On Taking Care: Accidents and Angels.

A young man I know had a motorbike accident last Sunday: head on collision with another bike, week in hospital, lots of broken bones, repeated surgery, and a worrying amnesia (although he remembered his parent’s phone number). Can’t remember the accident, can walk around, wants to go back to work right now, in spite of broken right arm, smashed eye socket: gave his girlfriend such a fright she wrote off her car two days later as she backed out into a busy road. The brain has received a shock.

            This story is repeated all the time, as insurance companies know. They levy high rates for young people. knowing older people are safer on the road. Take fewer risks. Take more care. But then, how much care do we take walking on our feet? Should pedestrians need licenses to cross the road? What about the footpath? Lurking skateboards, mad cyclists, leaping dogs? Vehicles as we brashly cross against the lights? In the middle of the road? Uneven pavements, slick wet surfaces? Why should we have to take such care?

            Then there’s the home accident. This week also I went into the backyard to call my dogs in for the night. As I was ascending the ramp, one dog shot up behind me so fast he passed between my knees and brought me down onto my knees. I had my hands on both rails and so fell onto the ramp with less force and the dog himself broke my fall. I crawled around until I found the step and levered myself up on my feet, so I could help the other dog, who was so shocked by all this he couldn’t get himself up the step.

            My guardian angel works overtime, it seems, and I’m not helping, being so careless. I turned my back on this dog, a witless beast. I knew he likes to rush about. Our knowledge about risks in many circumstances doesn’t translate to our behaviour. Where young men think they’re immortal, older people know we’re mortal and still don’t process the information.

            Why should we take care? It’s only us, isn’t it? Or is it the world, and we’re part of it? Do we have a fictional cinematic impression of floating freedom as if the world is a friend? Are we not sinners? No, I mean seriously. Refusal to understand limitations — which may be moral as well as physical — misplaced confidence, especially in our own wisdom, power or authority, refusal to ask for help or guidance. An impression of ourselves as persons too gifted to take care.

            Don’t we stand in need of mercy? And receive it so often. I could have fractured bones, slipped a retina, passed out with only two dogs for company; my friend could have broken his neck. Where’s the sin in this? you ask. Aside from grief caused to others, there’s the damage to one of God’s creatures — oneself — and then the idea we’re too good to be on a level with other creatures, being careful.

            Are accidents our fault? By definition, they befall. No: events are the consequences of earlier events. As those upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were not worse sinners than others: they were only in the wrong place at the wrong time. As to why one is saved from catastrophe while another is not, I find it comforting to reflect on Psalm 131: ‘O Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.’ Oh, good, I’m spared the need to know all about everything! NRSV has ‘too marvellous for me’. However the world works, it’s marvellous and complicated and also often dire.

            However, if we do not amend our ways, both individually and collectively, and employ more gentleness and care, we may become the cause of later events. Then we’ll be called upon to repent, to seek more protection for ourselves, for others, even for the marvellous world we inhabit: such is condition of our forgiveness.

On Refuge: Naming the Asylum Seeker

I like to take photographs of people with their dogs, and when I meet an interesting dog, once I’ve asked if I can take the photo, I always ask the dog’s name, but I never ask the person’s name. I meet these dogs in all kinds of places, and sometimes I wonder whether anyone I know will sometime recognise the person. Well, last week it happened. One of my friends recognised a fellow tennis player! This placed the dog’s owner in a context: a person with a name, a past (in his case playing tennis, rather well I gather) and quite possibly a future.

            From a tennis-playing dog owner to a fleeing asylum seeker may seem a leap of the imagination, but for me the common factor is the name. Linguistics is an interesting science, and like many sciences it’s also an art form, which can be practiced with subtlety by those who wish to conceal what they’re actually doing. One of the problems with the treatment of refugees (those who are fleeing) is the language used to describe them, in particular the official language.

            Getting onto a plane for international travel requires a passport, on which is written your name (writing is most important) which links you to other persons and places, probably to large swathes of your past, and very possibly to a future. Getting onto a boat chartered by persons for carrying cargo may not be such a precise venture. This lays refugees open to the possibility of becoming nameless.

            Official language tends to treat people in groups. Leila and her children, fleeing (by the only means available) from the distinct likelihood of getting shot, have a place, a past, a context, a family; often a religious affiliation; a nationality, race, or ethnicity which may contribute to the likelihood of getting shot: in short, they have individual human lives symbolised by their names. They’re running from a present danger — run, Leila, run! — towards a future where, like you and I, they hope to live in peace.

            Why don’t we say, “Leila got onto this boat because there was no other way out; Leila came from this town, a long way, through much peril; Leila’s dream is to educate her children, and she can’t do that if they’re shot dead.” Why do we say instead: “Another boat full of asylum seekers (plural), economic refugees (plural), victims of people smugglers (plural) is sinking and must not be rescued; if anyone drowns they can’t be retrieved and honourably buried; if anyone is brought out alive we have an arrangement with a foreign country to stow the cargo there.” With or without a passport, official language promotes namelessness.

