The knowledge and love of God

There seem to have been so many items in the news over the past few weeks relating to the abuse of children and young people. Every day there's a new and horrific revelation from the guilty plea of TV presenter Stuart Hall to the sheer scale of abuse in children's homes in Wales, and then the harrowing accounts of the murder of Tia Sharp today. And this is to name only a few.
One of the hardest things to acknowledge is that human cruelty is an everyday event. One of the most revealing details came when the neighbour of Ariel Castro struggled to get his head around the fact that an average bloke who attended backyard barbecues and made small talk was also capable of abduction, abuse and torture.Finding out that someone you assumed was basically decent can carry out atrocity shakes your faith not only in them but in your own judgements and ultimately in human nature.
If, while listening to these cases on the news, you have had a fleeting moment when you have asked yourself whether it is safe to trust anyone, or safe to assume that most people are decent, imagine how much more of a challenge this poses to those who have been abused. Those abused as children have grown up with that disconnect between appearance and reality because they have experienced what a trusted and seemingly decent adult, who goes about their everyday life in an ordinary fashion, is actually capable of. Survivors of abuse are rarely very surprised at what goes on behind closed doors.
Yet trust is an essential part of human life; without it you close down and emotionally you die. You can't let people get close to you. You can't be honest with others or be yourself with them. Because you are unable to develop a sense of who others are, you may lack a sense of self and show a casual disregard for your own needs or be unable to identify your own emotions.
We all need to be able to trust others and I think that to have a faith can be an enormous blessing for those who have been abused and for all of us in our doubts about goodness in ourselves and others. If you can truly grasp that God is pure goodness, pure holiness, pure love, and can be utterly trusted, then this provides that still centre in a turning world. If you have this, then the knowledge that evil is real and everyday is balanced by the knowledge that goodness is also real and everyday- and you will begin to  find it, and even to expect it, in yourself and others.

TLC

Today, as I heard on the radio this morning, is Good Shepherd's Sunday in the Catholic year. We can learn a lot from reflecting on the different images we have of  God as Father, Mother, Creator, King, Judge, or of Jesus as brother, Saviour, friend, lover, advocate. I think the concept of God and Christ as shepherd is one of the richest with its connotations of being guided, tended and valued so much that he will rise and seek for us to bring us home. No-one has so little worth that they can be dispensed by the Good Shepherd, and the more we are in need, the more imperative it is to Him to reach us even at great cost to Himself. There is also the idea of Christ as the Lamb of God which reminds us of the God in Christ who comes to be among us and be utterly vulnerable as we are.
This beautiful metaphor for God and God in Christ should comfort us and help us to trust, even if our capacity to trust has been damaged by our experiences or individuals and even if we feel we can no longer put our trust in institutions or ideology. We can always trust God to meet us in our needs, or as one of these songs says,  God shepherds us beyond our wants and fears. Both of these hymns are about TLC _ not just tender loving care but trust, love and confidence when we approach God.  I've posted them before - still I hope you find them meaningful.

Stress bears

I recommend these stress bears which a friend sent me today. A quick click of your mouse and you can send the little devils tumbling down. You can imagine they are anything/ anyone you like - iron ladies, certain bishops in the Church of England, cold callers, those difficult neighbours,  your colleagues...your congregation....
Possibly not very christian... quite therapeutic though...

Remembering

Dunno about you but the death of MT has had two effects so far in our household. Number one is that I've had to say "Calm down" to Mr M on an even more frequent basis than usual as he rants angrily at the radio (he didn't like her...) The second effect is that hearing about the miners' strike, the Brighton bomb, the Poll Tax and so on has brought back vividly what was happening in my life at those particular moments. It is a weird thing the remembrance of things past. So for anyone feeling nostalgic - enjoy the above.

Still breathing

 We didn't break up until Maundy Thursday and things were pretty non stop. As a result, I had a Holy Week with very little time to reflect on the meaning of Holy Week, in fact it wasn't until I got up at 9am on Friday morning that I realised it was Good Friday and that I just had time to mark the occasion by getting ready to go to the service in town. I was pondering whether to go when my son announced he thought he might have broken his toe while boxing and might need to go to A&E.The chances of getting to a Good Friday service rapidly diminished.
My husband and I debated a trip to A&E. He was of the opinion that we should first try the out of hours service or NHS direct just to get an opinion on whether the possibly broken but probably only bruised and swollen toe could wait until Tuesday when the surgery would be open.
I spent over twenty minutes trying to get through to the new 111 number you phone for out of hours advice. I got cut off once. When I finally got through, the lady asked me the sort of  questions that I'd forgotten they have to ask. The conversation ran thus:

 Me: My son's hurt his toe boxing, it's very swollen, could be broken. I just want some advice on whether it could wait until Tuesday or if it needs an X-ray.
NHS operator: Is he still breathing?
Me: Yes, he's just hurt his toe.(Would I really be on the phone discussing his toe if he wasn't breathing?)
NHS operator: Has he lost consciousness at any point?
Me: No, he's fine. Would you like to talk to him?

