Category: Guest post

Dethroning anxiety

I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting this wonderful blog from Nadia Bolz-Weber. On the face of it, her circle and mine (hers is much bigger) do not much intersect: ordained, tattooed, a former addict, divorced, remarried and probably further over on some theological spectrum than I, but she writes and thinks so beautifully that I would recommend her corner of the internet to you and anybody. Here’s the link that should enable you to sign up. And here’s something she wrote a couple of weeks ago, about anxiety:

As a child I worried a lot about quicksand. To be fair, the TV shows I watched made it seem like more of a potential danger in life than it’s proved to be.

And as a teenager I worried that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on us but I equally worried that I wouldn’t get tickets to see Depeche Mode.

In my early 20s I was mostly worried I’d run out of booze, and that I would not be able to pay my $325 a month rent. Sadly, I did not think to worry about how those two things might be related.

And when I got sober and I worried that I wouldn’t be funny anymore never realizing I wasn’t all that funny before.

Then I was told to worry that Y2K was going to make airplanes just sort of drop out of the sky.

And when 9-11 happened I for sure worried the terrorist attacks would just keep going and by that time I had 2 babies and that made it feel more acute.

Then when the economic collapse happened in 2008 … honestly I was entirely free from worry because I was entirely free of money. So it was very a relaxing time for me.

Then I worried that people would think less of me when I got divorced not realizing they didn’t think that much of me to begin with.

Feel free to go home and write your own biography of worry. It’s a humbling project to undertake.

But also kind of calming.

Because writing my own this week helped remind me how worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe, or to prevent bad things from happening or to ensure that good things did. It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in.

… worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe … It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in

But what I really want to tell you about is how our reading from Revelation helped me this week –

The churches in Asia minor to whom John’s Revelation is addressed had some pretty high anxiety levels too – they were living under the thumb of the Roman empire and the book of Revelation was meant to offer them comfort. It’s famous for 7 headed beasts and heavenly battles and whatnot, but If there is an overwhelming message in this, the weirdest book in the Bible, it would be this: that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. Which is another sermon for another time.

The part of today’s reading that I swear lowered my cortisol levels was this:

In his opening remarks, the writer of Revelation twice refers to God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. That’s it.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

That is what comforted me this week as I read our texts for today and tried to manage my anxiety while writing a sermon.

That God was and is and is to come.

Or as the hymn goes:

Crown him the Lord of Years,

The Potentate of Time,

creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.

It helped me this week because it reminded me that this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story.  A story of God and God’s people that reaches back to the beginning of time, brushes the skin of the present and moves on into a future we cannot see.  

What I am saying is that I think I am most anxious when I invest myself too fully in some Johnny come lately story.

Because looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed.

What I am trying to say is that the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard.  And competing stories will always surround us.  Sometimes, maybe a little bit like our siblings in faith from the churches in Asia minor in the 1st century, we too need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story. That that there is only one potentate of time.

When I look back, in all my times of grief and doubt and sorrow and anger and faithlessness, I can in the rear view, see the mighty hand of God.

To be clear, God was not busily arraigning all my desired outcomes. If that were true, had I gotten everything I wanted I promise you I wouldn’t be alive right now, much less standing here in this pulpit.

But what I can see now, is how often I was saved from having the thing happen that I was so sure would make me happy.

Looking back I see how often I was carried through things I thought I couldn’t survive, and how I was guided to beautiful things I wouldn’t have ever even wished for.

Because God is like a shimmering, divine filament woven into our lives that provides spiritual tensile strength, and beauty in each moment, even when we forget to trust him, even when we forget to pray or be grateful.

Busy doing nothing

Photo by Zach Searcy on Unsplash

A guest post from my friend Colin Bearup, who has spent much of his Christian life serving among Muslim people.

I have noticed that most of us involved in Christian mission tend to hold one of three attitudes to rest. Some of us see rest is necessary for survival. If you don’t rest you can’t keep going, so you just have to stop sometimes. Some of us are more positive; rest is necessary for success. You cannot flourish, prosper, accomplish or triumph if you don’t get a break. And – more rarely – I come across those who see rest as a calling, a delight and a gift from God.

