Thoughts about life

For reasons which will be obvious to anyone who follows the news, I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be 'pro-life' - and also what it doesn't mean.  What is a distinctly Christian approach to the ethical issues surrounding the beginning and end of human life?  Here are some thoughts, not all well developed at this stage.

1.  The theological foundations of a Christian pro-life stance are creation and Christology.  The doctrine of creation teaches us that each human being is made by God, in his image, and belongs to him.  Life - including my own life! - does not ultimately 'belong' to any of us, but to God.  That is why a human being cannot arbitrarily take another human being's life - consider Genesis 9:6.  Christology comes in because it is, if you like, the highest compliment that could be paid to human nature that God the Son took it on himself and became incarnate.  If we doubt the value of human life, the doctrine of the incarnation should be a sufficient rebuttal of those doubts.  We could also add that, de jure, each human life belongs once again to God, this time not only by right of creation but by right of redemption.

2.  The ethical implications of these foundations are sometimes very clear, and sometimes not so much.  I think that anyone who celebrates the Annunciation - I don't mean necessarily by keeping the feast, but by being gladdened by the angelic news of the incarnation - ought to recognise that Christ in his incarnation sanctifies human life from conception.  We ought to be pro-life in the narrower sense of 'against the deliberate ending of life in the womb'.  But we need to recognise that issues around end-of-life care just are more difficult.  There can be a moral difference, for example, between deliberately ending a life and withdrawing treatment - although both will end in death, and are undertaken in that knowledge.  We ought not to act or talk as if this stuff were simple and straightforward.

3.  To be pro-life is not the same as being anti-death.  One aspect of recognising the sanctity of life is recognising that the mystery of its end does not lie entirely within our power.  Thanks to medical advances, we can often delay death - but whether we ought to do so in every case is surely very doubtful.  Especially for the Christian, who believes in and looks for the resurrection of the dead, being pro-life ought not to mean 'prolonging life wherever possible regardless of other considerations'.

4.  It seems to me that many people - especially, I have to say, Americans - muddy the waters by confusing more than one issue.  For example, in some of the tragic issues involving children which have come up in the UK, American commentators have been quick to equate being pro-life with believing in absolute parental autonomy.  Some talk as if parents own their children's lives, something which I can't accept on theological principle (see 1, above), and some import the distinctly American (but not Christian) idea that the community and the state ought to have no input into tough decisions involving children.  This is an unhelpful blurring of issues, and particularly when it is being shouted across the Atlantic sounds a lot like real-life tragedies here are being used as ammunition for ongoing culture wars there.  (And as an aside, if the sanctity of life means anything, it means that issues of life must not be used in this way).

5.  A distinctive of Christian engagement with this issue ought to be a certain amount of calm.  Don't get me wrong: there should be anger when the sanctity of life is not respected, and there should be grief over individual tragedies and systemic horrors.  But there needs to be somewhere behind that the faith in God who raises the dead and gives each one his or her due, so that we can engage without bitterness and frenzy.

6.  Life is a gift.  It is all too easy to present life as a burden - and then say that you have to carry it anyway, because hey, we're pro-life.  Life is a gift.  There should be joy in being pro-life, joy in honouring the greatest thing the Creator has made, joy in the fact that Christ came that we might have life, and life to the full.  The Christian pro-life position is full of gratitude, seeing goodness where nobody else can see it, the joy of glimpsing the imago dei even in the briefest flickers of human existence and the hardest moments of human being.  Tone matters, because it betrays what is really going on in our hearts.

Behind this heavy stone

What have we buried here, behind this heavy stone?
Why the effort, why the seal?
What is it that we've buried here?

We buried sin,
and death and curse and hell.
We buried wrath.
The end of everything is buried here,
behind this heavy stone.

Is that all that we buried, behind this heavy stone?
Is that all?  Nothing more?

We buried all mankind, each one,
still and dead.
We buried you and me.
All folk are buried here,
behind this heavy stone.

Just us?  But why the guards?
The stone is heavy.  What need for them?

We buried God.
The Creator lies entombed.
We buried Sinai, we buried Zion,
the glory and the cloud.
We buried God,
wrapped sheets around his face;
we looked on it and did not die.
But he died.
We buried him behind this heavy stone,
and placed the seal,
and set the guard.
We buried God.

Well that makes sense.
We wouldn't want him getting out again.

