11th July, 2024
Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s video.
Firstly, an erratum from the video I recorded just before the general election at the end of June. I was speaking in the video about how I might vote. After recording it I discovered that members of the House of Lords don’t vote in general elections! Bishops can apparently, but the convention is we don’t. I followed the convention, and I still won’t tell you how I would have voted if I did!
Back to this week. I’m recording this from General Synod in York. In preparation for this meeting we are sent (mercifully electronically) the equivalent of a couple of Dostoyevsky novels of paperwork! Many forests have been cut down to make this meeting possible. If I’m honest, I have the time to skim read a proportion of it, to go into more detail on particular items of interest or for those debates I chair, and really hope for the best on the rest. I do wonder whether such a volume of material, to be digested at relatively short notice by a group of dedicated, but busy people, is a recipe for really good governance. Sadly, the demands of compliance and institutional rectitude make such meetings necessary.
Henri Nouwen, the great spiritual writer, someone who mastered the gift of brevity and succinctness, said this in his book, The Way of the Heart. “Our heightened verbal ability, which enables us to make many distinctions, has sometimes become a poor substitute for a single-minded commitment to the Word who is life”. As I reflect on my own life, key pivotal moments have not been very wordy. I became a Christian with the grudging prayer to God, “Oh, alright then!” My marriage began with the simple response, “I do.” My call to ordination came out of the blue at a Christian conference in a sentence from the speaker about the varieties of Christian vocation. Other life changing divine interventions have often been a few choice words from a friend or a part of a sermon, or even a wordless encounter with someone whose long life of following Jesus makes them a light in moments of darkness.
The Desert Fathers had a great commitment to silence. I think it was St. Anthony who was silent for 26 years, focussing his thoughts on God as a hermit. When he emerged from that period, his brief pearls of wisdom became highly valued. He learned through that supernatural discipline to speak words of life devoid of ego. I think all of us learn to distil our speech as we get older, in part in response to failing memory!
James counsels a restraint in everyday life in Chapter 1, vs. 19. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry”. This is in marked contrast to the shenanigans played out in the echo chambers of social media: slow to listen (especially to those we disagree with), quick to speak (especially as a knee jerk emotional response, without acknowledging complexity and nuance) and very quick indeed to resort to faux outrage at more or less anything.
Our words to one another reveal the secrets of our heart more than we realise. I read somewhere that we tend to tell our stories as hero, cynic or comic. Each performs a purpose to nurture our fragile ego and places ourself at the centre of things. As hero, we draw others to admire us. As cynic we invite others to join us in a supercilious looking down on others from a point of superiority. This is the basis of the attraction of conspiracy theories. Rational debate and common sense go out the window. Truth is immaterial. It’s more about joining a community of the like-minded who can then feel superior to other poor benighted souls who don’t know the same things they think they ‘know’. As comic we keep things on the surface, afraid perhaps to engage with the pain of others. All of our stories are necessarily selective, but have in common a need to draw others to fill a gap in our souls that only God can fill. None have much to do with Jesus’ command to love. If we are to raise the spiritual temperature of our common life we need to find ways of turning outwards: developing a sort of transcendent curiosity to what God is doing in the lives of others. More Holy Ghost stories, less chat about the weather! James advice to listen is an encouragement to all of us to be quicker to seek the good of others than our own.
And now back to the many words. I pray they may cause less heat than light.
+Richard