Category Archives: Maladies

Harry Potter and the disappearing student

Abuse of Power, Articles, Harry Potter, Magic, Paternalism, Review, Youth, , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life Dec 2001

English public schools always breaks up for Christmas – and Hogwarts is no exception. Strange, really, since Hogwarts is an academy for wizards and witches, and therefore (according to Christian fundamentalists and even some toy store chains), a global focus of neo-pagan demonic power and a corruptor of childhood innocence.

Hogwarts is, of course as fictional as its most renowned pupil, Harry Potter. Each of the seven years that Harry spends there is to be recorded in a novel for children – boys especially – by J.K. Rowling. Four have already been written.

At Hogwarts one finds the familiar cast of the typical English boarding school yarn – the wise and indulgent Head whose gift for moral discernment has nodded strangely in the appointment of a sinister teacher or two; the sadistic, sneering student bully and his henchmen; their victims – and the heroic Harry and his mates who stand in the way. But instead of Latin, Maths and French, Harry and his coevals take Sorcery, Magical Animals and Divinisation classes. And where Harry’s predecessors had to deal with German or Russian spies or drug runners, Harry has to match wands at the denouement with the sinister Lord Voldemort, an arch wizard bent upon global thraldom. It is essentially youthful joie de vivre against the controlling mind of the overbearing adult, white magic against black, good against evil – and guess who wins in the end.

The young (and the wannabe young) tend to love these stories partly because the school is indeed, after the family, the power structure within which their own life drama begins – a challenging microcosm of the adult world within which some kind of glory is sought and all kinds of humiliation skirted. They love them also for the rich Halloween detail and humour which make lessons riotous – apart from the inevitable one or two in which the teacher burbles on endlessly on, say, astrological charts, as her predecessors would have done on Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Rowling takes her other world scholarship on everything from dragons and unicorns to leprechauns and giants with almost Tolkien-like gravity – but also improvises joyously.

Should we worry about all of this? Yes indeed. Rowling’s imagination does seem strangely bare of biblical reference, and Harry’s Christmas is a matter of mere digestive excess, in the tradition of Enid Blyton. If the rich historical significance of Christmas and Easter in the defeat of the powers of darkness can find not even an allegorical echo in the most popular child fiction of the moment, there is indeed something wrong. Christianity, one gathers from the minimal reference in these books – and from the po-faced fundamentalist campaign against them – is a portentous and tedious feature of the Muggle world – something to escape from in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, who headed down river in spiritual revolt against soap and psalms as well as fear of an abusive parent.

Muggles, for the uninitiated, are those who can never get to Hogwarts, because they are simply unendowed with magical powers. Following the murder of his parents by Voldemort, Harry was raised by his Muggle Aunt and Uncle, suburban tyrants who gave him the cupboard under the stairs to sleep in. They spoil their only son, Dudley, who bullies Harry until he finds himself transmuted into a variety of animal forms, and humiliated in various other ways.

Oddly enough, it is in the humiliation of Dudley that Rowling comes a little unstuck. Magic is after all an extension of human power and when it is used to humiliate, laughter cannot be entirely unalloyed. Dudley’s obesity is precisely the kind of vulnerability that bullies exploit in the Muggle world – so his likely destiny as the archetypal spoiled suburban child is eventually itself oddly affecting. Perhaps Rowling will find some way of redeeming this particular Muggle in the end.

The straightened circumstances of the Weasleys – the wizarding family that provides Harry with an occasional holiday refuge from his Muggle cousin’s – is also a little difficult to fathom, as the ability to transmute anything into anything else should surely be commercially exploitable without breaching wizarding rules. However, Ron Weasley’s penurious decency is a necessary foil to Harry’s exceptional talent and destiny, preventing him from getting above himself.

The Weasleys are derided for their penury by the school cad, Draco Malfoy – scion of a wealthy and ambitious family inclined towards Voldemort – so Harry’s friendship with Ron makes him a defender of the weak and the poor against the power-hungry. This is in the best traditions of children’s fiction, entirely compatible with Christian principles, and one marvels again at the obtuseness of those who condemn these books as a threat to these. They sometimes wonder why the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis have no current equivalent in children’s fiction – without realising that their own lack of humour goes a long way towards explaining why.

Lewis’s medievalism led him to allow his child characters to play in a rather priggish way at Kings and Queens in Narnia, learning chivalry from Aslan the wise lion. Aslan’s self-sacrificial death to save the most selfish of the child characters was Lewis’s rather awkward attempt at explaining Christian redemption to children. Lewis could never see that the idea of kingship – the ultimate elevation of the individual in the ancient and medieval worlds – has always itself been associated with the problem of victimisation – as the Bible itself reveals, for example in the story of David. In this sense Rowling’s imaginative world marks an advance on that of Lewis – for Rowling identifies ambition and the desire for power as in themselves morally dubious.

The suggestion that these stories may draw children towards the occult seems fatuous: children playing at magic will quickly find (as I did) that the books don’t provide enough straight wizarding instruction to conjure up a packet of liquorice allsorts. Although demons do turn up rather frequently, Hogwarts is no den of iniquity: it springs straight from the magical underworld of King Arthur’s mentor, Merlin, and its sense of humour is very similar to that of T.H. White’s ‘The Sword in the Stone’, a joyous retelling of the boyhood of Arthur.

The success of Harry Potter reveals clearly once again what Mark Twain so beautifully demonstrated in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: that children have an entirely healthy desire to turn the world upside down. Christian educators should wonder why it is that this same desire cannot yet be identified in children’s fiction with the purpose of the Gospels. When Harry rejects the option of power and success on his induction into Hogwarts, and at important crises thereafter, why can none of the fundies find an echo here of Jesus’ option to join the sinners in the Jordan (the occasion of his first recognition by the Father in John’s gospel), followed immediately by his rejection of both political and religious power in the desert, and his rejection of the option of force (i.e. worldly power) at Gethsemane. Jesus himself said that his kingdom was not of this world – but that children would be at home in it. As children feel entirely at home in Hogwarts it is reasonable to suppose that Christian educators would carefully study that world before banning it from their own library shelves.

Every child wants not only to turn the world upside down, but to save it – and that is why children identify with Harry, with Merlin, with Arthur, with Robin Hood, with Huck Finn in his saving of the slave, Jim, and with George Lucas’s creation, Luke Skywalker.

Luke’s recognition as destroyer of the awesome spherical Battle Station in the final scene of the first of the ‘Star Wars’ films gives us insight into every boy’s desire for recognition as hero and saviour. Somehow, for Christian education to touch the boy at the deepest level our practical theology must place Jesus in that heroic context, offering a meaningful, non-soppy heroism to children today, connected to the cosmic context in which their minds now operate. The feminising and over-spiritualising of Jesus we have inherited from an Italianate piety that essentially invites Catholic boys to be Mammy’s boys has not yet been properly eradicated from our Catholic culture – and the over-theologising of Jesus that grips the academic theologian’s imagination is equally misconceived as a means of capturing the hearts and imaginations of young men.

The Lucas stories, the Narnia books, the Potter stories and the Tolkien books all demonstrate the desire of children to live in a world that they can master and mould, escaping from the one they patently can’t. That so many now seem to want to escape from Christianity also is a problem that deserves the most careful thought.

I am convinced that the problem is precisely that theistic Christianity has largely remained the intellectual property of those governed by fear of the future, by fear of freedom, and by nostalgia for a buttoned-up past. Far from seeming subversive to the young, it is seen as supportive of an adult controlling instinct nostalgic for Victorian order – if not something even fustier. It is an Anne Widdicombe preserve (she would make a marvellous Muggle Tory school inspector double-taking the absence of maths and economics from the Hogwarts curriculum), and therefore something to avoid at all costs.

We are faced with the problem of explaining redemption in imagery that can grip children as the best children’s art does – and neither a retreat to Lewis’s medievalism nor censorship will answer. The truth is that we adults are lacking the kind of grasp of the gospels that would allow us to do this persuasively in our children’s imaginative world – and this is a fundamental reason for the current evangelical shortfall of Christian education. For most of the children who leave our schools our ‘good news’ is a complicated, incoherent and meaningless adult tale that takes place in a world entirely remote from their own, for the support of an institution to be ruled forever by an oligarchy of old men dressed in skirts. So it is very stale news best forgotten, rather than a possible vital centre of their own life’s journey.

This is our fault (I speak as a parent and former teacher) – not theirs or J.K. Rowling’s.

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The Spiritual Dimension of Mental Illness

Articles, Depression, Dysfunction, Mental Illness, Psychiatry, Psychology, Review, Status Anxiety, ,

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life, Nov 2001

When we read the gospel accounts of what are clearly encounters between Jesus and what we now term ‘mental illness’, we experience again the full force of the Enlightenment’s rejection of the supernatural. Demonic possession is now the domain of Stephen King and the X Files – and ‘scientific’ psychiatry, relying heavily on physiological explanations for mental disturbance, has commandeered the care of the damaged soul. This is just one area of intellectual expertise and social care that the churches have lost to secularization – apparently beyond recall.

Yet if we are to take seriously a recent Irish book on the subject, the current pharmaceutical bias of much psychiatry is itself a confidence trick, in danger of compounding the growing problem of mental illness, especially of what is called clinical depression. Dr Terry Lynch in Beyond Prozac1Beyond Prozac: Healing Mental Suffering Without Drugs by Dr Terry Lynch alleges not only that currently fashionable drugs are likely to create a new dependency, but that their use is justified by bad science, that it merely suppresses symptoms, and that it commonly delays recovery by failing to elucidate the experiential factors which often lie at the root of the problem, and to provide the caring and sympathetic relationship that is needed to address them.

Pointing out that insulin deficiency can be demonstrated to be the cause of diabetes by a blood test which proves the deficiency, followed by the replacement of the missing substance, Dr Lynch points out that although psychiatrists commonly claim a biological imbalance or a genetic deficiency to lie at the root of depression, they make no blood or any other kind of biochemical test, for example for the level of serotonin. Yet so powerful has the mystique of the profession become that journalists will happily tout serotonin as the ‘happiness’ substance in the brain – and marvel at drugs such as Prozac as the magic solution to its absence.

In fact, although some prominent Irish psychiatrists will debunk what they choose to call the ‘endless talk’ approach to mental illness, they are also forced to admit that they do not know exactly what physiological processes underlie it, or how exactly their pharmaceutical solutions actually ‘work’.

The diagnosis of ‘clinical depression’ is especially interesting. It appears that one can trigger this diagnosis by being especially sad. A sense of hopelessness; of being unable to cope; of continual lassitude; of loss of ambition or interest in a hobby; of meaninglessness; of social fear or inadequacy; of low self esteem: a given number of these symptoms will transfer us from the realm of the mentally fit into that of the mentally ill – and this given number can vary geographically.

The truth about western culture seems to be this. If we become so emotionally distraught as to be unable to ‘function normally’, we are mentally ill, and need, in many cases, pharmaceutical support.

It follows from this that normality, and mental health, is now apparently defined by many psychiatrists in anaesthetic terms: we do not feel negative emotions to a degree that will impair our ‘function’. We are, in other words, unassailable by emotional pain. In the context of a world subject to all sorts of pressure, stress, decay and danger, and in which individuals more and more commonly experience severe trauma, this, when we think about it, is altogether ludicrous.

The presumption that psychic buoyancy and autonomy is the norm, that normal people do not ‘break down’ and become persistently distraught, is of course, of great benefit to at least one current economic ideology. In the Thatcher era a popular one-liner ran as follows: “A Bore is someone who, when you ask him how he is, he tells you!”