The church in Holy Week

Not to keep harping on about the same things, but Holy Week surely has something to tell us about the being of the church in the world.

Look, Jesus gets some cheers and some crowds as he enters Jerusalem, presumably mostly from the people who have followed him along the way, but the people of Jerusalem on the whole don't know him and won't have him.  The influential, in particular, are against him.  The cleansing of the temple (which in the Synoptic gospels takes place in Holy Week; not in John, but that's another story) is an action which must surely be deliberately divisive.  The Supper is taken with a small band of disciples, but even here there is a traitor and the group is divided.  Even on the cross, a division is made between a thief who sees and a thief who doesn't, and therefore between life and death.

This, I think is what the author of Hebrews meant: the Word of God is sharply divisive, cutting through all the appearances and shams that we can put up.

There are lots of words in the world, lots of messages, lots of causes.  Some unite people and some divide people.  Most do both in different ways.  But nothing cuts through like Christ crucified.  Here is the divine scalpel, which penetrates our individual existences, right to the heart, slicing away me from me.  All the other divisive-uniting words exist within the system and complex of human words.  They are relatively divisive, but they work because they recognise that underneath there is a commonality; the divisions are not essential, the wound is not mortal, the crisis is not existential.  Not so the Word of God.  Here is the Man from Without, the God who has stepped Within.  Here is division that goes all the way down.

What about the church, though?  Many churches delight to be, or aspire to be, at the centre of their communities.  But can the church speak the Word which divides from that place?  We want to serve our communities, but if our service means giving people what they already recognise as good, how are we serving the Word?

Going outside

Reading Hebrews 13 at Morning Prayer, I'm struck by how much I naturally want to be On The Inside.  My guess is that this isn't just me.  My guess is that even people who glory in being On The Outside, out of step with society, secretly or not so secretly cultivate a sense that they are On The Inside of something.  Hence all the close-knit little sub-cultures.

But if Hebrews is to be believed, that desire to be On The Inside could keep me from Christ, who was crucified outside the gate.  I think we read this wrong if we imagine that here in the church is the community where we can be On The Inside.  The church is always going to be wandering back into the camp; institutions and communities as well as individuals feel the strong draw of The Inside.  So we are always called to "go to him outside the camp", a constant movement into The Outside that reflects the fact that our citizenship is not here, but is in another city.

Perhaps not coincidentally I read this editorial this morning on my way into town.  Religion is on the retreat.  But what should be our response?

In the past few decades, some parts of the church that tend to reject the trappings of religion have tried desperately to appear “normal”. But for a generation that prizes authenticity, maybe that’s just a turn-off. Rather than being just a slightly rubbish version of the rest of the world, with slightly rubbish coffee and slightly rubbish music, maybe it needs to embrace its difference, its strangeness, its weirdness, its mystery.

Be more weird.  Go outside the camp.  That's where we meet Jesus.

A visit to Westminster Cathedral

The other week I popped in to Westminster Cathedral, the home base of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales.  I've walked past it quite a few times, but never been in, and I was curious to take a look.  I liked it.  I enjoy a church building in the Byzantine style (I assume everyone has a favourite style of ecclesiastical architecture?  No?) and the decoration is tasteful and not so baroque as continental Roman Catholicism tends to display.  It is massive, as you'd expect, but seems to scale; one is dwarfed but not crushed.  It's a lovely building.

One thing I noticed is that some of the ceiling decoration remains unfinished.  This is apparently deliberate.  Here space is provided for future generations to add to the Cathedral, to express their own faith in the architecture.  The leaving of space seems to me to be a statement of faith by this present generation, too; it says that despite the history of Catholicism in this country, they expect to be here in the future.  They expect the church to go on.

This has got me thinking about models of church, and of the relationship between church and eschatology.  I come up with two basic models.

Here on the one hand is Westminster Cathedral, displaying its faith in the future, or rather its faith in the God of the future, through architecture and decoration.  It's about the incarnation, isn't it - this stable faith, this understanding that God has entered history and therefore the church is in history, a human factor (albeit established by God) in the midst of other human factors.  The church is a contributor to the wider culture, because all humanity is affected by the reality of the incarnation, whether they know it or not.  The church belongs here, because Christ was here.

