flicking sparrows

everything gone wrong

Sometimes everything goes wrong. The foundations on which our lives are built are suddenly shaken, the solid, unshakeable and immovable things of life that help us navigate our way through are gone. Suddenly we realise we are not walking on solid ground, but on a thin tectonic plate floating slowly around a ball of liquid. Spinning at hundreds of miles an hour. And we cling to its surface using the power of a theory called gravity that no-one understands, without which we would aimlessly drift into space, wherever that is…

When things go wrong, we can end up comparing ourselves with others. Is my ‘everything gone wrong’ worse than yours? Whether it is the loss of a friend, a parent or a family member through illness, accident or argument; whether it is losing everything you have in an earthquake such; whether it is struggling every day with the black dog of depression and despair and despondency and self-loathing; whether its having no thumbs due to a bizarre mix-up with cough medicine and a lathe (yes, I’ve seen Glee…)… any of things could count as ‘everything going wrong’.

memorial to steven moore

Some ‘everything gone wrongs’ are worse than others, undoubtedly, at face-value. The situation in Haiti or other places worldwide is truly horrendous. In practical, tick-list terms, it is worse than, say, than me losing my mother to cancer at the age of 11, or innocent bystander 24 year-old Steven Moore being killed by a car that was being chased by a police van just down the road from where I live in Carshalton. I came across the spontaneous memorial to him the other day. It made me very sad. We know that one person who dies is not the same as 200,000 dying in one go. We know that one person with severe depression is cannot be compared with millions with no homes or water or medicine and all suffering terrible family loss. But… but…

Each of us carry our own person tragedies. Each of us carry our own personal trials. And for us, in our worlds, they are great. They are the foundations being shaken; they are certainty being curtly butted out the way by uncertainty like when I was once rugby tackled by someone twice my size; they are what matters to us, now. And they hurt. Situations like Haiti can help us put things in perspective, and that is good. But they don’t stop us feeling our own pain.

Part of me feels the need to somehow defend God. To answer the questions about a loving God and an earthquake or a premature death.  There are plenty of inane things I could say. Plenty of text-book answers. Plenty of philosophers of religion I could quote. Suffice to say, suffering is a real challenge to personal faith in a personal God for so many, me included.

It is also a reason many people believe in that same God.

What comes to me are Jesus words about flicking sparrows. Or at least, Rick McKinley’s words about Jesus words. Jesus said that just because he knows that a sparrow falls to the ground, that doesn’t mean he flicked it from the tree. But it is up to us to help the sparrow back up again.

watching for the celestial index finger

bras rubbing in a cathedral of cynicism

How would you respond to the idea of a cathedral running sessions for rubbing bras? It would, even to the most open-minded, seem a little odd. Where do the bras come from for a start? Do you bring your own? Then the simple misunderstanding is realised, the ‘s’ is restored, and wholly more innocent past-time of brass rubbing is revealed.

Simple emphasis can make a huge difference. Wherever you are, say “bras rubbing” and then “brass rubbing”, and you will see what I mean. Obviously the context makes a difference to the understanding.

When the story broke about the government introducing more checks for parents who drive children to sports clubs, the press reaction was interesting.  The checks are being considered in light of the Soham murders, in which someone with previous convictions was able to slip through the net and continue to work with children. Seen from the perspective of protecting children, these checks are a good thing. And the news-breakers, so critical of social services, government, and anyone who can be blamed when something goes wrong, surely would support it. A positive emphasis expected, though obviously not uncritically.

But intriguingly, the checks were immediately branded as ‘paedophile checks‘, surely too much of a tabloid phrase even for the BBC. And all the problems were pointed out, with all the cynicism we come to expect from our news media. A negative emphasis. This makes any who think uncritically and accept what they are told that these checks will be an invasion of privacy, a hassle, unnecessary. Complain, complain, complain.

For me, this isn’t really about whether these particular checks are right or wrong. It is about emphasis. When we are told things, are we told within a cathedral of cynicism – of politicians, of establishments; are we fed comment and opinion in the guise of news; are we aware of the need to filter all that we hear.