This goes close to the heart of one of our deepest social problems: beyond a certain low threshold we do not wish to be burdened with one another’s problems. When we ask “How are you?” there is usually an iron rule that the answer will not disturb our own momentum – that any declaration of unwellness will stop short of a claim upon our time, will end with an insistence that our friend, or even sibling, is ‘really ok’. There is, in other words, a rigid ethic of self-sufficiency – especially among males. The purpose of our education is to make us personally autonomous, and we are now educated to believe that we are less than whole if we lose this autonomy thereafter.

This is in itself a complete explanation for the fact that ‘breakdown’ brings us to psychiatry, for it is a radical loss of autonomy. The psychiatrist is the professional expert on those who have ‘cracked up’ – for no-one else is either competent enough, or confident enough, to cope.

Yet an hour’s reflection will show us that emotional autonomy is a myth. Even the ‘successful’ person is dependent upon others to deliver a verdict of success, and one cannot lift a newspaper without tumbling over the rampant attention-seeking that the wannabe-successful wallow in. We are relational, not autonomous beings, which means that our emotional health must be closely related to the quality of our relationships, past and present.

Furthermore, we are role-playing beings, often desperately trying to fulfil the expectations of an employer or a colleague or a relative. We are often, in other words ‘trying to be’ the person we suppose we ought to be – and often we have not in fact chosen this role. It has been chosen for us by a parent or other person influential at a formative stage in our development, or forced upon us by economic necessity. What if it is incompatible with our deepest needs, with who we actually are?

And loss, or lack, of self-esteem, is as potent a factor in mental illness as in addiction – and self-esteem also cannot be autonomously created. We depend heavily for our self esteem upon the esteem of others – and this is precisely why we feel compelled to give the ‘OK’ answer when things are far from ‘OK’. We are afraid we will lose that esteem if we are ‘broken’.

Terry Lynch’s book gives many examples of patients who, following an investigation of the background to ‘breakdown’, reveal a personal history that more than amply explains why they could not possibly be ‘OK’ – why they need to be distraught, to throw themselves upon the resources of another human being, to be reassured, to be – in a word – loved – for themselves.

But love is not a pharmaceutical substance. It is a spiritual thing, because it is a going beyond what can be expected. The person who loves is no longer self-absorbed but lost in sincerely honouring another. If love becomes a scarce resource in any culture, we are headed for large scale breakdown – and a psychiatry which substitutes drugs for love cannot make good the shortfall.

Let us apply this analysis to the stories of mental illness in the gospels – beginning by reminding ourselves that in those times people were more certain of the existence of God, and that they commonly deduced the level of God’s approval from their worldly circumstances. It followed that the more extreme the circumstances, the less self-regard people would commonly have – the more ‘poor in spirit’ they would become. The poorest in spirit would suffer a total loss of self-esteem, followed in extreme cases by breakdown. It followed also that breakdown was likely to be interpreted as a matter of passing out of the care of God, into the realm of the demonic.

Dr Lynch points out that a person who has always felt himself insignificant, and suffers pain from this, is naturally likely to suffer delusions of grandeur – yet if these in turn lead to social rejection and isolation, self-regard will naturally reach an even lower level. At the lowest level of the moral cosmos of the gospel world was Sheol, the place of the dead, where demons reigned. Delusions of demonic possession could therefore naturally follow the complete ostracisation of an individual.

But for all its horrors, the ‘demonic possession’ paradigm has one beneficial characteristic that the biological/genetic theory signally lacks: it does not identify the malady with the sufferer; the whole person is reclaimable by ‘casting out’ the demon. On the other hand, we are stuck with our biochemical or genetic problem – if that is what we’ve ‘got’.

At this point we need only remember that the essential characteristic of Jesus’ ministry – the one that got him into terminal trouble – was its radical inclusiveness. Prostitutes, lepers – the ‘unclean’ generally – were to be restored, not just to health, but to their relatives and friends. No-one was more ‘unclean’ than the demonically possessed : so Jesus’ extraordinary power to communicate the esteem of God for those who thought themselves totally outside it must have hit the self-hating with extraordinary force. When we remember that great social fear lay behind the avoidance of such people, even Jesus’ close approach would arrest their attention – and so the text confirms.

Great love is clearly present in the accounts that Dr Lynch provides of successful ‘friendship’ approaches to the treatment of people who have presented with various symptoms of mental and emotional distress. It requires great faith in the essential goodness of every individual, and in the power of sympathetic investigation of past experience, to get to the root of the problem. This in turn often requires great patience – and here we find the essential reasons for the failure of the psychiatric paradigm. Psychiatrists too are scarce ‘human resources’, highly expensive to train and maintain. Everything must recommend a rapid throughput of patients. The last thing they can possibly have is the time to befriend their clients individually, to become familiar with the detailed contexts of their lives.

When we confront the continuing stigma that attaches to mental illness we must even more seriously question a biochemical/genetic theory which provides no hope of separating the sufferer from the source of their illness, which, must, in fact, reinforce their sense of being ‘different’, and thus of isolation, stigma and despair. An hour’s serious reflection should be sufficient to condemn any search for a ‘happiness’ gene or biochemical substance: human emotional well-being is both fragile and essentially relational – and a society which increasingly deprives us of time for one another must also be one in which psychological breakdown will also increase. Emotional pain, like any other kind of pain, is a compelling warning to rest, and to address the cause

And when we remember that the pharmaceutical industry is part of the globalisation process, and that ‘happiness’ pills are vastly profitable, we need look no further for an explanation of the dominance of the physiological paradigm of mental well-being. The research which appears to support pharmaceutical solutions is largely funded by that industry and therefore seriously biased in favour of the conclusions it wishes to find. To escape this conclusion it need only fund experimentally in equal measure the methods which favour compassionate friendship, psychotherapy and counseling. If this funding should be found wanting the churches should try to supply the deficiency, in faith and love. It is surely time to begin reversing the downward trend towards ‘happiness’ pills for all.

“Beyond Prozac: Healing Mental Suffering Without Drugs” by Dr Terry Lynch

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The Day the World Changed – 11/09/2001

9/11, Alienation, Articles, Capitalism, Division, Freedom, Fundamentalism, Humility, Imperialism, Islam, Mimetic Desire, Power, Rivalry, Scapegoating, Status Anxiety, Superpowers, Terrorism, Violence, , ,

Sean O’Conaill  © Reality 2001

For most of my lifetime I’ve been teaching history and current affairs, and in that lifetime already there have been days of special significance.

The night in 1962 when JFK told us about Soviet missiles on Cuba; that other awful night in 1963 we learned he had been assassinated; the day of the first serious violence in Northern Ireland in August 1969; the day in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down.

Yet none hit me with so much force as Tuesday 11th September 2001 – the day over 3000 people died in deliberate air crashes in New York and Washington. On my screen as I write there is a shot of Flight 175 about to pass through the enormous glazed wall of the World Trade Centre south building. I keep it there as a memento of an era that is about to pass away, a reminder that we are now in a different time. And that we owe to those dying and about to die at that moment – and to those they left behind – a monument that will do justice to their loss.

That image perfectly expresses the vulnerability of the US, at that moment the world’s only superpower.  Its terrifying nuclear missile shield, its strategic bomber force, its air and army and naval bases throughout the world, its nuclear submarines, its dozen floating airports, its huge external and internal intelligence services the CIA and FBI – all had been powerless to protect its most vulnerable citizens as they began their innocent day.

Superpower?

All of which raises a critical question: Is the concept of the superpower itself a dangerous illusion when only one superpower is left to become a target of a terrorism that it cannot directly engage with superpower arms?superpower Is the vastness of its strategic military strength, and the global nature of that power, now an invitation to the murder of its own citizens from within, and to a global religious war?

The concept of the superpower emerged in the period after 1945. Two powers had contributed most to the defeat of the axis powers – the  USA and the USSR. Only one as yet possessed a nuclear capability, but by 1962 this inequality had disappeared and the world stood poised on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The superpowers were already competing also in space, and it was the US decision to build a defensive satellite shield against nuclear missiles that finally broke the USSR’s capability to compete in the late 1980s. The collapse of the soviet empire from 1989 left one superpower only, with an apparently global dominance.

But global dominance – the aspiration of conquerors from Alexander to Hitler – is a dangerous position to be in. In fighting the Cold War US support for Israel was a potent source of alienation of Islamic peoples who sided with the Palestinians who were being squeezed out. Geared for nuclear warfare, or conventional warfare with forces prepared to engage in pitched battles, the US now faced a new and subtle enemy whose strength was anti-western fanaticism and an ability to improvise.

“They have woken a mighty giant,”  President Bush has now assured us, paraphrasing the Japanese Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbour. But Yamamoto had actually said ‘sleeping giant’ – and this seems far more appropriate as a comment on September 11th. There is a sense in which the entire political and military leadership of the US was indeed asleep on that morning, and was then woken out of a complacency of catastrophic proportions.

As all the ingredients for the disaster were already known to be present, future historians will set their students the task of explaining why the disaster was allowed to happen. Fanatical middle eastern suicide bombers had attacked US targets before, and had recently killed hundreds of Israelis and severely damaged a US warship; hundreds of men from middle eastern lands deeply alienated from the US were known to be in the US; US flying schools did not require security clearance for their pupils; US internal air security was known not to prevent the carrying on board of potentially deadly weapons; the flight decks of these aircraft were known to be accessible to armed passengers.

Nothing more was required to allow the most appalling internal disaster ever to befall the US at the hands of its enemies – and these facts all lay before those charged with the defence of US citizens during the years this plan was meticulously prepared.

To argue that no one could foresee this is specious: these terrorists had foreseen it, probably as early as five years before. Specific US politicians and military and security and intelligence personnel had the task of outguessing the nation’s enemies, of thinking the unthinkable in order to prevent it, during that time. They either failed to do so, or were discouraged from pursuing the issue Scapegoating of individuals is pointless: there was a national failure of leadership at the summit, affecting the previous Democratic presidency of Fulbright scholar Bill Clinton as much as that of the Republican George Bush, and Congress also under both administrations. No-one at the summit wanted to think the unthinkable, although that is precisely what terrorists do.

Now that the US is attempting to build an alliance against terrorism it needs to avoid words and actions that must prevent that alliance ever becoming effectual. Words like ‘Crusade’ – for the Islamic world this has the same overtones as ‘Jihad’ for the west. The Crusades were Christian military expeditions against the Islamic rulers of the Holy Lands in the Middle Ages, called initially – and inexcusably – by the Papacy. An estimated 40 – 70,000 Jews and Arabs perished in the rape of Jerusalem by western ‘Christian’ knights in 1099 CE. The fact that George Bush did not apparently know this, and did not employ an adviser who could tell him, shows clearly the absence of a due respect for Islam at the summit of government at this critical moment.

The alliance must also avoid the indiscriminate use of force anywhere in the world. As I write, US military strikes of some kind against Afghanistan seem a possibility – with consequences that could include the alienation of much of the Islamic world from any anti-terrorist alliance. Since the bin Laden argument is that the US is bent upon global domination, unilateralist action by the US against any Islamic nation can only strengthen the bin Ladens and enhance their reputation.

US after 9-11What is needed above all is for the US to rethink its role and posture in the world. Is it bent upon economic and cultural as well as military dominance, or is it the big brother that guards the freedoms and dignity, and cultural identity of others as determinedly as its own?

At a critical moment in the development of the Irish peace process the London government found it useful to say simply that it had no longer any strategic interest in retaining control of Northern Ireland. This allowed most republicans to stack, if not yet to relinquish, their arms and bring us peace of a kind. Something similar is required from the US to clarify its intentions, especially with regard to the Islamic world and Israel. This could also strengthen its relations with the western powers.