            I’ve just read Chamberlain’s “The Philosophy Steamer,” the story of Lenin’s international exile of Russian intellectuals (not only philosophers, but poets, agricultural experts, economists, literary figures, religious thinkers, and other academics) in 1922, creating a class of ‘boat people’ who were sent to Berlin by arrangement with the Weimar government which desperately needed money. (Unlike Stalin, Lenin shot only a proportion of those who disagreed with him; it was early days in the Russian Revolution).

            When a government makes an arrangement with a foreign country to house people who belong to us, we can understand more clearly what’s actually going on by following the money. Chamberlain notes that “Chancellor Wirth disdained the idea that Germany be seen the world over as a second Siberia. But, war-ravaged and diplomatically cold-shouldered, his country was committed to helping Russia in exchange for the gifts of Rapallo, which included Most Favoured Nation trading status and extensive trade agreements, plus cancellation of war debts and pre-war claims. Germany did not have much scope to say no.”[i]

            The academics sent out of Russia by the Russian government obviously belonged to Russia. But I’m saying that Leila and her children, who appeal to us for our help, belong to us by the very reason of that appeal. Leila is seeking refuge, a quintessentially religious act.

            The Buddhist liturgy — if that’s the correct word — states: “I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (or, the teachings), and the Sangha (or, community).” Christians take refuge in the Trinity: the Father, the Son (or, the Word), and the Holy Spirit (which informs and interpenetrates the community known as the church universal). According to Panikkar God, humanity, and the world cannot be separated from one another. One always takes refuge, ultimately, in a community. And this community is bounded by the whole world. Therefore, Leila is entitled to our protection. She takes refuge in us, the community, and it would honour us, as our privilege and responsibility, to provide that refuge.

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[i] Chamberlain, Lesley, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (London: Atlantic, 2006), p. 85.

Liber Scriptus: The Sensible Book.

I have to confess that I’m bi-graphical:  I have two handwritings. There’s the neat, show-offy birthday card writing, with rounded ‘o’s and graceful ‘t’s and ‘l’s, and then there’s the scruffy grocery list writing, with wonky slopes and squashed ‘g’s and ‘y’s.  Depending on mood and distraction, the same words might be written in different ways.

            This leads me to wonder if the presentation of writing reflects how we receive it. Whether the beautifully bound, gold-edged Bible (a confirmation present) is any more of a pleasure to read than the battered paperback volume in the backpack. Whether the gold-edged Bible is even read at all: perhaps it’s too precious to touch. Touch, that vital link with the inhabited world, can add pleasure to reading or it can repel.  I own a copy of a book on meditation so sensually produced —with its thick, creamy paper, its lavish but not overwhelming size, its lightness and substantiality combined — that just holding it is meditation for the hands.

            Then there’s the question of what is written in the book. Here I just mention another of the senses, hearing: hearing about writing, this time through music.  For Mozart, the words ‘Liber Scriptus’ in the Requiem Mass are a calm, fluent tenor solo in the midst of a classic trio, leading to the great choral heralding of “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” — the King of Fearful Majesty —coming to judge the world with justice: the final moment for God’s justice to prevail.  For Verdi, by the nineteenth century, it’s an operatic oration, setting the stage for a grand if terrifying drama. For Britten, who had seen Belsen concentration camp soon after its liberation, it’s a spine-chilling soprano declamation: an ambassador’s announcement of dreadful events.  ‘Liber Scriptus’ is the book in which are contained the deeds of humankind by which the world shall be judged.  It is the written book: these deeds cannot be altered; they have already taken place.

            Surely the Bible, a collection of books which is in one sense a history of the world (for there are many senses), contains these matters which must be judged: wars, genocides, invasions, deportations, imperial aggressions, repressions, persecutions; slavery, incest, rape, murder; betrayals, rejection of strangers entitled to protection; lies, greed, grinding down of the poor.  Hatred of neighbours; worship of money.  Vengeance, ruthlessness, self-interest as a way of life. Read the Bible, and you’ll be astonished at how little has changed in the last few thousand years.

           But there is another sensibility in the Bible, and especially in the Gospels. The figure of Jesus of Nazareth offers a way of compassion, a view of the kindness of God and the forgiveness of sins for those who repent.  To repent, forswear violence, and follow a way of goodness/beauty can’t change the words in the written book: events in which I (and sometimes a whole generation) have been implicated have already come to pass, and their consequences will play out in the mortal world.  But perhaps new words can be written, for there is a fountain of divine mercy — ‘fons pietatis’ in the liturgy —and it’s never too late to appeal for ever-flowing salvation.