If so, what filter should we use? For followers of Jesus, the same old filter of love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, self-control. It applies to all things. To stories from the BBC, the Daily Mail, the bloke down the pub. It does not mean we cannot be vocal in our support or opposition. It does not mean we should not stand our ground. It does give us a responsibility to listen well, to hear the emphasis, to discern whether it is a worrying case of bras rubbing or a simple case of brass rubbing. I hope that is worth our (under-wired) support.

blaming the goat

blame the goat

I am always at it. Blame the goat! You know, that thing we do when we make judgements about people, and always say ‘them’ – that imaginary ‘they’, the third person I remember learning in French that always seemed to be entirely irregular. What third person? Well, there’s you, there’s me and there’s ‘them’, ‘the other’. The goat. And they are always to blame.

When society appears to be falling apart (has it ever not seemed like that?! ask an older person about the war…), we are so quick to blame ‘them’. Whether it is politicians, single-parents, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, Chelsea fans… the dodgy family a few doors down, the farmers, foreigners…Sometimes we can all get a bit Daily Mail and point the finger of blame. Goats, the lot of ‘em.

We like having someone to blame. It makes us feel secure. The problem is labelled and dealt with. Maybe not solved, but there is a door to lay blame at. And it’s not mine. So we can make scapegoats of social workers if there is an abuse going on that wasn’t acted on as we would like, even if life and family intervention is a whole lot more complicated than that allows for; we can blame ‘Muslim terrorists’ for wanting to destroy our way of life, especially if that means we don’t have to hold a mirror to ourselves and ask why.  We can pin the whole blame for Lockerbie on one man, who is now dying of cancer, as if he alone was responsible; we can blame ‘the bankers’ whilst forgetting perhaps it was us who enjoyed the easy credit as much as they allowed it.

The thing is though, with the Jewish-Christian lens we look through, it is much harder for us to point at others and say ‘them’. Instead, we point at ourselves and say ‘we’. Someone once (annoyingly, to be honest) said that when you point one finger at someone, three fingers point back at you. Probably annoying cos I was the one pointing. Anyway… If I am a part of society, and society is producing terrorists, then I am partly to blame. If I am a part of society, and society is producing overweight, under-active teenagers having too much sex (is than an oxymoron?), then I am partly to blame. If I am a part of society and society is producing paedophiles and perpetrators of abuse, then I am partly to blame.

Ouch.

But… but… it’s not me, I didn’t do it, I am a good person, how can it be me? How, indeed. Well, we each may not feel we contribute to things we disapprove of, but we are a part of it, simply by being there. To say otherwise would be to be a grain of sand on the beach and deny you were part of the beach, or a raindrop splashing in a puddle and claiming to be from a different storm. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, whether a literal account of real people or a allegory laden with meaning, points us to this. As humans, we are together, one – we all looked longingly at the tree, we all offered the fruit, we all ate. So there is no them, only us.

Does that make us feel hopeless, or hopeful? Hopeful (I hope) because God does not cruise earth searching for individuals to rescue like some kind of cosmic kerb-crawler, but he drives a huge ocean liner (mixed metaphor!) so full of space and grace and says to us all, as you all share the guilt so you can also all share the grace, you can all be redeemed, you can all come aboard. This is wonderful stuff! Though to many will seem unnecessary, because still theyf blaming other people and feeling better about ourselves. we (oops) will cling to the life-raft o

But we no longer need the scapegoat, which comes from Leviticus 16, when an actual goat took on the sins of the community and was sent to its death. And we no longer need to shoulder them ourselves either. Because God as Jesus came to take that burden from us, to painfully and wholly free us from the guilt our human nature ties us to. But, interestingly and so importantly, not then to remove us from the society of which we are a guilty-but-free part, but sends us back there to disrupt and irritate the guilt, to be light in the dark, flowers in the desert, love in the blame, a peaceful voice amidst the finger-pointing in anger.To be part of the story of the redeeming of creation that his resurrection began.

So the challenge to them us is to live as us, not us and them, however painful and illogical it seems. We are them. They are us. Live deeply and be free. Most of all, free the goat.

(p.s. be part of freeing the goat without needing to keep checking my blog, by clicking on the new ‘subscribe via email’ link on the right- it will let you know when there’s a new post to read so you don’t have to keep checking)