When those who devised the US constitution wondered how to express the essential equality of the states that belonged to it, they decided that the US Senate would each have just two members from each state. This reassured those who argued that states with smaller populations would be always outvoted and ignored. The nearest thing we have to a world congress, the UN, gives greater power to the permanent superpower members of the Security Council. It must surely be obvious that when the list of superpowers is reduced to one, the credibility of the UN as an impartial body must be weakened. The time has come to re-examine its constitution – and here also the US must play a crucial role.

Having climbed to the summit of world power, the US has now to decide how that power is to be used within a framework of mutual international respect. Respect is only possible within a framework of equality. Equality was the original program of those who framed the US Declaration of Independence of 1776, and makes a perfectly respectable program now for a new world order. Is the administration of George Bush up to this – or will the US go on defending a supremacy that must remain a target for all the ‘young guns’ that must emerge to challenge it – with heaven knows what consequences for its own citizens, as well as the rest of the world?

What is power?

As I watched the aftermath of this shocking catastrophe in New York I had as a guest in my home a Dutch naval officer, one of a group of eight Christians visiting Coleraine from the Hague. “What is power?” Rudolph Francis asked at one point.

The question is so appropriate. These hijackers had armed themselves with nothing more than information, basic flying skills and knives. The information allowed them to co-ordinate the seizure of four planes that had left three different airports within fifteen minutes of one another. Knives and piloting skills allowed them to turn three of these into flying bombs of great destructive power, aimed at the political and economic capitals of the world’s only superpower. The factor that stunned the US – their willingness to give their lives for this enterprise – has undoubtedly helped to shape the history of the next century. It is equivalent to the assassination by Serbs of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary in 1914. The consequences of that action included the Great War and the downfall of that empire, with consequences that still reverberate in eastern Europe.

What will be the consequences of September 11th, 2001? One possibility, which must at all costs be avoided, is another ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and Islam. To avoid it we must all become far more aware of the multitude of different cultures, beliefs and attitudes to be found among the world’s one billion Muslims. Islam is at least as diverse as the Christian world. The fanaticism of the suicide hijackers is fuelled by a perception of the west, led by the US, as a purveyor of a corrupt globalisation, threatening to Islamic faith and culture. The best way for the west to undermine that perception is to rediscover the Gospels, which threaten no-one.

Our own church could begin by acknowledging – in a substantial document – the disastrous error of the Crusades, called initially by Pope Urban II in an address that was not recorded verbatim. One version of it has him asking:

“Can anyone tolerate that we do not even share equally with the Moslems the inhabited Earth?”

As this ‘take’ on the papacy’s attitude to Islam would align it with a possible tide of anti-Islamism today, it is all the more necessary that the church distance itself from this discreditable era of its history. This beautiful Earth is not a western or Christian domain but a dear heritage of all its children. Our Bible – some of which we share with Islam – records that we are one family, from the beginning, and our gospels insist that we are destined to be at peace. Most Islamic scholars share this vision, so the earth need not become a battlefield between any two or more great faiths.

And this vision of a world enjoying a secure diversity is perfectly compatible with the greatest traditions of the USA. To protect its citizens it reconciles in its constitution the principle of the separation of the three different elements of state power, with the other vital principle of national unity against external aggression. It can now lead the world to a permanent peace by placing equal emphasis upon both principles in a genuine new world order. The world’s peoples and faiths can unite as one world against fanatical violence, in defence of the freedom of all to be themselves.

And the idea of a New World Order was, of course first floated by the first President Bush. It is time for us all to begin thinking about what the phrase might mean.

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Is God Dead?

Articles, Mimetic Desire, René Girard, Review, Satan, Scapegoating, Scripture, Violence, , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life  Oct 2001

A Review of I See Satan Fall like Lightning by René Girard (Orbis Books, New York, 2001)

Neo-paganism more than anything else is the target of this book, but its greatest value is as a succinct introduction to the various other profound works of the author, René Girard. It is also, in the end, a highly optimistic summary of the lasting effects of the Gospel, and a redoubtable assault upon the cosy post-modernist consensus that God is dead (the only significant thing agreed upon). Not so, says Girard – the fact that victims everywhere have become the focus of compassion and policy, and their salvation and protection an essential test of political virtue, is the de facto victory of the cross, and thus of God also – but not the God of power that Nietzsche might have respected.

Girard is a vastly erudite literary academic and cultural anthropologist, rather than a theologian or philosopher, but both theology and philosophy have much to learn from him. As have those biblical scholars whose a priori deconstructions (actually destruction) of the texts they study is another of Girard’s targets. For him the Bible is the book of all books, because, without an elaborate exegesis, it allows us to discover the organising principle behind all ancient culture, without exception.

That principle is scapegoating violence – the murder or expulsion of a usually marginalized victim, selected by a process of mimetic accusation which holds the victim accountable for the ‘plague’ afflicting a given society, e.g. ancient Thebes in the time of Oedipus. The accuser is Satan, the one also bent upon concealing the injustice of this original crime from the clear gaze of its perpetrators. ‘Plague’ is a metaphor for any crisis threatening the survival of a society, especially internal conflict brought about by mimetic desire. The single victim mechanism unites all in the expulsion of this evil, releasing the tension which might otherwise have destroyed all.

Mimetic desire is a key Girardian concept. It registers the key fact that Madison Avenue confirms daily – that our desires are mostly imitative, an unconscious absorption of the desires of others, interpreted through whatever they already possess. ‘Covetousness’ is the biblical term, a key word in the Mosaic commandments that the ineffable Bishop Spong routinely rubbishes as a party piece. Desiring what others possess – especially if it is, like supreme power, or ‘glory’, unique – is the essential source of internal (as well as external) conflict, and this is precisely why in the Jewish and Christian traditions, desire needs to be understood and controlled.

For those who read both Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ and the New Testament first at school, it is fascinating to see both texts fall together under Girard’s lens. Caesar is a military conqueror whose ‘glory’ excites the envy (blocked desire – disguised as patriotism) – of those who murder him. Yet in the avenging of his death he is divinised, creating the title by which holders of imperial power would thenceforth be known, and the principle by which the empire is unified. It was in the reign of the first of these Caesars that Jesus entered the world, the one who renounced worldly power, both secular and religious – conquering mimetic desire – and then clearly revealed the process of mimetic violence in the Passion, recorded in the Gospel narratives. The fact that these narratives were recorded at all was the result of something itself unique in such events – the detachment from the scapegoating crowd of those convinced of the resurrection, and of the innocence of the accused.

Thus for Girard what distinguishes the Biblical texts from all similar founding texts is their revelation of, and intolerance for, the scapegoating process. He insists that all other founding myths, treated so often merely as quaint fictions by modernist conflaters, conceal real foundation murders. The Enlightenment’s tendency to find e.g. ancient Greek civilisation entirely healthy by comparison with Judaism is fundamentally naïve – as evidenced by the known practice on certain festivals of ritually assassinating the pharmakoi – marginalized victims pre-selected for this purpose. Myths for Girard, although correctly decipherable, are essentially lies in the sense that they seek to justify the unjustifiable – but only our possession of the biblical texts allows this decoding.

The most striking defence of this conviction comes in his comparative analysis of the stories of Oedipus and the biblical Joseph. Both are subject to mimetic accusation – Joseph twice, by his brothers and by the Egyptians – but in the Greek legend the guilt of Oedipus is alleged to have been proven, whereas the biblical account insists on Joseph’s innocence on both occasions. His test of his brothers’ willingness to repeat their betrayal of himself in the handing over of Benjamin results in one moving exception, a foreshadowing of Jesus’ substitution of himself for all victims.

Girard’s assault on Nietzsche – for explicitly justifying sacrificial murder – is drastic. He argues that the archetypal modern scapegoating murder, the Holocaust, was essentially a pursuit of this programme, and that had Hitler won the war the Nietzschean programme of undoing the compassion for victims established by the gospels would have been attempted on a vast scale. The genocide of Europe’s Jews would have been not only acknowledged but boasted about – just as such events were justified by spurious accusation in the ancient and medieval world.

That the global historical record might thus have become so easily permanently tainted suggests that Girardian analysis has much to reveal about historiography generally. Northern Ireland is replete with scapegoating violence on both sides of the equation – and it is interesting that the original villain of Irish nationalist historiography, Dermot MacMurrough, was also the victim of an expulsion. Now he is banished historiographically (a kind of perennial classroom ritual) as archetypal traitor – the promised fate of all who collaborate with the enemies of those who claim the sole right to define the nation. MacMurrough’s essential problem was that he lost out in a fratricidal (i.e. mimetic) conflict among Ireland’s own ruling elite – although to listen to the anti-revisionists one would often suppose that never a blow was struck on this island before the Anglo-Normans came. (Lundy, of course, fills the same role on the loyalist side providing the name by which all Unionist compromisers will be known.)

And in the reciprocal accusation that is the daily, dolorous stock-in-trade of Northern Ireland’s extremes one finds Girard’s ‘doubles’ – the rivals for vindication and power that are identical in essentials and in viciousness, but totally fixated on the trivial differences of flags and emblems. Mimetic desire for sole possession of a territory that all could freely share is an exact description of the causes of this conflict, as it is of the Palestinian tragedy. Each extreme attempts to build a worldview, and a historiography, around the right to accuse, and then expel, the other. That they cannot recognise in this Cain against Cain is Ireland’s, and Christianity’s, (and, in the case of Palestine, Islam’s and Judaism’s) greatest tragedy.

Satan as orchestrator of the scapegoating process is first, seducer – the one who tempts all to the fulfilment of all desire. Then he is accuser, the one who points to a (usually lowly) scapegoat who must bear the blame for the social conflict that must follow blocked desire. The advantage of choosing a stranger, (or other marginalized person) is that the accusation can more easily become unanimous. Unanimity over the fallen victim equals a new social cohesiveness – and even eventually in some cases a cult of the victim, who has been paradoxically the restorer of unity and peace. This process, is, for Girard, the invariable origin of pagan cults and Gods. Pagan sacrifice, originally human sacrifice, was the ritualised remembrance of the founding murder, a gradually deteriorating means of maintaining unity.

That neo-paganism should scorn the existence of Satan (i.e. a principle of evil separate from ourselves) is thus a predictable recovery of the blindness that we need in order to resume the heedless fulfilment of desire (facilitated now to some degree by mass production) – and also to resume the hunt for scapegoats. If there is no Satan, then someone else must be to blame for everything. The remnants of the Marxist left will again find their scapegoat in capitalism and its devotees. The right will thus be provided with its scapegoat in the ideological left. The mimetic desire of both for power and control will be invisible to both – and we will soon, it seems, watch the next round of this irrational and bloody two-step in Colombia – (now with Irish participation of some kind!). Girard reminds us that ideologies too became the objects of cults in the aftermath of the enlightenment, and that both must also have their sacrificial victims (e.g. the Soviet show trials). We can easily add the McCarthyite witch hunts in the US, and the Cultural Revolution in China.

That Jesus never accused a human individual, and in the end forgave all, for all time, is in itself the means by which Satan is revealed. He offers us a global unanimity without another victim, and is thus the author of the only kind of globalisation that is tolerable. That he offers us also self-esteem without the amassing of possessions is also the best hope we have of avoiding environmental catastrophe.

This perception of redemption – as the means by which we as a species become aware of the origins of our own violence in mimetic desire, and can thus repent – supersedes the temporary expedients of the middle ages – which explained the crucifixion in terms of the appeasement of God’s anger, or the satisfaction of his honour or justice. These expedients were necessary because medieval order was also founded on scapegoating – of, for example, criminals, heretics, witches, Jews and Islam. Now that the state is revealed as the ultimate ‘legitimate’ user of violence (i.e. victimiser), church/state pacts must always be held at arms length by churchmen. That the Enlightenment itself, in the form of secularism, is forcing this conclusion willy nilly upon even the most reluctant ecclesiastics must be regarded as another proof of the divine constancy.

