I read this morning of a mother in Hong Kong who is taking her daughter out of school. It seems that the Chinese authorities are tightening their grip on teachers and on what can or can’t be taught to children, especially in regard to the concept of freedom and the State.
Then I read of all the things Donald Trump could do, or is doing, to de-stabilise global relations and undermine fragile peace accords in some of the most dangerously volatile areas of the world. As he sets about sabotaging his successor’s job, some pretty frightening questions come to mind.
If, for example, given his power and his mood, he chooses to attack Iran, what will the global consequences be? And what about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, which is fast becoming a reality? If that happens, it will leave a power vacuum ready for the Islamic State or the Taliban to fill, and from which to operate. And if Trump continues to avoid paying real attention to Iraq, Sunni extremists in that country will be indebted to him.
And what about climate change? Global temperatures have sky rocketed and the rising trend would appear to be unstoppable, despite all of our best individual efforts to eat less red meat, heat our houses in ways that are not detrimental to the environment, switch to electric or hybrid cars, or cycle more.
And what about Covid and the social ills that come with it? It’s unlikely to go away in time for Christmas.
The general picture is a bleak one. There are probably many people who are choosing, metaphorically speaking, to hide under the duvet, hoping perhaps to wake up to a new and better world. Who can blame them? After all, things like Civil Wars and coups don’t happen in America – do they? Covid should be a thing of the past by the summer – shouldn’t it?
How do we live with these questions without giving in to collective despair?
I think one thing we need to start doing is to move from plucky optimism to well-founded hope. We have tried optimism for so long and it has not really proved up to the job of sustaining us in these critical times. We’re thrown about by what’s trending on fake news, with little time or energy to seek out in-depth coverage of events by reliable sources and, in any case, we are not sure where those sources are, or how to get an objective ‘take’ on anything. Objectivity requires time and a degree of confidence about facts and history. I would hazard a guess that not many of us have that kind of confidence.
So perhaps what’s needed is a different kind of confidence, the kind of humble confidence that grows the more time you spend in prayer. By prayer I mean just letting God be God in whatever situation most concerns us, giving space for God in it, rather than looking for answers and solutions. It’s the space we make in ourselves for God that changes things.
What I have learned, especially since the outbreak of Covid, is that God is already in the mess and pain, and very much in our anxieties. He has bound himself to both the causes and the effects of the ills we bring upon ourselves. He has bound himself so closely to our fears, to the terrible realities that could yet come about, that they are somehow held in him.
The work of prayer, which is vital for the survival of the world and of each one of us, consists in constantly returning to that place where God is. We find the place in the centre of our true selves, or what is often called ‘the ground of our being’.
It would be tempting to think of this returning to centre as a form of escapism, like hiding under the duvet. But it is quite the opposite. Prayer is about turning into reality, not away from it. It is about turning into the the reality which God sees in all the complex and often dangerous situations with which we are faced at the moment. Prayer involves contemplating the fragility of human beings with an untroubled gaze, and acknowledging our flawed nature, which makes a person especially vulnerable when they are driven by the need to hold on to power.
But the reality we face into has to do with the ‘deep down goodness of things’, to paraphrase the poet G.M. Hopkins[1]. This deep down goodness is the Divine that is already in us and which overcomes the destructive forces of darkness, because its essence is light. Darkness cannot overcome light. When we set our minds and hearts to prayer, we are engaging with this pure light, drawing it into the world’s conflicts and into our own fears.
[1] ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ G.M. Hopkins God’s Grandeur