God decreed rest for his people in the Old Testament. One day a week, no work for man, woman or child, whether slave or free. Even the donkeys could put their hooves up. And consider this: there was no internet, no smart phone, no TV, no sport to watch, no books to read, no synagogue to go to. It was a day of quiet. Scary or what? Not working is one thing; doing nothing, that is another. Rest wasn’t just a different way of being busy, which is what I tended to make it.

We all know the Pharisees made it miserable and Christians have been known to do the same, and we are not supposed to live today by the OT law. But God’s intention was and is that we enjoy rest. Call it a delight, said Isaiah (58:13-14). For the ancient people of God, rest was an expression of faith. They could stop because God was in charge and they were relieved of responsibility. Rest for them was an act of worship; intentionally stopping was a way of honouring God. Doing nothing, trusting him and being grateful. Why would we settle for less?

On prayer

This from Nadia Bolz-Weber who can write and think, sometimes both at the same time:

So even though I don’t believe in the gumball machine idea, that if I put a shiny quarter of prayer and righteousness into God’s vending machine that a shiny round gumball of “blessings” will drop into my hand, I still pray.

I pray because I have fears and longings and concerns and gratitudes and complaints that are best not left unexpressed.  And so I hold these up to God, I repeat them in my mind and ponder them on my walks; I whisper them into my pillow, and press them into the soil; I write them on ribbons; I say them in the single, choppy syllables managed between sobs. And I believe that God somehow catches them and will not let a single one land unheld in God’s divine knowing. Not because God is good and I am good so I get what I ask for, but because God was, is and will be, meaning that God is already present in the future I am fearing and already loving me through the grief of the bad thing happening, and already and always ready to comfort and sustain me. God abides all around me even in times of collapse, even in times of boredom, even in times of selfishness, even in times of effervescence when I forget to be grateful. I know this to be true even when I do not “feel” it.

The church and mental health (some more)

I had the privilege recently of meeting and having lunch with a clinical psychologist, who was soon to retire. In our brief time together I was interested in what (if anything) Christian communities could do to take some steps towards tackling the crisis in mental health that seems to be all around us.

Dismiss for a moment the claim that we don’t have a blooming of mental health problems so much as a blooming of mental health terminology. And dismiss for another moment the further thought that previous generations had it much worse (think, World War I or the great plague) and just got on with it.

Ask instead, if the lived experience of many today is struggles with mental health (anxiety and depression say), can Christian communities do something to help?

Interestingly, my lunch companion thought ‘yes’. I hope I am not misquoting her in that she said many mental problems—wider than just anxiety and depression—are essentially chronic conditions, that is, life-long and to be managed rather than cured as such. But she said she could get good outcomes if her work with people was combined with their participation in community things. If there were two aspects to managing an illness, one was her work, the other was a community.

This was fascinating. But, I asked her, wouldn’t this community themselves need to be trained in mental health issues? Not really, she replied. Essentially they would just need to be able to spot a mental health crisis and know whom to contact. What was more important was normal, non-judgemental acceptance and human interaction.

We have seen this in our own church, and I suspect so have most churches. Most congregations I have belonged to have contained some marginalized people who have hung onto normalcy in large part because Christian communities have accepted them and welcomed them in.

We can do this. The same congregations that, in the 1960s say, hosted large Sunday Schools, or in later decades ran parent and toddler groups and youth groups and foodbanks, can intentionally set stuff up that will give the lonely something to belong to and the anxious a welcome.

Our church started a food hub, and we noticed that people turned up way earlier than the opening time. It wasn’t just to get the first dibs on the food. Some brought garden chairs. It turned out that as much as needing food, they needed community. They enjoyed the queue.

As time went on, entrepreneurial people in our congregation downgraded the food supply and opened a cafe instead. During the recent crisis in energy costs, we got money from the City Council to run a designated ‘warm space’ for people.