And the current rows over Catholic anti-semitism and Pius XII can also benefit from a reading of this book. It clearly shows that the reading of John’s Gospel as an accusation against Judaism per se is totally misconceived. The scapegoating mechanism revealed there is identical with processes which are the prevailing theme of the Old Testament also – so Judaism – the transcendant victim culture of the ancient, medieval and modern world – is in fact the cultural vehicle of all divine revelation, and must therefore be eternally revered. And our church’s complicity with anti-semitism is not a specifically Catholic or Christian sin – merely evidence of our own susceptibility to a general human catastrophe – the betrayal of our brothers out of fear. The recent Rwandan horror sucked in many Catholics also – all the more reason for becoming aware of the power of high-level scapegoating accusation to deceive us all – but not a reason for condemning Catholicism per se. Accusation itself is the problem. When we indulge in it – for example in pillorying Pius XII – we participate in the process that eternally seeks to destroy our peace.

There is not a single major problem or controversy of the present or foreseeable future that Girardian analysis does not illuminate, in theistic Christian terms, which makes this extraordinary and virtually unknown academic probably the greatest Catholic mind of our time. Faced now with horrors such as the actuality of racial and ethnic scapegoating in Ireland itself, we need this book on our shelves, and its fundamental insights rapidly incorporated into Catholic education. It is wise, erudite, optimistic and accessible, giving us the means of meeting neo-paganism and relativism head on, but without the awkward divisiveness and self-exaltation of Dominus Iesus. It meets secularism on its own ground, clear-eyed and compassionate – banishing forever the fear that Christianity is historically defunct, or that adherence to Christ is a threat to anyone. It threatens only evil itself, giving it a name we also need not now fear or deny. Girard’s meticulous account of how that evil operates, throughout history, and in the world’s literature, allows us too to see Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

Views: 30

Rehabilitating Satan

Accusation, Articles, Evil, René Girard, Review, Satan, Scapegoating, , , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © The Furrow 2001

Since the 18th century Enlightenment, western modernity has ridiculed the notion of an intelligent power of evil separable from us yet bent upon our destruction, and has optimistically trusted in the power of reason to deliver Utopia. Post modernism has lost confidence in reason and banished all optimism, but remains closed to any spiritual dimension. Both God and Satan remain banished from the media discourse of most of those who seriously debate human affairs – including the question of where the world may be going. Even Christian theologians, although defensive of God, seem often slightly embarrassed by the question of Satan – as though he were a kind of demented and distant relation with obscure and unmentionable, and maybe even absurd, criminal tendencies who is best forgotten.

The fact that Hollywood has enthusiastically adopted this embarrassing relative doesn’t help matters. As lascivious progenitor of a human Antichrist bent upon world domination he becomes merely ridiculous – even more so than Dracula, Dr No or Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Yet the pervasiveness of evil in our time – never more horrifically demonstrated than on September 11th, 2001 – defies our expertise, and whatever optimism we can still muster. The West’s technological sophistication – quite capable of ending global deprivation – was turned against it with terrifying effect. America, ‘land of the free’, was attacked as though it was a global tyranny to be fought by the most merciless of means.

‘Diabolical’ we may say – at a loss for words of sufficient force – even while knowing that it is the demonisation of America by militant Islam that explains that day. That is, when we humans decide that any physical entity is ‘the root of all evil’, we will justify any means to destroy it – and that attempt becomes itself an archetype of evil. Nazism justified the Shoa in precisely the same way – ‘international Jewry’ had supposedly conspired against and humiliated Germany during and after World War 1, so its destruction was a holy duty. Yet this systematic attempt to destroy an entire people became itself the archetypal example of ‘diabolical’ evil in modern times.

Accusation is the essence of the demonisation process – the loading of blame onto a specific human target. If we identify the specifically demonic act as one of accusation we can make use of the insights of René Girard (succinctly presented in a recent post-retirement work *) both to interpret what is happening, and to predict what lies down the road. Girard the anthropologist needs to do no more than minutely describe a repetitive process of mimetic rivalry, accusation, violence and concealment to justify his theories. Christian faith can go beyond this to accuse the spirit of evil, Satan, which lies behind this process, tempting us to accuse one another.

The USA’s finger was within hours of the US catastrophe pointed at Osama bin Laden, catapulting him to world notoriety and, apparently, global Islamic fame. Within a month western high explosive – often with ‘NYPD’ painted on the casing – was ‘rearranging the rubble’ in Afghanistan, and causing much ‘collateral damage’. Soon Osama bin Laden was in turn accusing the USA of being the source of all that is wrong in the Islamic world, and urging Jihad.

What I propose here is simply that mutual demonisation is an inevitable consequence of the banishment of Satan, understood as ‘the accuser’ – the spirit of accusation – from human discourse. That is, if we fail to see the resort to mutual accusation as the imitative demonic process common to protagonists on the brink of conflict, and to stand apart from it, we, almost consciously, join the dance of death. Our common enemy is this spirit of accusation, busy on both sides. Unrecognised it operates freely through us – raising our arm to point in accusation, and to hurry us to arms. And once we use them we will, knowingly now, validate one another’s accusations. Thus Satan the accuser becomes also Satan the destroyer.

“How can Satan drive out Satan?” Jesus asked. Unless the accused is totally alone and powerless, the result of accusation is invariably counter-accusation. We have seen this law survive thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, perfectly intact. It is the veritable source of human historical inertia, the repetitive resort to violence. It would be catastrophic if this same dynamic were now to polarise the West and Islam.

Of course accusation to be plausible will usually seek, and find, justification for itself. Bin Laden’s direct part in the September 11th atrocity may be hard to prove conclusively in court, but it fits perfectly his openly espoused programme of killing Americans wherever they can be found, and he explicitly approved and exulted in the attack afterwards. Moreover his wealth and energy will inevitably place him somewhere in the paths of some of the perpetrators, and in the weave of events, leading to the disaster.

But the purpose of accusation is more than to apportion blame. It also deflects attention from the accuser – often in a crisis likely to reflect badly upon that accuser. Bin Laden did precisely the same in forecasting US atrocities in Afghanistan as a means of winning support in Pakistan, and of deflecting attention from the appalling scale and manner of death in Washington and New York.

To date I have not heard any US politician ask why the appalling weaknesses in US internal air security, spotted by the plotters probably as early as 1996, were not eliminated by those charged with this responsibility by the Washington administrations of both Bill Clinton and George Bush. Could the reason be that both of the great American political parties have been catastrophically remiss – for purely wealth-driven reasons? And when the plight of the Palestinians is raised as a cause of Islamic fundamentalist wrath, the hawkish response is to allege that some kind of moral equivalence is being argued. To placate American opinion – severely shocked by this unprecedented blow to its heart – the military hardware they finance through taxation must be put in motion eastwards, even if this does cause further havoc among the desperately poor of Afghanistan. As I write, Americans wait for some kind of dénouement there in the arrest of Bin Laden – so the deflective power of accusation is still doing its job.

The best of all lessons on the proper Christian approach to accusation is the story of the woman accused of adultery in the Temple, in Jesus’ presence. He did not address the accusation, but the accusers. Accusation deflects attention and focuses anger elsewhere by implying a moral imbalance between accuser and accused. Not only is the accused guilty, the accuser is also innocent. The scapegoating violence that normally followed such a charge was intended to envelop Jesus also – either in complicity or opposition. His direct appeal to the self-knowledge of the accusers – and to their knowledge of one another – prevented the throwing of the initial and always fatal stone.

To allude to Satan then in this context is to point to the power of the spirit of accusation in unifying one community against another. Evils exist both in a seriously sick western culture that threatens an unmodernised Islam, and in an Islamic fundamentalism that naively scapegoats America – and these must both be addressed.

When addressing the problems of the west – especially an unbounded and glorified consumerism that unbalances the world and threatens its environment – we may be temped to resort to the accusatory word ‘greed’, especially in relation to America. Yet the Bible does not make this accusation. Again it places the blame for all our weaknesses upon a spiritual entity that tempts us, without being an essential part of us. ‘You shall be as Gods!’ – this is the original temptation: to forsake the obscurity and dependence of the creature for the glory and power of the creator. To say ‘yes’ to this temptation is to admit the spirit of material dissatisfaction and ambition – the very core of Western economic dynamism and military power.

When the artist known as Madonna can assert that she will continue her career until she is ‘better known than God’, she unwittingly validates completely this biblical diagnosis of what is wrong with all of us. Our self-regard depends more and more upon the degree to which we suppose we are regarded by others – and this is the root source of our acquisitiveness. Possessions are the social symbols of success, of ‘worth’, and money the means by which these symbols are to be acquired. Celebrity is the final seal: ‘I am known by millions, therefore I exist’.

The Enlightenment was therefore entirely wrong in supposing that the concepts of sin and Satan are an indictment of humankind. Instead they are a means by which the perennial evils we visit upon one another are explained in terms that deny us the right to accuse one another, and also offer us the means of a full reconciliation, in mutual respect.

Thus when President Bush tells an American audience ‘we are the greatest nation on earth’ we need not say ‘There you are – American arrogance and imperialism!’  We can say instead that in a moment when American self-respect has been seriously damaged the temptation to hyperbole has proved irresistible. And when bin Laden identifies America as the root of all evil we can ask ‘What role, then, does Satan, the tempter, play in your theology?’

And when right and left fall into separate bitter camps over the relative evil of ‘terrorist’ and state violence we can point out that the debate needs to move on – to identify the spirit of self-exculpation and accusation in both camps as the root of the problem. Islamic societies seem to be as easily deflected from the horrors of September 11th as Americans are from the sufferings of Palestinians and other Muslims due to Western failure.

There is no doubt that otherwise we must all seek a violent righteousness – a position of moral unassailability from which we can indict everyone else. We will continue forever demonising one another until we can recognise that the temptation to do so – a temptation that is resistible – affects us all, afflicts us all, but is nevertheless separable from our better selves. And this tempter has the same name in both the Bible and the Quran.

  * I See Satan Fall like Lightning : René Girard (Orbis Books, New York, 2001)

Views: 37

The World of the Wannabe

Articles, Careerism, Corruption, Original Sin, Personality Cults, Theology, Wannabe, Youth, , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Spirituality 2001

New verbal coinings sometimes reveal an aspect of contemporary culture that takes us back to the ancient world. ‘Wannabe’ is just such a word – a descriptor for the (usually) young person who ‘wants to be’ someone else. Most young black Americans, the polls tell us, ‘wannabe’ celebrities of some kind – rock musicians, TV or movie or basketball stars. Currently millions of adolescent girls wannabe the pop ‘sensation’ Britney Spears.

‘Wanting to be’ is probably the major problem of the moment. It is a state of alienation from the self – a sense that the ‘being’ one now has is not worth having, and so must be exchanged for another.

What happens if we relate this to the temptation in the garden of Eden, that place of greatest happiness, where Satan promised ‘you shall be as Gods’. Genesis tells us that we fell for this, and notice here the coincidence of the word ‘fell’. The Fall results from ‘wanting to be’ something other than we are, the loss of the sense of being already all we need to be.

We find a superb illustration of this in Robert Bolt’s screenplay for ‘A Man for All Seasons’. Young Richard Rich pesters Thomas More for patronage – the use of personal influence to advance another at court. Chancellor More, disillusioned by the corruption he sees in the court of Henry VIII, insists that this ambition is misconceived.

