The Demon of Dehumanization

What follows is an extract from a sermon preached in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge on Sunday 15th October 2023. You can listen to the full sermon here https://soundcloud.com/kingscollegechoir/there-is-such-religion-as-dehumanisation?si=d767841a8ce64455b9ed24113ba3f16d&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

The question of what divides us, how we relate to those we face, is one of the most fundamental in human psychology, politics and history. And nowhere has the drama, passion and suffering that goes on around and across boundaries been more painfully or consequentially played out than in the Middle East. When on October 7th hundreds of men, full of hatred and violent intent, flooded out of Gaza to kill, maim, humiliate and capture Israelis, it was one of the most appalling crossings of a line that anyone can recall, both literally and metaphorically. That action immediately galvanized a reaction, and for the last week we have been living through the horrors which could not be imagined were it not for the location and nature of political and human dividing lines.

What has happened recently is terrible. What is happening now is terrible. And there is yet more to come which will be terrible. The questions for us are how to understand, how to respond, how to think of it, how to speak of it and what to do. It is extremely difficult, and I don’t feel that there is a great deal that I can say that could be useful except the following.

First, that clearly drawn lines that make binary oppositions are the problem not the solution. Anyone who wants to think or speak or act helpfully needs to get beyond ‘barrier thinking’. Second, it is only if we do this that we can calm the dynamics of retribution which invariably lead to uncontrollable spirals of violence. Third, it is only if we free ourselves from binary loyalties that we can recognise that all abuses of power and violations of human rights should be condemned.

There are lines that it is right to defend. But what are those lines? They are not, I’d say, the lines drawn between people, but the lines drawn around people for their sake. Every human being deserves and needs the protection and respect of all other human beings. No one should be subject to sudden attack or to sustained oppression. If religion, if God, if monotheism, is to be a force for good, it must take the form of encouraging and facilitating the mutual respect and regard of one person for another, whatever differences are apparent, integral, inherited, acquired, or assumed.

Ours is the era when talk of human rights has been most prominent, but also the era in which they have been most flagrantly relentlessly and publicly violated. The harm in the harm of what we are witnessing is the callous disregard of the dignity, needs and prospects of vulnerable human beings. The principal demon among the many demons creating havoc is the demon of dehumanisation, of disrespect, of disregard.

That is the demon that needs to be named and exorcised at this time in history. It is only when he has dominion that atrocities and war crimes are committed. Whatever we do we must not allow ourselves to worship the demon of dehumanization, the demon who says we can harm others in any way we like because they don’t really matter, they don’t count, they are not as worthwhile or important as we are. For when we worship and follow him we find ourselves being led as far as possible from the love of God and neighbour. The demon of dehumanization leads us into the bowels of hell.

More to say

Hello! I know it’s been a long time since I last posted but, well, I was keeping my head down while I was writing another book. That’s completed now and will come out next Easter so I am planning to have a bit more to say. Stay tuned.

In case you were wondering, the new book is called Unforgivable? Exploring the Limits of Forgiveness.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/unforgivable-9781399401326/

Address to Graduating Students

I gave this address to graduating students and their parents and other guests in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, on Tuesday 28th June 2022

The majority of those of you who are graduating tomorrow will have started here in October 2019. Maybe you recall the day of your matriculation, reading There’s No Planet B and the animated discussion it provoked. Since then you will have had many more animated discussions. As first these would have reflected the sorts of discussion you had at school. As the months went by, so you changed, the agenda changed and the discussions changed. That is always true. But in your case, of course, COVID-19 came knocking on the door, didn’t wait for a reply but just walked right in and proceeded to play havoc with all our expectations. Among other things, it changed the range of the questions we were asking of ourselves and each other.

The last three years have been completely different to any other three years. They have put us all to the test in new and super-challenging ways. When you look back, it is truly remarkable to think how well we all coped.

This Chapel came to the same grinding halt as everything else. That was a matter of obeying the law of the land, but life became truly testing when we had to balance the desire to carry on as normal with an assessment of the risks of every single activity. The challenge here was first analytical and scientific, but then it was social and communal. Not everyone saw things in the same way, and yet we all had to act in concert. Necessity being the mother invention, we all found new ways of achieving the same ends. That was especially the case in here with regard to our Christmas Broadcasts on the Radio and on the Television in 2020. In both cases new plans were carefully drawn up and then repeatedly rewritten as things changed.

