Tag Archives: human-rights

The Pope Is Dust Just Like You

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As the evening approached I began to get more and more excited. I haven’t been as expectant and excited about a service since the Midnight Communion a few months ago. Ash Wednesday had arrived!

This day, more so than most other feast day, gets to the core of my theology and spirituality. A preacher and minister has to work very hard to fudge the the central message of this celebration and act of worship.

Remember you are but dust and to dust you shall return. Turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.

Ash Wednesday marks the start of the season of Lent, a period of 40 days (plus Sundays) dedicated to repentance and re-dedication to discipleship. This season is known for the tradition of giving up/fasting from certain luxuries or habits that distract us from the work of discipleship and our journey to holiness. The restraining from luxuries, in the modern day, has become seen as some self-inflicted punishment and has betrayed the true reason for participating in such activities: to re-dedicate your life and attention towards Christ, to clear our mind of striving after short-term pleasures and receive the eternal pleasure of knowing God.

But this post is not about fasting and Lenten disciplines.

I approached Ash Wednesday this year with Pope Benedict’s resignation very much on my mind. I, like many others, have been struck by the timing and the manner in which the pope’s statement was made. Through this short and concise proclamation of intent, the pope communicated one thing: humility.

True humility is about naming the truth of one’s status. It is a fine virtue to public live out just before the celebration of Ash Wednesday because humility has its roots in humus (of the earth). The pope’s public declaration clearly spoke of his weakness, a self-awareness of his defects and mortality and limitedness in fulfilling the role to which God called him. In a world obsessed with promoting the strength and potential of humanity, this public resignation sings of our true nature: we are dust.

The pope’s conviction stands powerfully against the lie of this age which says humanity is the source of transformation in the world. We, as a race, need no one else to be great. If we could harness some metaphysical goodness and our inner strength we can achieve all we want and imagine. There is no god but us; we are the source of our own destiny. In this environment it is no surprise that the pope’s resignation and the humility expressed in his statement confuses and baffles our culture.

And so it is with Ash Wednesday! We stand prophetically against the humanism of our society, which, in many forms (Christian as well as non-Christian), grips our philosophy. We reject the temptation to stand on our own and name ourselves ‘good’ and beautiful, worthy of praise and adoration. We deny the powerful narrative that suggests that, if we work hard and gather together we can muster up ‘love’ (whatever that means!) and build a bright future for ourselves. This is a lie!

As Christians we must start with the humility that the pope lived out in making the public statement: we are limited, we are mortal, we are dust.

But the Christian story doesn’t end there, in the fatalistic nihilism that this truth can lead us to. The Christian message is that we are dust (and not God) but, by the grace of God alone, we are able to become living beings. We are not born as living beings, as things worthy of attention and praise. We are born as dust.

Prior to the pope’s announcement our attention was captured with the debate over equality. At the heart of this conversation was the bill of Human Rights which I spoke about in ‘The Hunch, the Compulsion and the Overwhelming Pain’. It begins with the statement: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…’ On Ash Wednesday and through Lent we, as Christians, proclaim a different truth which sounds seductively similar but distinctive: ‘All human beings are born dust and equally in need of God.’

We are equal in the sense we are equally dust, limited, mortal, nothing but we can receive the grace of God if we turn to Him and receive His gift. We cannot deny the giver and receive the gift, allowing its power to transform and change to manifest itself in our lives.

The pope shouted above this view that we, human beings, are the source of significant and lasting transformation of the world, a different view. The Catholic Church doesn’t need Pope Benedict to be the Body of Christ. The Catholic Church, as it has done through out history, needs God, the sole source of transformation and change.

Ash Wednesday begins a narrative in the Church’s calendar that journey’s through Good Friday into Easter and won’t end until Pentecost. There, in the upper room with the first  disciples we become aware of our dust-ness but then the Spirit of God moves and causes our lifeless bodies to sing of life, not just existence, but eternal life. The Spirit of God, like a breeze, blows through that room and causes those heaps of dust dance, refracting the light that shines from Christ, the risen Lord.