“Be a great teacher,” he says, offering Rich such a post in a local school.

“And if I was, who would know it?” Rich asks.

“You would know it; your pupils would know it – and so would God. Not a bad public.” More returns.

But Rich has set his sights on the political summit – and eventuallyperjures himself and betrays More – in order to become attorney general for Wales. More goes to the block.

Rich pesters More because he sees himself as being ‘out’ as well as ‘down’. More is a doorway ‘into’ the charmed circle of Henry’s court. If you are ‘in’ you are also ‘up’. So when More does not let him in, Rich tries another door – the unscrupulous Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell’s price is Rich’s perjury.

Here too we find the connection between ‘wanting to be’, personal corruption, and the desire to climb. The ‘higher’ we are, the more people will see us, and the ‘greater’ we become. Herein too lies the extraordinary power of modern electronic media. Alexander the Great’s desire to ‘conquer the world’ can be achieved today by an Andre Agassi, or a Tom Cruise – for each is known globally via the TV and cinema screen.

“Top of the world, Ma”, “We’re going to the Top”, “The Jet Set” – these familiar clichés also connect fulfilment with elevation – as though the world actually had a ‘top’. The building of political empires followed the same logic – to subject a world conceived as planar to a single political edifice at the centre. George Bush is probably as close to fulfilling Alexander’s ambition as anyone will ever get – hopefully.

But what happens to this logic when we reflect that Earth has no ‘top’, that every one of us occupies the same boundless surface, which has no ‘rim’ or ‘edge’ because it meets itself in all directions – and that logically therefore, since there is no ‘up’ we are all equal, and since there is no centre, no-one is ‘out’?

It follows that there is no need to ‘want to be’, for we already ‘are’.

In evolutionary terms, to get the global human population to this insight as quickly as possible, someone sometime had to affirm that no-one ever is ‘out’ or ‘below’. The man who set out to build a kingdom for all the rejected of the world – even before the limitless nature of human space was understood – and without violence or self-admiration – must surely take the prize. As a consequence we find the inclusive symbol of the cross on all continents – however ambiguously it may first have arrived.

However, the vertical structure of the church, the source of all the ambition within it – is now a serious barrier to the growth of this spiritual insight, and a relic of the flat earth consciousness of antiquity. The investment of so much reverence in the person of the Pope – despite the historical evidence that God does not invest all grace there – creates a ‘wannabe’ culture within the church itself – as Cardinal Gantin confirmed when complaining about episcopal careerism just a year or so ago.

What is the implication of organising monster meetings for the central purpose of getting close to the Pope, other than the notion that we thereby come closer to God than we can be in our own backyard or parish church? What is the implication of a papal ‘court’ other than the notion that this man is most worthy, more ‘in’ and higher ‘up’ than we?

Were the Pope on the other hand to insist that no-one needs to ‘want to be’ anyone other than he or she is – for all are equally important – what then? In asking the church to reconsider how his office might be exercised, John Paul II draws us closer to this eventuality also.

Nothing is more certain than the need to challenge the ‘wannabe’ problem head on. Adolescent girls starve themselves because they want to be the super slim model they see on the catwalk. Young men may often deny themselves participation in sport because they don’t possess the idealised physique that TV sports coverage tells them they should have. Self-rejection is a primary factor in suicide, clinical depression, addiction, and criminality. The political corruption we are currently uncovering in Ireland is clearly a result of ‘wanting to be’ the lavish Irish country squire – the centre of attention and power.

And ‘wanting to be’ is also at the root of rampant consumerism and environmental decay. Advertising has discovered that our sense of our own inadequacy can be exploited by associating consumer wares with the people we ‘want to be’.

Which means that ‘sin’ is centrally concerned with self-dislike and the self-advancement that follows. The fixation that sexual desire is the root of all evil is entirely misplaced. The Decalogue connects even adultery with covetousness – the desire to possess what someone else already has. The media deliberately create sexual desire by creating sexual stereotypes – icons of desirability to create dissatisfaction with the partners we already have.

The current Blairite craze for ‘meritocracy’ should be another target of spiritual awareness – for it implies a pyramid of worthiness without ever clarifying that most of the ‘worthy’ have simply purchased their privilege by virtue of an historical advantage that has nothing to do with ‘merit’. The principle that ‘everyone should be able to rise to whatever position their talent and efforts deserve’ implies a level playing field to begin with, an inequality of worthiness, and a perfect arbiter to determine who is worthy – while apparently the possession of vast inherited wealth and a drone lifestyle do not disqualify. The whole notion is palpable nonsense – a thin disguise for mere selfishness, and a source of disillusionment to those who find themselves rejected.

It disguises also the self-regard of the merely clever, and the elevation of a narrow kind of intelligence to power and privilege. Education today increasingly emphasises its capability to ‘change your life’ by making us ‘everything you want to be’. Thus, merely knowing has become more important than understanding, mere information more important than wisdom.

It is no accident either that meritocratic Britain is critically short of nurses and teachers – ‘wanting to be’ is taking over from wanting to serve.

Another wannabe problem results from the prominence given to theological expertise in the church – and especially the notion that the more theology one knows the wiser one necessarily becomes. This prominence creates the theological wannabe. Wisdom has to do with quality of being, not quantity of knowing. Of course we must know what lies at the summit of the hierarchy of truth, but this is essentially quite simple: that each of us is infinitely loved by the creator of all being, and can never be alienated from that love. To peddle the notion that we can only arrive at this understanding by subjecting ourselves to a course in theology is essentially to do what the lawyers were accused of doing: using the key of knowledge to prevent others from entering, while not entering themselves. Here, I believe, we find the reason that theology often leads to nothing but arid debate – pride enters in to convince us that our greater knowledge entitles us to greater respect. The internet is often a theological battlefield as protagonists aspire to be ‘right’ when the only source of wisdom is the compulsion to love and let be.

As we mull over the strange failure of Catholic education to develop in Ireland a community at peace with itself, and in love with God, we need to acknowledge that in buying into the secular meritocratic mirage we pulled from underneath ourselves the essential truth: that respect cannot be merited. We owe one another respect because we are all equally flawed, yet equally and infinitely loved by the same God, and cannot add another cubit to our height, whatever we achieve.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)

Discovery of the soul is discovery of the self – the self that we don’t wannabe, the core of our being that God knows and loves. We need urgently to acknowledge the power of global media to alienate us from the wisdom to be content to be ourselves – and counter it at every turn – by telling every wannabe that he or she already – gloriously – is.

Views: 23

Twelve Steps to Being Christian

Addiction, Articles, Honour, Papacy, Shame, Spirituality, , , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © The Furrow 2001

How are we to understand and explain the basic vocabulary of Christianity today? It is a truism that people no longer understand ‘Sin’ as our grandparents did – which means that ‘Salvation’ too becomes problematic. Told recently that ‘Jesus Saves’ my twenty-one year old sceptical son inquired ‘at what rate of interest? Most of his generation wishes above all to be saved from the saved – so we surely need to revisit the original story of salvation to understand what relevance it might have in the twenty-first century.

Richard Rohr, the American Franciscan, helps us part of the way by observing that in this era most of the deepest spiritual work is being done in the basements rather than the naves of churches in the US. There, closest to the earth, the twelve-step programmes for alcoholics, gamblers, compulsive shoppers, partner-beaters and every other kind of self-destructive addict are worked through. It is clear that we live in a deeply addictive culture that – in the media cliché – ‘ruins lives’. What is the root of this addictiveness, and how does it relate to ‘sin’ as Jesus might have understood it? And how does the invocation of a ‘higher power’ – the basic strategy of the twelve-step program – relate to what he taught?

Talking recently to a close friend who is working through such a programme, I was struck by his insistence that the invariable problem of the addict is low or even non-existent self-esteem. A childhood deprivation of parental care or affection, an experience of abuse or systematic bullying or humiliation in early life, an inability to keep a job or a partner – these and other examples of rejection, failure, derision or contempt keep cropping up. And the result in the addict is a pervasive sense of shame and fear, a chronic inability to love the self.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ What happens if we translate ‘poor in spirit’ as self-rejecting – bankrupt of self-esteem – rather than as simply poor in an economic sense?

Coming at this as an historian rather than a theologian I see the ancient world as everywhere a pyramid of esteem or worthiness. At its summit in Jesus’s time were Roman God-Emperors whose exaltation had usually emerged out of military rivalry and conquest. Essentially this applied even in the Jewish world view, where David, the Lord’s anointed, was archetypally a military hero, the boy-slayer of the Philistine giant Goliath and father of Solomon, builder of the first temple.

And it was Herod’s temple in Jesus’ time that was the focal point of the religion of most Jews, the place where sacrificial propitiation of the Deity took place.

But those who came to John for baptism must have been outside the temple system – and the key to this is to understand that temple sacrifice and expiation was a relatively expensive business, involving the hiring of religious lawyers for advice, the purchase of sacrificial offerings, and the making of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem – all seriously problematic for those at the base of the economic pyramid.

It followed from this that the poor were thus also usually the poorest in spirit, the lowest in self-esteem, the shamed, the sinners – the ones looking for an inexpensive route to ritual cleanliness and divine forgiveness. These were the people who followed John and Jesus. Peter’s astonishment over Jesus’ observation that the rich would have trouble entering his kingdom tells us this also: good fortune was interpreted then as evidence of divine favour; ill fortune as proof of God’s anger. This was the reason that Jesus’ forgiveness of sin – offered freely to those who sought his help, without any interrogation – was so astonishing to his disciples, and so bitterly opposed by the hierarchs whose power rested upon respect for the Temple system.

‘You are beloved of God’: this was Jesus insistent message to those who had felt excluded – and this is the Good News. It follows that Jesus was overturning the pyramid of esteem of the Ancient World – and that this was the fundamental reason for Christianity’s growth within the Roman Empire also in the early centuries. Evangelisation was the doorway into divine esteem for those who thought they could never enter. And it was also an entry into the church as community.

‘You are loved by God’ was not, however, news at all to those who already held position in the older Pagan and Jewish pyramids of esteem. They felt sure of it already.

How then did Christianity become in the end so often associated with social respectability, coercion and sexual fear; and salvation a hypothetical eternal life insurance – pie in the sky by-and-by?

History again provides the answer. Christianity’s own success was eventually noticed by one of the many upwardly mobile military adventurers of the ancient world. “In this sign, conquer” – this was the message conveniently seen by Constantine underneath a fiery cross on his way to the battle of the Milvian bridge. Most Christian hierarchs tragically swallowed this gambit whole – as an offer they couldn’t refuse – and the result was a marriage of Christianity with the state that was to persist for more than fifteen hundred years. Augustine’s identification of sin with wayward sexuality rather than social unworthiness allowed the upper classes (of which he was a member) to retain their social eminence as well as their sense of chosenness. Conversion usually became a matter of attaching first the rulers of kingdoms rather than their subjects – these would soon follow out of deference.

It followed inexorably that Christianity would become associated with respectability and coercion, and that gradually the meaning of the story recited in the creeds – would become lost. In particular we lost the meaning of Jesus’ social descent as an expression of divine solidarity with the ‘losers’ of the ancient world. Medieval theology came to explain the crucifixion as the price exacted by a divine system of justice which insisted that God’s ‘honour’ demanded satisfaction by nothing less than the death of his son. Thus the ruling classes of the Middle Ages redefined God in their own image, scapegoating him for the death of Christ, and thus eventually making ‘salvation’ wholly unintelligible. It became merely inclusion in a scheme of divine providence that must wait upon the death of the one ‘saved’. It followed also that it need not mean full inclusion in the benefits of community on earth, and so became valueless to those who remained excluded from it.