Quite how anyone had enough headspace to progress the normal academic activities of teaching, learning and research through all this now seems hard to imagine. Of course, some work simply had to stop, but there was remarkable productivity nonetheless. Students wrote essays and solved problems, and Fellows conducted research and wrote papers and books.

The productivity of this place is remarkable in terms of both quality and quantity. That is reflected at every level across the University. It’s measured, reported, and celebrated. But it’s not the only thing.

Of far more interest to me, and of equal importance, are the inner journeys that take place here. Those developments of mind and spirit, and the overall growth in maturity and virtue, that inform and make up our character – who we really are.

This great chapel, Cambridge’s most remarkable and iconic building, stands to the glory of God but also, and intentionally, it creates space for the spirit; space for the soul. You never really feel that by looking at it from the outside. But whenever you pass though the south door, you walk into a space that is almost ridiculously large and capacious as well as beautiful and inviting.

Some of you will have sometimes come along late on a Thursday evening for HeartSpace – a time just to be and rest and enjoy. We tried doing HeartSpace on Zoom during lockdown. It was fun to put together a playlist and choose photos – but it really wasn’t the same. The space and atmosphere of the Chapel simply isn’t communicable – at least visually. I sometimes think that our radio broadcasts give more sense of the place as the special acoustic is so evident. That magic sound hints at the scale and warmth of King’s, and the encouragement of generosity and liberality that were the hallmarks of King Henry VI’s vision when he planned his College for 70 poor scholars. 

Cambridge is a place of achievement and you graduands deserve all the praise you are receiving. But it is more profoundly a place of inner learning. Only you can really say how the ‘inner you’ has been challenged and stretched, encouraged and developed these last three or four years. You probably haven’t had much chance to think about that yet, but maybe there will be a few moments in the days to come when you can sit and ponder, or maybe walk and ponder, not only how your mind has developed but how your heart has grown in this space.

A space and place where, yes, we are both traditional and on-trend, where we are often scruffy and sometimes superformal, but where we do what we can to keep things open and vibrant and fresh and humane. That is why we have readings at our Chapel services not only from the Bible but also from the likes of Civil Rights mystic and activist, Howard Thurman, from whose Meditations of the Heart you heard a few paragraphs earlier in the service. I’ll be honest and tell you that I hadn’t heard of Thurman until a few years ago, but having come across one small quote from his writings, I have looked out much, much more. It’s inspired and inspiring.  In 2020, I even managed to slip a prayer of his into our televised Christmas Carol Service.

This is how it goes:

The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the hear.

Maybe there’s a prayer called The Work of Graduation that needs to be written. Maybe it would go like this:

When the noise of the May Balls is stilled,

When the rides from the Front Court are gone,

When the students and parents are home,

When the Fellows are sadly alone,

The work of the graduate begins:

To find solutions,

To speak with clarity,

To be wise in judgement,

To be bold and creative,

To stand up and lead,

To continue to learn,

To be the one who makes peace,

To let gratitude fill the heart.

Hello Again

Long time, no blog. But I’ll be offering a few over the summer. So do stay tuned.

I am going to be thinking a lot about forgiveness so there may be a blog or two on that subject. A huge amount has been written about it since I published Healing Agony: Reimagining Forgiveness back in 2012. And just this week the BBC has a series of forgiveness stories every day on BBC Radio 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018npb

Meanwhile I will publish the address I gave yesterday at a service in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge for our graduating students.

Easter 2021 – The Importance of Sadness and the Abiding of Love

I have long been troubled by the insistence that Easter should be celebrated with unalloyed joy.  Three days may be all it takes for God to raise the dead, but we all know from experience or observation that it can take a very long time to ‘get over’ traumatizing experiences.  

