffering in ways that are as unethical as they are irrational. This is the ‘god’ whose existence (and supporting rationale) began to be questioned in the 18th Century Enlightenment and who finally – or so I should argue – hit the wall at Birkenau, lies dead and buried in Auschwitz, a death beyond all resurrection.
To grasp an alternative understanding of God, we need to attend to the distinction between omnipotence and pre-eminence in love. In barest outline we could say that if the agency of the former involves power alone, that of the latter acts with the power (or causality) of love, a power, that, moreover, respects human freedom. Thus, while an omnipotence of power can always by-pass human agency (and the laws of nature) to achieve its ends, a divine agency that is pre-eminent in co-passionate love is (by its nature) fully respectful of human freedom (as of the laws of nature). It works, that is, through the nexus of the hearts and minds of people, their body-selves – by which is meant all the realities of human life from birth to death in time and space. Collectively this space is history – the very place between the beginning and end of earthly time where the dramas of human life are acted out. Here people are drawn into becoming co-creators and co-redeemers with God; the living God who, in all the pre-eminence of co-passionate love, is the one who takes the initiative in sharing suffering or energizing liberation.’
(ii) ‘This understanding of the divine-human nexus approximates (I would claim) to Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s plea for a voluntary understanding of the covenant between God and his people. Perceptively he writes:
‘In a voluntary covenant, there is a deeper dependence – that of relationship, love, self-expectations based on the model of the other – but it is a dependence out of strength. The ultimate logic of parenting is to raise children to meet life’s challenges, but to sustain them with a continuing presence and model, not with continual interference or rescue from problems.’
Greenberg’s analogy of the strong, loving, non-interfering parent could be complemented by another: that of the wise and loving person who, because deeply respected, profoundly influences all those who come in contact with him or her, but who always leaves them free – for good or ill – to make their own decisions. This person cares passionately about people and comes to them with an infectious vision and personal practice of the fullness of life. This person, further, is peerless (or pre-eminent) in love in the sense of never exercising ‘power over’ others, but rather by being endlessly generative – no doubt on the basis of the track record of their own life – of a ‘power to’ love, to hope, to care (or whatever) in others. People are thus profoundly affected, but always through inspiration, influence, example, love, accumulated wisdom, and sometimes through a guidance and persuasion that always stops short of dictating. In this way we arrive at a notion of the agency of love that can be seen as free, full of life, proactive yet restrained, powerful yet never domineering.’