But in our own time when the educated classes have mostly followed the Enlightenment in concluding that Christianity was nonsense, this opened the way for the retrieval of the meaning of the crucifixion by those at the base of our own pyramids of esteem in this era. The ‘junkie’ – the one discarded – is the very image of the stone discarded that became the cornerstone of the early church. The crucifixion is essentially not about the physical pain of Jesus, but about acceptance of the obverse of glory – ultimate shame and humiliation – and this can now be recovered when the socially esteemed can find no meaning in it.

The implications of this for evangelisation, and for how we think of ‘church’, are profound. In particular those who wish to revive Christianity in the third millennium must understand that social vertigo is the greatest barrier to success. We need to advance on two fronts – attacking the complacency and the intellectual assumptions of those at the summit of our own pyramids of esteem today, and learning to lose our inherited prejudices towards the socially outcast, the ‘losers’ of the world.

It must surely be obvious that if we organise life as a race, losers must outnumber winners. It follows inexorably that the root cause of failure is nothing other than the worship of ‘success’. Even a meritocracy involves judgement and rejection, i.e. crucifixion. That the UK’s chief executive should be both an enthusiastic meritocrat and an avowed Christian shows how far we need to go still in disentangling one from the other. All pyramids of esteem inevitably create shame at their base.

For on what Christian grounds should we declare that some are entitled to esteem, while others are not? If the answer is that those who don’t work don’t deserve esteem, why then do we tolerate those who live on nothing other than shrewd investments? For their shrewdness? If so our kingdom is for the shrewd only – and our world becomes an intellectual pyramid of esteem, deadly for those whose gifts may lie in other directions. Is this intelligent? More important, is it wise? Most important, is it Christian?

For me, the essence of Christianity is the assertion of the eternal and equal value of every single human person, irrespective of race, intelligence, gender, wealth or whatever. It follows logically that everyone is equally important, equally to be cherished. And that the cult of celebrity must be a target of a revived Christianity also. No-one ever was, ever is, or ever will be, more ‘worth it’ than anyone else.

It follows inexorably also that churches cannot be pyramids of esteem. As a lay Catholic I am now totally alienated from the papal system as it has been exercised in this overlong pontificate. The Pope’s own invitation to the church to reconsider how this office should be exercised should be accepted with alacrity, for celebrity Popes cannot undermine pyramids of esteem without attacking celebrity per se. The notion that you can re-evangelise the west by elevating a single individual to semi-sacred status, upon whose every word we all must hang, is the residual myth of a bankrupt Christendom. It ignores the patently obvious fact that by loading spiritual dignity onto one individual you withdraw it from the rest – the root cause of the sense of spiritual inferiority and incompetence that afflicts many lay Catholics today. It is also spiritually obtuse and abusive, for it deprives even the ordinary Christian of the gift given by Christ – a sense of our own dignity as brother or sister of the Lord. No title can bestow greater honour than this – not even Pope.

Remarkably, one of the essential characteristics of the twelve-step process is the absence of hierarchy, the complete equality of all participants. All acknowledge their own brokenness, so none can claim precedence. Equally, no-one can be shamed or rejected. Yet the need for repentance – for taking full responsibility for all the hurt one has caused to others – is emphasised as an essential part of the process.

“Which of us is the greatest?” This insistent question from the disciples warns us that pride afflicts pastors also. Jesus’s response tells us that the essence of Christian community is nothing other than moral equality.

To the objection that only hierarchy can protect truth there is a simple answer. The creeds hierarchies protect have virtually lost their meaning in the very creation of ecclesiastical hierarchy, including the altogether scandalous notion of ‘princes of the church’. As history proved time and time again – for example, in the Crusades – it is perfectly possible to recite a verbal formula summarising the love of God one moment, and to disembowel someone the next. The urgent task of all Christians is to recover fully the meaning of the creeds. The only recoverable meaning that can change our world for the better is that God in allowing his son to be crucified renounced his own hierarchical privilege in favour of reclaiming those at the base of all worldly hierarchies. If hierarchical Christianity cannot rise to the challenge of such a God, it is unworthy of Him, and deserves to die.

On the other hand, it is the addict’s recognition of his brokenness in that of Jesus on Calvary that suggests that not even the Constantines of this world can prevail in the end. It is the shamed – the most prodigal sons and daughters – who can speak with greatest understanding of the love of the one who scans the horizon for their return, and even sends them his most precious son to meet them at the moment of their own ultimate humiliation.

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Towards a New Evangelism III: United Christian Aid

Articles, Evangelisation, Forgiveness, Status Anxiety, , , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine & Life 2001

In July 1996, at the height of the Drumcree tension, a couple in their fifties were enjoying a holiday in a caravan in Warrenpoint. Michael and Bridie McGoldrick turned on the morning news, to hear that another Catholic taxi driver had been shot dead, this time in Craigavon. Their world stood still, for their only son, also Michael, was driving a taxi at that very time, in that very locality. Within an hour they knew the worst: Michael had been shot by the LVF.

Michael, the parent, says that the two went almost mad with grief. He beat the ground outside their caravan, saying to God “Hanging on the cross was nothing to this!’ They thought of suicide – and even lined up a variety of medicinal drugs for the purpose. But then they remembered that Michael had a wife and daughter, and that there was another child on the way. They turned to prayer instead.

On the day of the funeral, as Michael touched his son for the last time – saying he would see him again in heaven – some power changed him. He was then not only able to help carry his son’s coffin in and out of the chapel, but to bear the full weight of the blow that had fallen. He went to the cameras and microphones of the assembled media and forgave the murderers of his son. Facing the danger of retaliation, at a time of extreme tension in that very locality, he appealed for restraint: “Bury your pride with my boy!”

Michael is the least histrionic of men. I know this now, for I have known him closely for about three years. His description of the extraordinary emotional transitions of those days sounds like something out of Willam James’s ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’. Yet it is the settled nature of his life now that impresses me most.

Richard Rohr observes that western Christianity is currently at a fundamental crisis: it will either move from theory to practice, or perish. We need to understand that inertia – but also we need to know that it is altogether possible to move beyond it, and what can happen when we do. Michael and his close friend Tom Lennon are the most astonishing example I know.

Tom is a Mayoman who almost died of peritonitis in his youth, and never fully recovered. He developed a deep commitment to prayer, believing that God wanted something from him, something beyond the raising of a family and the making of a living.

The plight of Eastern Europe in the 90s moved him to start a charity – United Christian Aid. It would gather from both communities in Ireland whatever anyone would give him. He had a dual purpose – to heal divisions in Northern Ireland by focusing our minds on the far worse material plight of the people suffering in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Empire, and to take aid from Ireland out there. He opened a map of eastern Europe for the first time, and headed for the Ukraine.

He quickly learned of all the pitfalls of such an enterprise – of the corruption of frontier officials who always had to have a piece of the action, of the difficulty of finding reliable helpers and administrators in a society where an ethic of ‘me first’ had taken hold on so many. Of the physical dangers of bad roads and bad food and dangerous nights in unlit streets, among people whose language he couldn’t even speak. Yet he persevered, learning from all of this.

And then one night, when he had explained his purpose to a small audience in Lurgan, a middle-aged man came forward and told him ‘I couldn’t do what you do!’ ‘Of course you could!’ said Tom, and began explaining how. He was talking to Michael McGoldrick. The two struck up a strong friendship, and now jointly run UCA.

Tom was by now focusing his efforts on Romania. He and Michael went out there in 1997 and decided upon an even narrower focus: just one town in eastern Romania – they eventually settled for Cernavoda. His first visit turned Michael into a dynamo. There is nowhere in Northern Ireland he is not now willing to drive the royal blue UCA transit van, no-one he will not talk to.

He came to Coleraine for the first time in 1998 – where I heard him tell his story. I was by now myself committed, and Cursillo had taught me a little humility. I was also fascinated by Eastern Europe. Our house became a depot for the bags of clothing and other goods people now wanted to give him, and we struck up a firm friendship.

He and Bridie would sit at our table and Michael would say “We’re just ….. normal!”. The pause was for emphasis. There is no trace of ‘look at us’ in these two. They are simply in love with the people of Cernavoda, whom it is normal, as well as necessary, to help.

They speak often of a Roma woman called Mrs Nikolai, who, when they met her, was trying to raise a family of six in one half of a stable. No-one occupied the other half – because it didn’t exist – two walls were missing. She had once delivered one of her children in a hospital where the staff, including a doctor, conspired to steal it from her, telling her it had died. She suspected the lie, and refused to leave without it. She had her way.

To understand this you need to know that Romania is a deeply layered society, in which the Roma (daftly named ‘gypsies’ by us westerners) are at the bottom of the heap. ‘Thieves’ and ‘murderers’ to many in the settled community, they occupy the social position of our travellers – always available as scapegoats for whatever anyone might need to blame someone else for. A quick search on the Web will tell you anything more you need to know.

Mrs Nikolai, who is an Orthodox Christian, now has her own house, gifted by UCA. They simply gave her the money to buy it – to the astonishment of educated Romanian Catholics. They were certain she would simply drink herself to death in a society where alcohol occupies the place it did in Ireland in the early years of this century – a social anaesthetic for people who have no other way of fulfilling their dreams.

She didn’t, for her dream was simply any kind of house with four walls – and now she has enough capital to run a small clothing retailing business – buying the clothes not from UCA but from Romanian sources. “You changed my world forever,” she tells Michael.

Cernavoda is on the lower Danube navigation system. Meaning ‘Dark Water’, it was fairly prosperous when a navigation canal, complete with massive locks, was being built through it in the Ceausescu era. Now its only dubious claim to fame is a nuclear power plant, built by Canadians. It has a population of about 30,000, mostly Orthodox, most of whom would have to drive right by the reactor if some emergency forced them to flee. What would happen if the Nuclear plant was the cause of the emergency? Tough. A bridge is to be built to provide an alternative escape route – but there is no sign of it being finished at a time when the Romanian economy is contracting.

Which means, of course, that prayer seems to be an entirely reasonable option in Cernavoda, where there is little employment, virtually no social welfare or health service, and where the winter temperature can fall to 15 below. On the (often wooden or mud) walls Christians put simple hanging tapestries of gospel scenes – the Good Shepherd is a favourite.

For many of them, Tom and Michael are good shepherds, renewing a faith that came westward to us almost sixteen centuries ago. Michael once told the mother of a family of eight to pray hard. “Why should I?” She asked. “God has never done anything for me!”

“Why do you think we are here?” asked Michael, watching as she pondered and understood this. Virtually her only reliable income was the Romanian equivalent of £20 sterling monthly – family sponsorship from UCA.

This is the point of this story. The words and truths of the gospel are beautiful – but wealthy westerners – and most of us are millionaires by Romanian standards – need to show those words have meaning when they think of evangelising the rest of the world. What would we sacrifice in order to convince anyone of their truth? Is there anything we would not give to do so? If so, how convinced are we?

So this spiritual commerce is overwhelmingly to the benefit of us westerners also when we make this journey eastwards. Our money buys almost three times as much in Romania as in Ireland – which means that very little of it can make an astonishing difference to the wellbeing, material and spiritual, of a Romanian family. The families in Northern Ireland who now sponsor Cernavodan families are kept abreast of all developments by UCA’s Romanian helpers, and by Michael and Tom’s bi-monthly visits. East and west are linked to the great benefit of both.

UCA will never rival the major charities – but that is not the point. It shows that Christianity moves people as nothing else can – in their hearts and souls first – and then in their bodies. As Michael says, the real mystery is why so many in Ireland remain unmoved by their faith.