I suppose it would make sense if the resurrection were merely the reversal of a bereavement. We thought our friend had died, but no, he’s back among us. Hurray! Let’s party!  But for those who have travelled the long and hard path of the so-called holy week that careered from ‘hosanna’ to ‘crucify’, and ended with the various cries from the cross – never mind the shrieks and wails of the sympathetic onlookers, and the taunts and jeers of the rest … For those of us who have let at least some of the suffering in as we have meditated on the sights, sounds and smells of the betrayal, abandonment, torture and murder of a friend … For those of us who have taken at least a few imaginative steps down the Via Dolorosa … it’s not so easy, and in fact it’s probably neither very mature, nor very healthy, simply to flip from desperation to joy. 

It’s always a mistake to connect our feelings and our faith too closely. Feelings come and go – but faith – like hope and love – is the sort of thing than can, should, must and will abide, remain, endure.  And it’s this solid, reliable stuff that the traumatized and disillusioned, the broken and the disappointed, need.  Don’t just take my word for it, Shelly Rambo puts this point at the heart of her deep and powerful study, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining.

In the Authorized Version of the Bible, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus ask Jesus to ‘Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.’  These words from Luke’s gospel inspired the great hymn as ‘Abide with me, fast falls the eventide’ as Victorian clergyman Henry Francis Lyte witnessed the death of his vicar and then moved knowingly and prematurely towards the end of his own life.

I don’t suppose that hymn will be much sung over Easter, and yet I feel it might accurately reflect not only the truth of where many find themselves to be on their spiritual journey at the moment, but also the depths of what they long for.

Abide with me is often sung by sad people at funerals or memorials.  But is it not also true that we are, if we are honest, increasingly aware that sadness is not a feeling that comes and goes, but a profound and dignified constant in the human condition?

A chance remark in a zoom discussion a few days ago reminded me of Gillian Rose’s memoir, Love’s Work, which then became my Good Friday reading.  I was arrested by this thought:  ‘Earthly, human sadness is the divine comedy – the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the ever-surprising outcome of our actions’.  She goes on to say more about this comedy, quoting Hegel who writes that it characterises someone ‘raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable about it at all’.

This in turn leads to ‘sureness of self’ but, for Rose, it is a very particular kind of sureness. It is the sureness of self that is ‘ready to be unsure’. And it’s the unsureness, not the sureness, that, she argues, makes for the holy comedy of our condition and which requires of us the work of love, which is also the abiding of love.

The point of the resurrection is not that joy quickly trumps sadness, but that love abides; love that is the partner, not of supercharged and switched-on happiness, but of faith and hope.

The truth is that sadness persists. And it’s right that it does.  When we think of all we regret not only in terms of our own actions in the past but also in the injustices that are perpetrated every hour, and in the untold suffering of millions in places of deprivation, violence, sickness or any other misery every day and every night, we can never be content with a kind of joy from which sadness is excluded.  And yet the persistence of sadness is not the end of faith, any more than the unsureness of self is the contradiction of appropriate, humble and compassionate self-confidence. The persistence of sadness is the beginning of faith and hope. It is not denied, but it is answered by the abiding of love.  And therefore we rejoice.

Thy Will Be Done – a question for every chapter

My 2021 Lent Book, Thy Will Be Done, doesn’t include ‘questions for personal or group study’. However, since publishing it I have written a question for every chapter. I offer them here, hoping they might be helpful to anyone using the book in Lent.

Part 1 HEAVEN

1. Do you agree that the Lord’s Prayer falls naturally into two halves –heavenly and earthly?
2. To what extent is ‘motherly father’ a helpful phrase for you?
3. Who are the ‘our’ in ‘Our Father’?
4. How big a problem is patriarchy for those who pray this prayer in these words?
5. Which do you find it harder to believe – that God is powerful or that God is intimately close?
6. What does it mean to say that ‘the Lord’s Prayer is not a spell’?

Part 2 EARTH

1. Bree Newsom took the Lord’s Prayer to the top of a flagpole in dangerous protest – where might you take it?
2. How might Christianity be different if Jesus had defined the ‘kingdom of God’?
3. Can you think of any good things that have happened while you were waiting for something or someone?
4. What are the best and worst aspects of monarchy?
5. What does it mean to see care-givers high-achievers?
6. What do you make of the phrase ‘my own special God in my heart’?

