At the front of my breviary I keep a small piece of paper with some words written by an old Carthusian monk. “The first thing then is not to be afraid either of ourselves or of others. We must face life. It is this deep and prolonged contemplation of reality which brings us to God, for he is behind everything”. I read those words again as I watched television coverage of the destruction in Christchurch during this past week. I was in that city five years ago visiting family and friends and it was especially sad to see the Catholic Cathedral in ruins – it being one of the finest ecclesial buildings in the southern hemisphere. “Zion was saying: ‘The Lord has abandoned me, the Lord has forgotten me'. Does the woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you”.
Secular humanists seem often to think that their clinching argument against believers is that we blindly try to make sense of the inexplicable, to explain away the contradictions, to want to dot every “i” and cross every “t” – that we live in an imaginary world of our own creation, sustained by the illusion that everything will come right, one day, in heaven. They could not be further from the truth.
Our belief in the Incarnation roots the Christian absolutely in the here and now circumstances of his or her own life. In and through his Christ, God enters time and meets us within our own space. In so doing, he commits each one of us to contemplate what is - and not to dream of what might be. Jesus, rightly, reminds his disciples that it is not possible to serve two masters, something that he himself had to face up to, in the starkest of forms, in the 40 days of temptation in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry and, again, with greater ferocity, in the final Agony of Gethsemane.
What we are being told in the Gospel is that we should not be anxious – that anxiety is the very negation of everything that has been revealed about God’s nature and activity. We do not believe that a magic wand can be waved and all will be well. The reality of human suffering – its depth and its cruelty, in so many manifestations – deserves better than a sticking-plaster caricature of religion, and anything that does not do justice to the passion of Christ, and to the reality of the wounds in his body, is nothing short of blasphemous. At the heart of Christianity will ever be the sign of the cross and that alone should guarantee that there are no shortcuts – no simple solutions – no half measures.
Jesus’ challenge to his disciples – and to anyone who will listen – is to accept that, despite every contrary sign, despite every attempt to rewrite the script and to leave God out, there is just no satisfactory way in which this world can be interpreted other than in terms of its Creator and his loving intention. To pick up on the imagery from Isaiah - and it is interesting to note this is one of a the very few examples in the Old Testament where female imagery is associated with the Godhead - there is something here which can only be understood in terms of nurturing, of cherishing. Jesus reveals his Father in terms of a loving, concerned Parent who will ever only do what is best for his own – who will never give up on them – who is prodigal, and will ever be prodigal, in his gifts. To know the Father of Jesus, to trust the Father of Jesus, is to remove any form of anxiety from the way we live.
But if being anxious is a form of atheism, compassion is a sharing in the heart of God – and, in the face of the pain of our world, it is compassion, rather than anxiety, which the Christian is called to exercise. Our belief, our experience, teaches us that God and his creation are essentially good – but, on a daily basis, we are confronted with the dysfunction of this same creation. Whether it is an earthquake in New Zealand or a Gadafi turning murderously on his own people, our eyes are wide open to the negative forces at work - not least in the human psyche. We are realists – we are not like Voltaire's Dr Pangloss, constantly trying to square the circle, and explain away what does not fit the preconceived notion. We are content to make St Paul’s words to the Corinthians our own: “there must be no passing of premature judgment. Leave that until the Lord comes. He will light up all that is hidden in the dark and reveal the secrets of men’s hearts”.
In the meantime, recognising the image of the suffering Christ written deeply into those around us, we try to minister to him as and where we can. Created in the likeness of God, we must not fail to reflect the compassion which identifies us most closely with the loving Creator. “The first thing then is not to be afraid, either of ourselves or of others. We must face life. It is this deep and prolonged contemplation of reality which brings us to God, for he is behind everything”.
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