The probability is that our own social layering, combined with the rising economic tide of the second half of the century, has made us add, time after time, new luxuries to our store of necessities. We must have what our status entitles us to. It takes an almighty shock to make us realise that Christianity is fundamentally a challenge to the whole hidden ideology of status that drives our economic advance.

To put it at its simplest, every single human life and person is infinitely precious and to be loved. If we deny this by denying that people come before wealth, we deny the faith we verbally profess, and make it bankrupt.

Intellectuals often make much show of compassion for the pain of the poor when they reject Christian belief – but intellectuals too are victims of the pride that dominates us. They ignore the fact that it is usually those who have suffered most whose faith is strongest. This is true especially of these two men, whose faith and love do so much to restore the dignity of an Irish Catholicism that is completely worthy of Columba and Columbanus. They too speak eloquently, far away from Ireland, of the power of the Trinity to change the heart, and then the world – and there are many like them in Ireland today.

Theological sophistication in the articulation of faith comes nowhere near what a ‘new evangelisation’ requires today – because the essential task is to close the chasm between the word and the deed – to demonstrate an unconditional compassion which will in the end restore good cheer, and an equal dignity, to all the peoples of the world, as UCA is doing. When this is done in the Lord’s name, the essence of Christian theology is being conveyed – more effectively than by the greatest academic theologian.

There is something else to be said. Christianity’s long dalliance with the state has had a devastating effect upon the manner in which we interpret the fatherhood of God. In the middle ages, to explain the crucifixion, theologians came to associate it with a need to restore dignity to the Father, whom sin dishonours – just as medieval kings were thought to be dishonoured by the disloyalty of their subjects. Inevitably this came in time to separate son from father in the mind of many Christians, for it seemed to imply that although the son could be infinitely forgiving, the father could not. This complicated Christian theology, and out of this complication arose many Christian divisions, and Christian fundamentalism.

What if the father is as forgiving, and as gentle as the son? What if the crucifixion is instead to be explained as the father’s ultimate gift – of his son, despite the humiliation involved in his death, a humiliation experienced by the father also, and accepted out of love for all of us – a love as great as the son’s?

Then those six words “Bury your pride with my boy!” would be his words also – words given as a gift to all on this island, in recompense for all our pain, and all our lost sons – the most perfect summary of the gospels in the English language.

Michael still hopes to meet someday the father of the murdered founder of the LVF, Billy Wright – to shake his hand in recognition of a common sorrow, and a common faith in resurrection.

Views: 21

Towards a New Evangelism I: What’s so good about the ‘Good News’?

Articles, Christendom, Evangelisation, Fundamentalism, Hierarchy, Honour, Humiliation, Media, Scripture, Shame,

Sean O’Conaill © Doctrine and Life 2001

“No – I don’t want to hear about Jesus!” This is the signature message of one member of the Internet mailing list alt.recovery.catholic – an international (but mostly north American) e-mail support community. Its members are mostly people whose experience of Catholicism has led them to see it as abusive or addictive.

The message succinctly sums up the problem of the ‘New Evangelism’ so persistently called for by Pope John Paul II. Just as people stopped listening to the boy who cried ‘wolf’ when none appeared, so countless millions in the west today suppose, on the basis of their own experience, that there is nothing especially good about the Christian Good News.

This is particularly true of Ireland, where people often suppose that an experience of nine or more years of Catholic education, and regular family Mass-going, have exhausted the possibilities of the Gospel they experienced there. The perceived de-sacralisation of the priesthood that has followed from a spate of scandals also takes a toll. So does Christian fundamentalism, of all varieties. When you ask perfectly sensible people today if they would like to be ‘saved’, many are liable to ask ‘you mean from the saved?’

Furthermore, the medium by which the Gospel has primarily been communicated for two millennia – the language of the bible and of theology – has less and less traction on human attention. All language has been debased by the children of Madison Avenue. Cynical political spin doctoring has had a similar effect. As the Ulsterman says, “If you believe all you hear, you’ll eat all you see!” In a welter of claims to veracity that are mostly spurious, we no longer associate word with truth. Our perceptual in-tray is labelled “Claims Mostly Unreliable” – and in it we place everything from Reader’s Digest promises of millions to papal encyclicals.

And biblical language has a special problem. ‘Sin’, ‘Salvation’, ‘Redemption’, ‘Atonement’ seem echoes of an age long dead – when every misfortune from floods to disease and earthquakes was attributed to divine anger. This problem is compounded by what might be called the Mandy Rice-Davies bind: the clergyman’s profession of faith is closely connected to his livelihood – so when he insists that God will call all to account at the end of time, people are inclined to think – and more and more likely to say – ‘but he would say that, wouldn’t he?’

A further problem relates to the ‘where’ of evangelisation. Spacial communities once centred on a single market place or village have been shattered by physical and informational communications revolutions – so people may sleep in one location, work many miles away, shop somewhere else, and socialise elsewhere again – and may do their thinking and discussing on the phone or the internet as members of an international work or hobby ‘virtual’ community.

As a possible solution to this problem of lost one-space community, the growth of broadcast media such as radio and television was initially met with as much enthusiasm by churchmen as by politicians such as Roosevelt and Goebbels – but multi-channel satellite and cable TV, as well as the VCR – have fragmented even these communities. Papal spectaculars are one answer – but quickly pall. They are too similar to mass political rallies in which charismatic personalities fly in, get waved at from a distance, and then fly out again, leaving little behind. For lay people wondering about their own lifestyle, there just isn’t any way of following an act like that. Radical change in the way we perceive and respond to life demands far more than a one-day sensation, and schools quickly found that replaying 1979 videos of Ireland’s papal visit was a sure recipe for an ‘Aw, Miss!’ response. Indeed, over-exposure on the media may well have done for the papacy what it has done for royalty – disperse the semi-magical aura with which people surround their mental image of an august person they have never seen.

We can summarise these problems as relating to the What, How, Who and Where of evangelisation. I’ll deal with just the first of these in this article. What exactly is the good news anyhow – in terms that will make sense to people today?

Readers of earlier articles in this series will know that I relate the appeal of Jesus, prior to crucifixion, to the fact that he upended the pyramid of worthiness or esteem that characterised the ancient world. The last would be first, the returned prodigal would be celebrated, the poor were blessed, the rich and powerful were not to be considered more favoured by God. Most importantly this verbal message – which astonished even the apostles – was authenticated by a table fellowship that scandalised the disciples of ritual purity by including the most reviled.

The Good News therefore was that those who had considered themselves at the tail end of the triumphal procession of the ancient world were in fact beloved of the God who was at the summit of it. He was to be glorified precisely because he acknowledged and raised up the lowly. ‘The World’ had got it wrong – and this claim was validated by the willingness of the messenger to associate with, and above all to eat with, the ritually unclean. Word and deed were not separate, but united – reinforcing the credibility of the message. As Peter’s astonishment over Jesus’s comment on the rich young man indicates, in the ancient world one’s sinfulness was a deduction from one’s exclusion, one’s social and spiritual unworthiness – so inclusion in the table of the messenger proved the latter’s integrity and one’s own salvation. The table of Jesus, like the Jordan baptism of John, was a challenge to the Temple system of ritual cleanliness and conformity with legal minutiae and expensive sacrifice – a system of salvation that favoured the relatively wealthy and educated.

A real, enduring fellowship offered to the shunned was therefore inseparable from the idea of salvation – and this association was maintained by the relative social humility of the early leaders of the church, and its rejection by the Jewish and Roman establishments in the first Christian centuries. Salvation is inseparable from a sense of ‘God with us’ – also expressed in the excitement of the Samaritan woman at the well. It was not ‘pie in the sky by and by’ that drew people to Jesus – but simply the fact of his willingness to bring personally the message ‘you are forgiven and loved’ – and to abide with those now evangelised, sharing their deprivation.

It is clear therefore that evangelisation is also non-hierarchical. Jesus’ humility collapsed the pyramid of esteem which had communicated to the rejected the fact of their rejection. As did his washing of the feet. As did the crucifixion most of all.

It follows from this that the Good News would not necessarily be good news for all – and that it was not simply a promise of life after physical death. It was an assurance of the love of God now and forever for those who had been taught by the world that they were of no account – with the sole proviso of genuine repentance. And it was therefore also a questioning of the presumption of those whose worldly success had been thought a sure sign of divine favour.

Sad to relate, this is not quite what the Church relayed to me during my orthodox Catholic education in the 1950s. Then the good news had become ‘the Church is always right’. The reason was simple enough: the Church’s own growth, and especially the Constantinian shift in the church’s social and political status in the fourth century had led to Christian adaptation to, and approval of, social hierarchy per se. Thus, although salvation could still be merited by the poor, their happiness must be deferred in this life. Theology soon explained human hierarchies – even the institution of slavery – in terms of divine preference for hierarchies in heaven also. It was at this point that the gospels became detached from the real world – and almost incapable of fundamentally changing it. Jesus belonged in a landscape of poor people raised by him onto a different plane – but it did not follow that Christian kings would share their tables with the verminous. Their superiority was required in order to maintain Christian order. And it was this Christian order that became Christendom.

A story told by Bede about St Aidan in the seventh century well illustrates this analysis. This spiritual child of Iona, in evangelising Northumbria, impressed its King, Oswald, to the extent that he gave the saint the gift of a valuable horse. When Aidan soon gave this gift to a beggar, the king was angered – to the extent that Aidan lamented his greater valuation of the horse than the beggar. Yet if Kings and beggars were equal in dignity, kingship itself conferred none, so kings inevitably won this argument in the long run. Territorial churchmen in time learned to avoid such sorrow by keeping such gifts, regretfully delegating the virtue of humility to their subordinates. Thus the church became itself a pyramid of esteem, duplicating and ratifying the secular one alongside.

This is where we all come in – close to the terminus of this sad experiment in accommodating the gospels to the injustice of the world. Once the elites originally educated by the Church lost intellectual respect for Christianity, their patronage of the Church could be easily abandoned. The trauma of secularist democratic revolution beginning in 1789 led to a renewed tactical alliance between political aristocracy and Christian hierarchy in the nineteenth century, but this too was fundamentally cynical and tenuous. Although it informed the Roman Curia’s attempted suppression of liberation theology as late as the 1980s, it did so at the cost of that body’s scant remaining moral authority. And this is precisely why the call for a new evangelisation now seems so forlorn. If the gospel doesn’t challenge the world, it must merely support it.

It must be pointed out also here that the fundamental premise of most Catholic education has by now been proved bankrupt: that the education of the sons of the wealthy would ‘Christianise’ society from the top down. Education itself is an empowerment, and when it is bestowed selectively upon those already privileged it can only reinforce their privilege. This is why our intelligentsias endlessly analyse the problems of the world and argue over their solution at the top of towers of steel and glass – without ever getting to the root of the problem: their own preference for height, for remoteness from the mean back streets below. For it is social contempt that the poor feel most keenly, not the material difference that is its sacrament. As anyone who has spent any time with the poor will know, people can be happy with very little until they are reminded by the media of the material differential that excludes them from the award-winning tables of the famous and the well-to-do.

And this is why our society is now so thoroughly secular – in spite of the fact that the elites that govern it are mostly the products of elite Catholic schools. The acceptance by the church of the principle of social hierarchy is an endorsement of the very essence of secularism – worldliness, the assumption that it is the proud, rather than the poor, who are blessed by God , and therefore worthy of their self-conscious superiority.

Yet the paradox is that it is the survival of social hierarchy and privilege that guarantees the permanent relevance of the gospels. Suffering and injustice, exclusion, low self-esteem, addiction, depression – all these are the richest soil on which the good news can take root. Many are reinforced by the media cult of celebrity in our own time – the raising to ikonic status of mere humans as flawed as the rest of us. For the essence of the Gospel is that we are all indeed already and unconditionally loved, and will never be forsaken. All that is lacking is evangelisers so convinced of this that they will not just say it, but live it. Indeed, given the bankruptcy of mere language, and the chasm between the word and the deed in the hierarchical Church, it is the doing of it that can alone now renew the Church.

