Pondering the last things

Sudden deaths, Easter, a last chapter

At the end of last week I became older than my father was on the day he died.

Dad suffered a major stroke on Friday, November 9^th 2001. I had been on a potty course – POT = Post Ordination Training – and I had been chosen to preside at the celebration of the eucharist. At the end of the service, just before the dismissal, someone from the host (Hoppers, in Kent) came in and asked for me by name. I finished the service and went off to find out what was happening; cue a dash up the motorway, collecting my pregnant wife from the East End, a further dash up the A12 and then forty eight hours of vigil until he died on November 11^th.

What I remember is the clear blue sky, literal and metaphorical. I had been feeling on top of the world. All was good... and then the bolt from the blue.

Looking back, I’ve often thought that my turn towards a more conservative outlook came about as a result of 9/11, and in particular as a result of some conversations I had been having in an on-line discussion forum at that time. Those were undoubtedly factors in my slow transition away from my Guardian-reading, mainstream consensus (pro-EU!) views. Yet I’m starting to see a certain ‘clenching’ in the way I have viewed the world ever since that time, bound up with how I have seen the world.

I am starting to think seriously about releasing a second edition of Let us be Human. I’ve toyed with the idea many times – to include, for example, the chapter on Islam, and a chapter about why I chose not to reference climate change, both of which might be heard more receptively now. Yet it is the final chapter where the deep soul work of my last twenty-five years might bear a little fruit. For the last chapter is the one I was always least pleased with. It seemed so underwhelming. Here are these major historical currents building up into world-changing climaxes, and what are we to do? Save a little energy here and there...

What I am coming to realise is that my task was not – is not – to warn about the coming catastrophe, that catastrophe that is now here, the end of this world. There never was anything that I could have done – that the green movement as a whole could have done – beyond setting out the arguments. Too many decisions taken too long ago had set our civilisation on a course towards destruction. The plane was always going to crash.

No, the work which I think I’m called to – indeed, the work that I think the church as a whole and priests in particular are called to – is the provision of hope once the disaster has been recognised.

People who are caught up in the exuberance of plentiful energy resources aren’t psychologically disposed for doom-mongering. They are too busy dancing around the golden calf. Yet when the calf is destroyed and they are forced to drink the ground down dust they are in a state of profound shock. Their gods have been toppled – and yet they are still loved by God.

Many gods are toppling now and we too will be forced to drink the ground down dust of our idolatries. People will be filled with despair, and their despair will be born from the shattering of meaning in their lives. Lives built around a set of values that the whole culture shared, a series of assumptions held in common by all the great and the good – all exposed as worthless. There will be so much psychic pain (and physical pains, of course).

This is the situation where the church, and the leaders of the church, need to offer the gospel, the good news, the genuine grounds for hope, hope understood not as a feeling – isn’t the sky so blue? - but as a decision. This has happened for clear and understandable reasons, and if we return to the living God, take on board the commandments carved in stone, we will be able to walk through the desert and find the promised land.

This great simplification that we are now living through is, like Easter, a re-receiving of life. At Easter it is not just that Jesus is raised from the dead, it is that we are broken out of our own tombs. What we thought was life is not life. What we thought was the right way is not the right way. When we shout Hosanna and when we shout Crucify we are dancing round the golden calf each time – and yet, when catastrophe comes, and we wake up with our hangovers and furry tongues and headaches, the living God comes to stand in our midst and says ‘peace be with you’.

Perhaps the best way to describe the shift is this: in the first edition of LUBH there was a mostly hidden premise, that the collapse of the Modern way of life was a bad thing, that needed to be prevented, and I was caught up in a drama of saying ‘Stop! Stop!’ I was still clinging, but ‘Noli me tangere!’ Now that the foretold events are coming to pass – and there is much more of the great simplification yet to run, in both predictable and surprising ways – now that it is actually happening, the point is not to warn, the point is to say ‘come this way’.

I think of a moment in one of Peter Weir’s more under-rated films, Fearless, when the Jeff Bridges character stands at the doorway of the crashed airplane and calls people to come to the open door, and the people that are drawn to his voice find their way to safety.

That is what the church needs to do – speak the word of life which was from the beginning and which we proclaim to you. That is what I need to do: in times of stress and strain and grief and pain to stand by the door and remind people of this: ‘come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light’.