Sunday 20 July 2014

MH17: On Deliverance from Evil



Some say that reading the news is bad for your health. Surely it is often bad for your peace of mind. This week has featured progressing catastrophes in the Middle East, the violent end of a civilian plane as it fell to earth over a zone of civil war, ongoing sieges, mass kidnappings and sectarian murders in parts of Africa. And that’s just today’s reporting.
            The writers of the Bible, some of them historians, understood fighting over the land. Very little seems to have changed since those ancient days with the cruelties denounced by the prophets. Micah knows about those who ‘devise wickedness and evil deeds’ and then ‘perform it, because it is in their power. They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house.’ (Micah 2:1-2) ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man’ says Psalm 140, ‘preserve me from the violent man … Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked…’ (KJV). The violent are much with us today, for it seems no time or place has been free of them: often their deeds carried out in the name of religion.
            The width of such tragedy is notable. There are complaints of greater interest in the fallen plane, with its Western and European context, as comparative silence rests over the current disasters in the Middle East. Sometimes, I think, the problem is not so much lack of interest as lack of words to express our continuing appalled despair. Yet where we fall within the context, where everyone may know someone who knows someone who was on that plane, interest and perhaps comment is natural.
            Matthew records that ‘from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force’ (Matt 11:12). This, to me, is still the case. The kingdom of God particularly favours children; indeed one must be childlike in order to enter it. Yet we find at the hands of the violent, neither ancient sacred monuments nor tender young children are spared.
            Morally speaking, are the deeds of the violent due to original sin, or is there an active spirit of evil at work in the world? The faculty of justice, the chief virtue that inclines us to give to everyone what properly belongs to them, is a divine quality too often lacking in humankind. Original sin, as I understand it, is the likelihood that human beings will fail in justice due to our faults and limitations. And this is a mark that we are not divine; however, we are not animals either. We seem to possess both reason and revelation, and often to ignore both.
            I’m no philosopher: I doubt that I could address these questions if I were. Yet I know that when we pray, we call upon two sides of this question. ‘Do not put us to the test’ says the Lord’s prayer, or ‘Lead us not into temptation; save us from the time of trial.’ Surely whoever brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 failed the test, abandoned justice, and gave in to faults and limitations to which humanity is subject.
            But then we also pray: ‘Deliver us from evil. ‘Us’ in this verse, being the entire human race. The destroyed persons, the devastated lands, both the most ancient and the most recent, belong to everyone, everywhere. We pray for divine justice. We pray for deliverance from evil.

Thursday 10 July 2014

On Your Spiritual History



Recently I was interviewed by someone who wanted to know my thoughts about God. This interview was fascinating in many ways, but the initial question took me back a bit. The interviewer wanted to know about my spiritual history: how had I related to questions of God from my earliest beginnings?
            You know, I found this question hard to answer. I realise — looking back on my reply — that I answered largely in terms of my experience of institutional religion. I said I was brought up on the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (1662) in the High Church Anglican tradition. And as a result, my vision of God was of a King, a supreme monarch, and that there were good reasons for this perception, rooted in the Reformation. I related how this came to feel antique, mediaeval, and somewhat oppressive, and how the arguments of my atheist boyfriend encouraged me to leave off going to church, although I didn’t agree with his position.
            And this in spite of being grateful today for Cranmer and King James as the gift of the English language, its beauty, and its spirituality in a form that is in one way at least, eternal.
            My travels through various forms of religious involvement, both within Christianity and outside it, I described by naming things, places, denominations. Where did I go, when God was no longer a king?
            Although later in the interview we fell into a deep discussion of prayer, I found on looking back that my awkwardness in answering that first question hid something interesting. And that, I think, is story.
            We all have a spiritual history. This same atheist boyfriend had a small sister, who used to make up tales about ‘the people who made us.’ He thought that was quaint, the way people deceive themselves without ever having been taught.
            And a history is a story, as accurate as we can make it, about something real, as real as we can make it. It will be profoundly influenced by our own makeup, our times, prejudices, impressions, sins, and failings. Our own history would ideally describe our sensations, emotions, hopes and values as well as events: the meaning is in our ability to find meaning. I feel that a story should flow. A choppy set of facts is no story. It may, of course, not yet have flowed to its destination. But it should be in motion. God, above all, isn’t static.
            It’s good to think about your spiritual history. Each step in it is going somewhere. You may see where you found your ethics, and how you relate to other people. You may see when you were rescued from danger, when you were injured, and when you were amazed into faith. You may learn to trust. Not everyone wants to cogitate on doctrine all the time; not everyone is a philosopher. But you may learn that there is nothing more real than God.
            And this was the last question of my interviewer: the one-word definition of God. Of course this can’t be done. But some have tried to define the Divine. Aquinas thought it was ‘the activity of existing or being’: I AM in the Judaic tradition. I have heard it said that God is love: Dante wrote a Comedy about that. And there are many other views. You will have your own answer. It’s only the best you can do.
            After some thought, I said: ‘Reality.’