Who ‘does’ Christian love best today? Obsessed with the danger of getting the theology wrong, our leaders seem to pay little attention to this question. If one truly loves, in the name of the Trinity, their presence is revealed by that love, which speaks of nothing else, so where is the possibility of error? We should be looking for, and encouraging, such people, if only to vindicate the truth we argue over.

Luckily I know some of these new evangelisers, and will write of this next month.

Views: 28

Understanding the Downward Journey

Articles, Christology, Evangelisation, Kingdom of God, Spirituality, Status Anxiety, Worldliness, , , , ,

Sean O’Conaill © Spirituality 2001

The essence of the downward journey is freedom from the illusion that it is the world that gives us both our identity and our worth.

We have almost as much difficulty understanding that biblical term ‘the world’ as we do the nature of God. This shouldn’t be – because our world also is the enemy of the soul. It demands that we compete for its approval. It rewards a tiny minority with its fickle adulation – which often destroys them – and consigns the rest of us to the role of ‘loser’ or ‘wannabe’. It is, in other words, a vast pyramid of esteem, a composite of all the smaller pyramids we pass through in life – family, school, neighbourhood, firm, city, state – and (often if not always) church.

So long as we play the game all these pyramids demand – postponing self-acceptance until we have been accepted or recognised by them – so long will we be Sisyphus, rolling the stone of self-dislike interminably uphill, until our strength gives out. That is a moment of terrible danger – but also a fleeting window of opportunity. It is dangerous because it tempts us to respond with despair, anger and sometimes murderous aggression or suicide. It is also an opportunity because we may then tumble to the essential stupidity of ordering human community, and valuing ourselves, in this way. We may then recognise this tendency as the root of all evil – and understand the cross as an expression of divine solidarity with our humiliation. Unfortunately, the churches’ historical participation in the pyramid system, and the stupid theology that results (e.g. God as medieval king angrily demanding Jesus’s pain in reparation for his lost ‘honour’) may deprive us of this insight.

Even the spirituality market implies a pyramid, at the summit of which must be those who have read deeply the writings of all the accredited spiritual masters from Buddha to Theresa of Lisieux. And so one may buy all of these books and begin the rolling of the stone – perhaps missing the fact that the unique characteristic of the journey of both was not towards the acquisition of knowledge – a matter of addition, and of the head – but towards acceptance of their own vulnerability – a matter of subtraction, and of the heart.

But what is the point of becoming spiritual if you cannot make it work for you? I hear this question – and its ambiguity. ‘Working for you’ could mean doing for you what it did for Buddha or Therese (i.e. make sense) – or it could mean making you well known as a wise and spiritual person. The trouble is that the spirituality market will exploit particularly the second meaning – because your purchases will burgeon with your desire to move always upward, in deep dissatisfaction with where you are, in order to become a spirituality expert. Notice again the world’s magnetic force – you are setting out to be spiritual in order to be ‘up there’ – the antithesis of the spiritual. The last thing you may consider is the possibility of moving in the opposite direction – of seeking to know less by knowing only the most important thing.

That most important thing in the Judeo-Christian tradition – that pearl of great price – is that you are already as loved and as worthy of esteem as you will ever be – already infinitely loved and respected. The condition of not knowing this, and fleeing from it towards the approval of the world, is sin. The tears that follow its discovery are called repentance – in which you weep also for the sin of ever having thought of yourself as unloved – for not having loved yourself as you are.

It follows from this that all of us are equally, and infinitely, loved – and that the pyramids we build are the product of an illusion. That illusion is the notion that the overall sum of our worth is what others think of us – when they are equally insecure. Gripped by this illusion we are slaves to it – and escape is virtually impossible

For Jesus the single most important truth was that he was loved by the creator of all things, the Father. From this great truth – and the relationship it gave him with the Father – came the revelatory journey which unlocked ‘things hidden since the beginning of the world’. Essentially what was hidden, and what remains hidden from most, is that the world preserves its power over us not just by insisting that we compete for its approval, but by victimising those at its base. From their plight we must flee – upwards, driven by fear. Ambition – desire to be at the top, adored and invulnerable, draws us in the same direction. Fear and hubris rule the world, imprisoning the spirit of generosity which desperately seeks escape.

These days throughout the west we are amazed by the sudden fall of ‘great men’ who not so long ago ‘bestrode the world’. Their gifts were also their temptation. Their ability to climb the political pyramid made them susceptible to flattery and sycophantic attention of all kinds – and they succumbed to sexual or monetary temptation on a scale that shamed them when revealed. Great wisdom can be gained by pondering the meaning of these events – for they merely reiterate the lives of ancient heroes, archetypally David.

If Jesus was not divine he was then even more mysterious – for neither fear nor hubris determined his actions from first to last (although he experienced – i.e. was ‘tempted’ by both). To the degree that we study him as a mere human he becomes unlike any other man. To the degree that we insist that he was God, he reveals God to be unlike our expectation. For us, both Gods and heroes must triumph and remain invulnerable. Yet Jesus accepted humiliation and defeat, and revealed God as both humble and vulnerable. Psychologically he is impossible to explain – unless we accept the reality of what he insisted upon. That reality was the Father, a spiritual being with whom he could communicate at will, who gave him the specific task of revealing and upending the spirits of fear and hubris which build the pyramids of esteem that govern the world.

Yet Jesus also tells us that those who follow him become his brothers and sisters, to whom he has revealed all that the Father had told him, and with whom he and the Father will live in the same intimacy. How do we find our way to this point of meeting?

Ancient heroes had to do something violently heroic to win the recognition of the world. Think of Theseus who must destroy the monsters who fall in his way as he journeys to Athens to be recognised by his father, King Aegeus. The gospel of John tells us that Jesus was recognised by Abba at the very beginning of his own journey – for doing nothing more than stepping down into the waters of the Jordan, in fellowship with repentant sinners who also sought the baptism of John. This episode is immediately followed by Jesus’ sojourn in the desert, and his rejection of the temptations to ascend the worldly pyramids of state and temple. His mission becomes the granting of forgiveness and esteem freely to those at the base of these pyramids, (usually far from Jerusalem), to whom he gives most of the rest of his life. For this effrontery he is hated ‘by the world’, and murdered by it, in the time-honoured manner.

The downward journey today could well begin with nothing more dramatic than the granting of respect and esteem – that is, of love – to someone we know who has less of these things than we ourselves, and who may have suffered a recent humiliation. If this is difficult, the difficulty lies in our greater respect for the world, the only source of our embarrassment, than for God – so prayer is strongly indicated. And this prayer should be part of our private life – for ostentatious prayer is a prayer addressed to the world rather than to God.

It must be clearly understood that this practice of according respect to those whom the world considers our inferiors must not be condescension – for they are in fact our equals. Its purpose is to discover the kind of relationship that Jesus formed very quickly with people he has just met – a relationship of fundamental equality and mutual trust. He did not presume that his relationship with Abba entitled him to greater esteem – but sought to draw others into the same relationship.

Another aspect of this journey is the discovery that the person next to us at any given moment is often the person to whom we should be speaking at that moment, for the sake of both. This is still a feature of the lives of people who live in remote places – every meeting is seen as an unmissable opportunity for conversation. Yet in our great cities people will often spend hours daily physically close to others with whom they exchange not a word. The convention in the tube in London is to avoid eye contact – so people examine one another surreptitiously, or read, or compute. Fear and hubris rule equally here also – for cities are above all else pyramids of esteem – and the person next to you might be an addict or drug rapist – or snub you as an inferior. Yet what might you be missing as your eyes slide about, looking vainly for an advertisement worth reading?

In particular you might exchange views on the reasons for the exhaustion that inevitably follows the endless busyness of modern city life. The man with the computer was told a decade a go that it would make his life less hectic – but the opposite seems to be the truth. He doesn’t have time simply to ‘shoot the breeze’ – he must switch on in transit and finish that report. The reason probably is that he believes that all his colleagues – his rivals for promotion – have this equipment too, and will steal a march. So it always will be – for it is in the nature of the world to disconnect us from where and when we are, to live in a tomorrow that never comes.

Yet what happens to the exhausted mind is eventually despair – and how will that help the firm? Tireless worship of yet another convoy of ocean-crossing buzzwords must eventually end in burnout – so who benefits? What if we all got together and said no to freneticism, technobabble and jargonising simultaneously? I reckon that nine out of ten eye-sliding city straphangers would find that question meaningful.

In Ireland it is usually in the craik in the pub that we get closest to this kind of common insight – and maybe this is the source of some alcohol addiction also – for the association of alcohol with genuine companionship and relaxation may create the false conclusion that one is impossible without the other. In those hours when today’s humiliations have been related, and their authors properly reviled, we ease down. Our friends are those who do not threaten us, and who can share in our meagre triumphs. Yet tomorrow beckons, inexorable as closing time – and battle is soon joined once more.

The tireless busyness of great cities, audible even through double or treble glazing, sets a rhythm to which we unconsciously dance. That seems to be true of any large community. And the car now allows that rhythm to radiate out into the countryside, far louder now than the hum of bees that used to be a byword for business. The discovery of the process of evolution should impress us with the slowness of God’s time – but instead it seems to have ratcheted even tighter our determination to live in tomorrow rather than today. It becomes daily more difficult to find stillness, to discover the rhythm of God’s tune, and dance to that instead.

That is why there has always been a connection between deep spiritual work, and isolation. We tend to associate the desert into which Jesus went merely with asceticism – but we should note that he went there from the Jordan, directly after the Father’s revelation of himself and recognition of his son. So we can assume that Jesus was simply seeking a stillness and peace within which he could discover the meaning of this extraordinary relationship. The hermitical and monastic traditions – which preserved the church through centuries of corruption of its superstructure – follow the same search for the one who speaks in stillness.

It is also always a search for the self – of who one is – the integrated ‘me’ shorn of pretence, falseness, that personality I put on like a shirt in order to please the world. The knowledge that it is the ‘me’ that I hide from the world that God alone fully knows – this is important knowledge that we have forgotten how to teach in our schools.

It can be rediscovered still in Ireland today – especially in the west. I did not discover that my own desert had been the wilds of Lough Corrib until I found that it was there as a teenager I had found a happiness so mysterious that when I found myself much later in the darkest valley of my own crisis, gratitude came pouring out to whoever had created it – just, it seemed, for me. In Galway again recently, determined to escape the hum of the city, I came upon a dirt road that seemed to follow inland a beautiful small river tumbling towards the sea. My wife and I followed it on foot, and within ten minutes the movement of the breeze and the rush of falling water had enveloped us completely, shutting out the rush of traffic, easing the almost imperceptible tension it builds within us. That was the Sabbath experience we must all seek – the rest from labour that only God’s music can provide.

These then are the elements of the downward journey: a realisation of the Father’s primordial and unchangeable esteem for us as brother or sister of the Lord; a determination to live in this knowledge, giving the same respect to everyone we meet; a seeking of the slower rhythm of God’s time in whatever form of wilderness we can find. Also a willingness to listen for a call that may ask of us a particular service in challenging the world, or serving its casualties. Then we will inevitably find that whatever tortuous route we have followed in life to this point will have a particular meaning for others on a similar path. No life is ever ruined once we again find fellowship with the God who so wisely – like the Father of the prodigal son – gave us our primordial freedom, and will now give meaning and redemption to our utmost waywardness.

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