Part 3 BREAD

1. Is bread ever simply bread?
2. What does it mean to say that food is a spiritual issue?
3. Might it be helpful if the word ‘ordinary’ replaced’ daily’ in the Lord’s Prayer?
4. Is there a distinctive or clear Christian sense of what we mean by ‘now’?
5. How does praying for daily bread impact on our relationship with the hungry?
6. Do you feel that the author might be being a bit hard on the foodie generation?

Part 4 FORGIVENESS

1. Is it true that Christianity doesn’t encourage us to sweat the small stuff of morality or scrupulosity?
2. How unusual is ‘weird Christian thinking’?
3. Would the Lord’s Prayer be better if the word ‘trespasses’ were replaced by ‘debts’?
4. Do you agree that the word ‘sin’ today lacks the full range of meaning and means either trivial or super-serious offence?
5. Does forgiving involve ‘forgetting the remembrance of injustice’?
6. How helpful is it to think of both the grace of forgiving and the grace of not forgiving?

Part 5 TEMPTATION

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of ‘distancing’ as a way of avoiding temptation?
2. How do you hope that God might respond when you pray ‘and lead us not into temptation’?
3. How do you understand the difference between a test and a trial?
4. Is it more helpful to pray ‘deliver us from evil’ or ‘deliver us from the evil one’?
5. Do you agree that there’s nowhere to hide from the tempter?
6. Has the pandemic had an impact on the way you understand what it is to be spiritually tested?

Part 6 GLORY

1. How much does it matter to you that the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer is not Biblical?
2. How does the word ‘fulfilment’ feature in your spirituality?
3. How does the example of power as empowerment given here connect with your belief about the power of God?
4. When, how and why is it right to say that glory is more than beauty?
5. How do you respond to the ‘version’ of the Lord’s Prayer presented in this chapter?
6. Is there a more profound or important prayer than ‘thy will be done’?

The Lord’s Prayer for Lockdown, Lent and Life

Readers of this blog will have noticed that there hasn’t been much to read for a while. One reason for this is that I’ve been writing books and not blogs. In fact last year I published two. The first was Psalm Prayers – the second Thy Will Be Done which Bloomsbury are calling The Lent Book 2021.

As I was writing the Lent Book I was trying to imagine what we would be feeling about the coronavirus after the pandemic was over – anticipating that, by the time it was being read, lockdowns, masks and social distancing would have been mere memories. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I think I was right, however, to choose the Lord’s Prayer as the theme for a Lent Book. As I read through expositions of the prayer from different historical eras, and made new connections of my own, I had a strong feeling that going for full immersion in the Lord’s Prayer would be spiritually enriching and renewing.

The idea was a good one for any time, but I now feel that it was an especially good one for this time of pandemic. In a time of uncertainty the familiar can be especially important for us. It’s comforting for sure, but that’s not the whole story. If you stay with the familiar for a while you realise that its more than comforting – and that it begins to open up new realities and truths and insights.

I’ve come to feel that there’s a real connection between engaging with something as deeply well-known as the Lord’s Prayer and the practice that many of us are engaging with in this lockdown, as in previous ones, of getting know our neighbourhood – not to mention the inside of our home – much more deeply. Day after day we are walking the same paths, sitting in the same rooms, having meals with the same people. This can be wearisome indeed for those of us … most of us … all of us … who have based our lives on busyness and novelty-seeking. But if forced to slow down, to calm down and to pay attention the local and, dare I say it, the ‘parochial’, we begin, after a while, to realise that the whole of life really is there – or rather here – in our locality, our home, and among our familiar companions.

If William Blake could see eternity in a grain of sand then the rest of us might just be able to see an awful lot more in our neighbourhood than we had previously noticed; and its the same thought that might lead us to hope to find not only daily bread but a feast of spiritual nutrition in the prayer that Jesus taught us.

No apologies from me, then, for writing a book about the most familiar prayer there ever has been.

Thy Will Be Done is available as a paperback in all the usual places and also as an ebook and as an audiobook.

By the way – next week Launde Abbey is hosting an online study day on the book next Monday, so do consider joining us. It would be great to see you. Check in here https://www.laundeabbey.org.uk/event/deepening-discipleship-day-twbd/

A Festival of Nine Lesson and Carols 2020

Details of this year’s service from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, together with links to help you find where it is being broadcast in the UK or overseas can be found here. https://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/chapel/a-festival-of-nine-lesson-and-carols-2020