On the other hand is the little band of disciples of Christ meeting in a community centre on a Sunday afternoon.  Their faith is displayed differently.  Because they believe in the God of the future, the God who is always breaking in, their community looks more like a band of rebels.  They don't expect to be able to make a positive Christian contribution to the wider culture, or at least not necessarily.  The wider culture represents the mission field, something they go out into for the sake of Christ but not the place they live.  They don't have the money to build cathedrals, but they wouldn't if they could; it's not about bricks and mortar.  There is something unsettled and unsettling about them.  They belong elsewhere.

What are we meant to be?  Cathedral builders or eschatological warriors?

Maybe the question is wrong.  Maybe we need both.  I wouldn't want to be without all the artefacts of Christian culture - the music and the art and, yes, the cathedrals.  But what about being strangers and exiles?  Yes, we need that too; at the moment, I think, we need that most of all.

Should we say, perhaps, that the spiritual reality of the cathedral builders is still that they don't belong, that they are exiles?  And perhaps at some level the exiles are spiritually at home in the world which Christ their Master claims as his own?

I feel the tension.

Learning to Pray

The introduction to Bonhoeffer's short book on the Psalms - The Prayerbook of the Bible - is worth every penny you might pay for the book, even assuming you didn't read and benefit from the rest of it, which you ought to.  In noting that Jesus' disciples ask him to teach them to pray, Bonhoeffer probes and pops on of the great prayer myths that circulates in the church.

"To learn to pray" sounds contradictory to us.  Either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, we say, or it will never learn to pray.  But this is a dangerous error, which is certainly very widespread among Christians today, to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray.

We imagine that prayer comes spontaneously or not at all.  Not so, says Bonhoeffer, for if it were so how could Jesus teach the disciples to pray?  There is plenty of stuff the heart can do by itself - "wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing" - but these are not yet prayer, and ought not to be confused with prayer.

Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one's heart.  It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty.

This has implications.  How should we learn to pray?  Why, the same way we learn to talk in general: by imitating our parent's speech.  In this case, taking on the speech of God.  "Repeating God's own words, we begin to pray to God."  We encounter this language of God in Holy Scripture.

This allows Bonhoeffer to develop a particular, and a particularly Christological, view of the prayers of the Bible, and particularly the book of Psalms.  Here in the Psalms we have the Word of God - but they are also prayers to God, which is to say they are particularly human words.  (What is prayer but a human word?)  How can they be both?

We grasp it only when we consider that we can learn true prayer only from Jesus Christ, and that it is, therefore, the word of the Son of God, who lives with us human beings, to God the Father who lives in eternity...  In Jesus' mouth the human word becomes God's Word.  When we pray along with the prayer of Christ, God's Word becomes again a human word.

Jesus prays, and we can pray along with him, because he includes us in his prayers.

If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible, and especially the Psalms, we must not, therefore, first ask what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ.

Recognising that we must learn to pray, and that we can only do so as we pray along with Christ Jesus, we learn to pray beyond our own immediate interests and feelings, to pray more than what it is in our hearts at the moment - sometimes, indeed, "it is precisely the case that we must pray against our own heart in order to pray properly."

Not the poverty of our heart, but the richness of God's Word, ought to determine our prayer.

All quotations from The Prayerbook of the Bible, in volume 5 of Bonhoeffer's Works, pages 155ff.

On handling sacred things

One thing that worries me about being in full-time Christian ministry is the danger of becoming over-familiar with sacred things.  I 'use' the Bible every day.  I pray with and for people as part of my 'job'.  I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about God.  It can all become a bit - comfortable?

Sometimes the tone of conversation is just a bit too jokey, a bit light, betraying a casual disregard which is creeping into my heart.  Sometimes I know the effect I want to have on the congregation, and I am getting better at tweaking what I do to get the result I want - and where, then, is God?  Sometimes - and honestly, I notice this most hanging out with other Christian leaders - we show by the way we talk that at some level we have stopped feeling the awesome weight of glory that there is in the gospel - and it's made worse by the fact that I know that I will still speak, on Sunday from the front of church, as if that weight of glory were real to me.

I don't mean that it's always like that.  I don't mean to imply that we're all hypocrites.  I just want to warn myself: to remind myself, perhaps, of Nadab and Abihu, or of Uzzah.  Holy, holy, holy is the Lord.  Don't forget it.  These are sacred things.  Handle with care.