Ten minutes later, after a conversation clearly designed to ascertain that my son was not facing imminent death, he was advised to go to A&E anyway. Just as I picked up my car keys, the dog, with impeccable timing, threw up copiously over the carpet...

I didn't have time for much Good Friday meditation, but in between cleaning up dog sick and seeing to swollen toes, I did think about Christ's death on the cross. The NHS operater's question, "Is he still breathing" kept returning to me. It made me think of Christ's passion and agony and of those who watch by the dying. It was my Good Friday meditation.

Is he still breathing?

Easter Sunday answers the agonised questions and the horror of Good Friday with the glorious answer that, yes, He is risen, he lives.God still breathes his power into the universe and breathes his transforming love into our lives. On Easter Sunday we breathe in the fragrance of light and hope and glory that exists beyond the cross and tomb and beyond death because of a God who is truly risen and,  "Is not the God of the dead but of the living because to him all are alive."

Sorrow and Love

Good Friday is the day on which my faith makes most sense to me. This is because, although I have never heard a completely satisfying intellectual argument as to why a loving God would allow so much human suffering, the image of a God who suffers along with us seems the most compelling emotional answer to that question. The cross is a rich metaphor; it does not really matter that it means different things to different people, more that we are prepared to search for meaning in it. In the clip above, Justin Welby describes how when he faced his daughter's death, he had a strong sense, alongside his grief, of the presence of Jesus that filled the room. That image of the simultaneous presence of love and grief recalls the words of Isaac Watts:
See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,
or thorns compose so rich a crown.

Or as it says in the liturgy,

“He opened wide for us his arms on the cross.”
Or in the words of William Blake:

“Until our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.”

The type of love which stays with us when the chips are down, when have reached rock bottom, when nothing can really be said or done other than to offer love itself, is something very precious. It is precious because it is then that we realise that love is valuable, not because it can sort our problems out, but because love affirms our dignity as human beings. Love asserts that our human life, even in its last futility of weakness, pain, despair and death, still has meaning and value.

The triumph of the cross is not a triumph over weakness but a triumph through weakness. It holds the message that an all powerful God loves us enough to be totally defenceless and that this in itself is triumph and power.

Brick walls

Giles Fraser, who only recently announced he was giving up anger and moving on, has now managed to upset a lot of people with an article about banging his head against a brick wall over "Cheesus Christians" which shows a level of evango-phobia which unfortunately doesn't seem to be tongue in cheek or satirical. I have to say that I do think the offence Fraser has caused is justified in this instance, he does peddle some appalling stereotypes about evangelicals, describing them as, "patronising, superior and faux caring all at the same time." Perhaps even more toe-curlingly, Fraser makes some apallingly sweeping statements about what he refers to as the theological illteracy of evangelicals, saying that their theology has no capacity to address suffering and pain.
 I suspect that Fraser fully intended his readers to understand that he is talking about a certain type of evangelical or a tendency that can sometimes be found in some strains of evangelical thought. If so, he doesn't make it clear, he just seems to lump the whole evangelical world - which is a very broad spectrum anyway-together as Cheesus lovers. I also didn't feel that Fraser's observations were particularly theologically literate themselves. He criticises evangelicals because  "the cross of Good Friday is actually celebrated as a moment of triumph", and not, as Fraser describes it, as failure and crisis, without pausing to take breath and consider whether the work of the cross, a work that involves embracing the failure and despair of humanity, is not the paradoxical strength-in-vulnerability that lies behind the power of the Resurrection. Seeing the cross as a work of triumph is not necessarily theologically illiterate.
But leaving aside the fact that the theological comment might have been more nuanced and astute, what that really made me want to  bash my head against the wall is that Fraser is president of Inclusive Church - and God loves and uses all sorts of people, not only men and women, black and white, gay and straight, but also liberals and conservatives. Also most people really do defy labels. Most people who might be described as "liberal" (such as myself) don't like to be characterised as not-beliving- in-the-bible, anything-goes-types any more than most evangelicals like to be characterised as either ranting -bible-basher or cheesy-fake-and-shallow.We have to get beyond the sort of "them and us" labels that can cause us to fail to see and relate to others, because that way we might just have a chance of bringing down the walls that can divide us rather than just bruising our heads on them.