There’s two failures we as Christians can make: inadvertently deny our dependence on God by promoting humanity as essentially ‘good’ and able to change the world, the other is to deny the power of God to use us, limited and mortal as we are, to show Himself as the sole source of eternal transformation. We so often speak too much of God’s love for us and fail to speak against the notion that we are worthy of that love. We can react to this by pushing too much the sin and darkness of humanity and fail to acknowledge that God has chosen to use our frail bodies.

The pope, in humility, made a bold statement against the humanism of popular culture and proclaimed our absolute dependence on God’s free, unmerited grace on us, unworthy as we are. He proclaims God is good and His love endures forever. We remain powerless until God’s power manifests itself through us. We must clear our lives of our own striving to hold power and receive afresh the gift of God’s presence that transforms us into something.

We are nothing made something by God’s everything.

We are dust caught in the wind of God’s Spirit, dancing in His Light.

There Is No Majority.

A picture that vaguely communicates a part of this post.

A picture that vaguely communicates a part of this post.

As a white, British, middle class, heterosexual male many would say I am privilege to have a culture and society constructed for me. In many ways those people are right. I look at those in seats of power and authority in our society and I see humans in the same demographic. This demographic is not the majority, it is a minority but so is every other kind of concoction of identity a society of different people creates. My particular cocktail of identifiers entitles me to an ‘easy life’ but it refuses me a voice in parts of public discussions about discrimination and human rights.

I would love to give my voice to a number of disenfranchised people and ask society to give them a chance for work, respect and ultimately for peace. I do give my voice to such people; those struggling for work due to the lack of education and some bad decisions which are held against them, those people who, by the arbitrariness of biology, have different chromosomes to me, those who’s life and circumstances have shaped them and moulded them to fall in love with a person of the same gender as them and not the equally complex factors that made me fall in love with my wife. I give my voice to them and would ask society to give them a chance for work, respect and ultimately for peace.

It is for this reason I can support the decision made by the Church of England to have women ordained into a seat of Bishops. It is for this reason I will continue to work with my brothers and sisters who don’t see it the same way to build a community where both, different views are at an agreed consensus and not majority rule (which never exists anyway!) I give my voice to ensure that women and men, different for physical reasons as well the plethora of experiences, contexts, etc. that makes one person different from another, are respected as human beings with the pains, anger and frustration that comes from facing different people. I want all people, male and female to find peace and this is where my voice may be lost…

It is for the reason stated above that I want this government to think seriously about how they take money out of the public purse without considering the vacuum they are creating. My voice is given to those people who are being forced to work through their dependency on reserves and welfare, in a culture geared towards consumption whilst they look around and see the culture has not changed and there are many still dependent on others sources of finance. I give my voice, my privileged voice, to those who are confused by the mixed messages they are receiving from this government to have austerity but to keep shopping and enjoying luxury dinners because that is ‘good for the economy’. I want all people rich and poor to be given a chance to work for even pay, politician or labourer, and to give all the respect of being human with the pain of misfortune and circumstantial events and bad decisions to be forgiven and cared for. I want all people to find true peace and this is where my voice may be lost…

It is because I want to give my voice to disenfranchised people that I want to see respect given to people in same sex relationships because they are human beings shaped by the culture they are in and the lives they have led just like me, a heterosexual. I want my sister, my dear friends and the people they love respected. They should not be refused work because of their sexual preference if it has nothing to do with how well they do or would do that work. This restriction should not come into play unless it’s pertinent (I can’t think of a job where it would… there might be one but I can’t think of it.) like an Italian being chosen over an Asian to be a waiter in an Italian restaurant. I happily give my white, British, middle class, heterosexual, male voice to these various identifiable people to ensure they have a chance to work, respect and ultimately peace but in this last instance my voice begins to be lost…

My voice is heard when it is the same as those in another minority. The moment I become different I am treated as an enemy, named a bigot, misogynist, blind, cruel, pathetic. I am silenced. I am made to feel guilty because of these strange external factors that make me like those who have a seat in power in this society. All of a sudden my voice, listened to and worthy of a chance to offer opinion in one moment, taken from me when I begin to say something that is contrary to the current popular voice. That guilt is strong and I am scared to voice my dis-ease with the way in which our society is living together.

