Having just posted my last reflection, the pinned tweet at the top of the twitter feed of Michael Sadgrove (a retired Dean of Durham) popped up:
Not to give in to despair, denial or fantasy, but to accept that the present is what it is, to do all we can to work within it for good, & to nurture the imagination to glimpse the possibilities that point to a future of better things for our world, our peoples & ourselves.
This seemed to me to be clearer than I had been about the way suffering and glory are in inextricable intermingled.
The shorter first part of his sentence is about facing difficult flawed painful inevitable reality as it is – not seeking to escape by giving up (despair), ignoring it (denial) or wishful thinking (fantasy).
The second longer part of his sentence is about looking for hints of the potential of glory in there as well (although he doesn’t name faith or God explicitly) – working with and nurturing imagination, glimpses, possibilities.
It turns out that it is Christian hope he talking about, as a twinned tweet makes clear:
Trying (struggling) to find a way of expressing hope that’s realistic rather than fanciful in dark & dangerous times.
Something further clarified by his comment on this:
To own up: I find a lot of the talk about “hope” is unexamined & lazy, no more than a vacuous kind of wishful thinking or cup-half-full-optimism. Far from being grounded in present reality, it is rather a flight from it. Spiritual leaders have a special responsibility here.
The language I’ve most often valued is that of Gospel possibilities (‘In this mess, following this mistake, faced by this cruelty, knowing this sabotage to our hopes, what could be the next Gospel inspired step?’) and Kingdom seeking (‘What signs or hints of God’s preferred and promised ways, of God’s glory, might we now see or suspect and celebrate and act towards?).
Suffering is real. The vision of God is real. Neither simply trumps the other. God-in-Christ’s journey through the cross entwines them.
The pictures are taken as near as I can get to it of a tree which in the recent winds fell from within the Rectory grounds here into a neighbouring field.
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Ezekiel begins with a vision of God surrounded by fire and brightness, cloud and winged creatures (with the detail that their faces were those of eagle, lion, ox, and human face). It isn’t actually a passage set in our three year cycle of Sunday readings.
The vision isn’t created somewhere like the Temple in Jerusalem. Exactly the opposite: the Babylonians have destroyed much of the city, levelled the Temple, and engage in pagan worship on the site; Ezekiel is with those exiled (literally by a river in Babylon remembering Zion).
Six centuries later, early in the Revelation of John, there is a vision of God surrounded by fire and rainbow, thunder and winged creatures (with the same four faces, John clearly knowing how he stood in the tradition of Ezekiel). We read it two Sundays ago.
Again, the vision isn’t created at the holy centre. The Babylonia empire is long gone; it is the Roman empire now which has been complicit in the execution of Jesus and which has, within John’s recent memory, again destroyed the Temple which has been rebuilt after the Babylonian exile. John’s exile is on an island, much as Napoleon would be exiled to Elba and Mandela imprisoned on Robben Island.
So major empires come and go, and they take the opportunity to overrun their neighbours viciously and destructively when they have a mind to do so. And sometimes (it isn’t guaranteed, and it isn’t a neat pious pay off) it is the vision of God which the prophet finds pulls into focus as he or she sits in the middle of the consequences of the disaster.
And then last Sunday, the Church of England has taken to invite us to relate to the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent. At one level this seems a puzzling, or at least non-obvious, choice. But, once again I notice the glory isn’t the real focus of the story. We are (Luke’s version this year) reminded that it is a week on from Jesus’ saying he must suffer and his followers must take up their cross every day, and the dialogue Jesus has with Moses and Elijah is about his coming ‘exodus’ or death.
Perhaps the glory and the painful realities are always inextricably linked. ‘It all seemed so nice, but my faith was destroyed when evil came to wreck things’ is as useful as ‘it is all horrid, but there will be pie in the sky when we die’. Our Lent and our world news seriously inviting us to stay close to the apparent impossibility of reconciling the two.
Meanwhile, the picture comes not from one or two but three weeks ago. Jeremiah, another prophet of the impending and breaking Babylonian invasion, in common with the Psalmist, has curses for those who trust mere mortals and our own strength, destined to be like a shrivelled shrubs in the desert, and blessing for those who trust in the vision of God, destined to be fruitful from roots stretched out beneath the rare streams which flow there. At St James’, our Family Service found water flowing though the desert and placed prayers for green possibilities on its banks.
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40% of registered electors voted for her predecessor, and now 21% have voted for her. It is difficult to know why the other 19% stayed at home this time. One factor will be that they knew they did not have to turn out to make a difference. Another might be a quiet abstention reflecting distaste at some aspects of the present Government. It would be hard to discern which, if either, factor dominated in their minds.
It mirrors approximately 15% of registered voters staying at home in the recent North Shropshire by-election having previously voted Conservative. The fact that less than 5% of registered voters voted Liberal then having previously voted Conservative might actually be an encouragement to the Conservative Party – gaining only 5% of voters when all the factors are in your favour (no risk of the Government falling and scandal surrounded the MP who had resigned) seems pretty paltry, while quiet abstainers are more likely to resume support when the next Government-choosing election comes along.
Meanwhile, I’m not convinced that a change in Prime Minister now or soon would be a significant factor when that next General Election does come along. The Conservative Party only needs the active support of about a quarter of registered electors to form a Government (perhaps the 15% or so of the electorate who are committed Conservative voters and 10% who might otherwise have not voted at all or who might otherwise have voted for another party?) and it was a full 29% at the last Boris and Brexit defined General Election. So next time two-thirds of the electorate feeling so radically opposed to him that they vote for others or disengage from voting at all wouldn’t actually matter.
I suspect that the November 2021 tightening of editorial responsibility in the Mail group of papers was a much more significant factor. On one recent Friday, every other major newspaper led with Boris being on the rocks, except the Daily Mail which led with Keir Starmer being a hypocrite. Boris trying out the lines ‘We get the big calls right’, ‘There is a difference between a Lawyer and a Leader’, and ‘Starmer failed as Director of Public Prosecutions’ looked bumbling but helps refine which lines of attack will resonate with the 10% of electors who might not otherwise vote Conservative next time.
If the brand ‘of course Boris is a bit of a chancer but he isn’t constrained by ridiculous political correctness and got Brexit done’ remains attractive to the potential 10%, the Party will stick with him. If the brand ‘we’ve left lock-down breaking behind and have buckled down to a more clearly honest and diligent delivery programme’ becomes more attractive, they will dump him. I can’t think whichever it is will make much electoral difference
And I’m not sure that anyone who is close to or anywhere left of Boris’ slightly moderate Conservative position would be as grateful if he goes as they might think they would be. I can’t think any of the potential successors and emboldened libertarian bank benchers would be delivering political choices they favour (as they welcome another lawyer into their Parliamentary Party).
This week, friends in London took me to see the replica of the pump from which Dr John Snow had the handle removed during the 1854 cholera epidemic because his pre-statistical pre-epidemiological observation was that drinking from it had to be the problem, a story I'd heard many times. The other two pictures are the results of Christmas efforts by traders on Haworth's Main Street.