I look at our current government I see them responding to that same guilt because they are being told, like me, that we don’t understand and we will never know what it is like. They, the white, British, middle class, heterosexual men are so desperate to be liked, to share the majority voice, that they are rushing to appease division and lead us to peaceful cohabitation. They want to be seen as the voice of the people and so they try and gauge the largest opinion and go with that. They will fail.

The way these moral decisions are being worked out is on a utilitarian model of moral ethics. It reminds me of Charles Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’ where Dickens satirizes the stupidity and violence of such a system. The greatest good? We oppose the system when we are the small voice but when we are the large voice we state it as ‘fair and just’ and should be followed. More people wanted female bishops so why don’t we have it? Less people wanted this Conservative Government and yet we get it? We protest and change our approach depending on where we see ourselves; a majority or a minority.

We are all so complicated that simple solutions don’t exist. Simple changes never work. Shakespeare wrote, ‘Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast.’ I agree and this is why I want time spent speaking in the General Synod until consensus not majority wins. It is why I want a discussion about what our society looks like and where the real changes need to be made until consensus and not majority wins. It is why I want time spent on talking through the Equal Marriage issue until consensus and not majority wins.

It is in the desire for all people, male or female, rich or poor, gay or straight to find peace that I think my voice will be lost because I am a Christian and I see communal living differently to many.

I believe in a God who is ontologically communal; i.e. trinitarian, consisting of one being, three persons, this means that God has difference held in unity as His perfect nature. Stanley Hauerwas outlines John Milbank’s view that,

the Christian faith owes no allegiance to the idea of the univocity of being, which can only uphold difference coercively and violently, but is instead moved by a trinitarian understanding of God, an absolute that is itself difference, inclusive of all difference, and thus able to affirm difference in a peaceful manner. (Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, p.87)

Creation, in my perspective, stems from a God who is pure peace and yet who has difference in His very nature. Creation, in my perspective, is ontologically an expression of that Divine nature and therefore peace is achievable without destruction of difference. When creation acts in accordance with this principle of ‘difference held by its internal harmony’ then it acts in accordance with its true nature.

Milbank suggests that non-trinitarian views of the world are different. Difference ‘enters the existing common cultural space only to compete, displace or expel’;’in the public theatre, differences arise only to fall; each new difference has a limitless ambition to obliterate all others, and therefore to cancel out difference itself.’ (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.376) We are, without an understanding of creation being ‘a positive expression of God’s limitless inclusion of all difference’, reduced to ‘secular peace… a tolerable regulation or management of conflict by one coercive means or another.’ (Performing the Faith, p.88)

I have tried, on a number of occasions, to voice my judgements on a situation be it General Synod’s vote on how we allow Women Bishops or the Equal Marriage debate and have been met with confusion and aggression. I am always wary of violent protest and aggressive fighting for rights. I am wary because it is not peace and peace never comes from violence; violence comes from violence. This opinion is always met with a loud ‘you would say that because you’re white, British, middle class, heterosexual male.’ I am judged and my voice is silenced. I want peace. Peace is a life lived as we are created to be. We are created in the image of a God who is pure difference and peace.

The manner in which we make moral and ethical decisions is what makes such decisions morally right or wrong. There does not exist a right or wrong action separate to the existence of a moral character.

I am for women bishops but I am also for the minority voice who are against because they deserve respect and peace. I am for same sex relationships but I am wary of the Equal Marriage Bill. I am for the poor, the lost and the broken and I am for us all acknowledging that this group, over all the others is not only a consensus but also the only real majority, indeed unanimous, group this world possesses.

I will end with Hauerwas,

Because the Christian multiple is not a multiple set dialectically over against the one but is instead an infinite flow of excessive charitable difference emanating from, and finally returning to, a single divine spring, differences are preserved rather than eradicated. Charity is the resource that makes the blending in God of all differences possible. (Performing the Faith, p.89)