And then our little church extended the cafe idea to community lunches and a monthly ‘cafe church’.

This is slow mission but it is also the Kingdom leaking into the community around us.

The fear of ideas and the playful creativity of curiosity

I saw this article in the current Economist, and I liked it so much that I wanted to share part of it. It was written by an African author called Chigozie Obioma.

I BECAME CURIOUS at a young age, radically so as I grew older. In keeping with Albert Einstein’s dictum that “the important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing,” I exposed myself to every possible idea.

I have studied religious texts from the Bible to the Koran to the Book of Mormon to the tenets of Odinani, the pantheistic religion of Nigeria’s Igbo people. I have read political philosophies from Winston Churchill’s “The River War” to Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. I have read books considered to be standard-bearers of leftist thinking and those seen as right-wing intellectual staples.

Sometimes I find myself holding several conflicting, incommensurable beliefs, but most often I arrive at a centre—a rich ground that enables me to fully appreciate the complexity of the human condition, to understand the substance of different ideas and why others might hold them. I am forever open to the possibility of changing my mind.

That is why I got such a shock in my first few weeks in America. At an event at the University of Michigan an African-American speaker was hectored and shouted down by a mob. I could not understand; why wouldn’t the audience hear him out? The response I received—that the speaker’s view was “problematic”—would reverberate through the next few months and years. Speakers across various platforms in America were drowned out, attacked and silenced …

…

These conflicting actions and reactions, I think, are a result of a societal malaise that has been developing in the past decade or so: radical incuriosity. It is, in essence, the fear of ideas.

Obioma then goes on to describe the importance of what he calls ‘provisional thinking’: a capacious open-mindedness, encompassing both the moral and the political, in which one’s assumptions can constantly shift, unattached to ideology or dogma. And arrives at a natural resting place for him, namely agnosticism.

This is logical and I warmed so much to what he wrote. But I wonder if agnocisim itself is also a little flimsy as a resting-place for your soul. I may be wrong. But if you are open to everything, on what do you base any judgements you make? What values can you hold that are not themselves potentially valueless? I struggle to understand how being agnostic about everything (if that is what is being argued) can enable you to form judgements about anything? Presumably, better minds than mine, not hard to find, have views on this.

But that is why I like the position of Christ as truth, as he claimed to be. Perhaps with him (and what he said) as the foundation, we are able better to judge the value and utility of multiple different political and moral viewpoints? At least we have somewhere to start.

And that starting point, Christ himself, was and is iconoclastic, turning some truths upside down, reshaping others, fulfilling others, just like Truth would if ever, like some icebreaker, it started ploughing through the frigid accumulation of our reasonings. Hmmm..

Created by Dall-E-3

Alexei Navalny’s slow work

I was so shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Alexei Navalny. I thought, Mandela-like, he was going to survive prison and see the regime he opposed collapse around him. Not to be. But how brave, how slow, how peace-loving it was to return to Russia when he didn’t need to, and take his stand with determination and wit, retaining a sense of fun even if all around him was grim. This is the powerless frightening the life out of the powerful; President Putin could not evidently bring himself to utter his name.

It was quite something to discover that this Russia hero had a Christian faith. I’m grateful to blogger Diane Butler-Bass for this slightly redacted version of his testimony. (You can find more of her here, and I enjoy her weekly writing)

In prison, apparently, he used to pretend he was on a spaceflight–hence the discomfort–towards a new Russia, one that was Europe-like in its democracy and rule of law, but Russia-like in its history and greatness. He didn’t see it yet. Instead the call from his Lord was: ‘This day you will be with me in paradise’.

The fact is that I am a believer, which, in general, rather serves as an example of constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly people are atheists, I myself was quite militant.

But now I am a believer, and this helps me a lot in my work, because everything becomes much, much simpler. I think less, there are fewer dilemmas in my life — because there is a book (editorial note: the Bible) in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what needs to be done in each situation. It’s not always easy, of course, to follow this book, but in general I try.

And therefore, as I already said, it is easier for me, probably than many others, to get involved in politics.

A person recently wrote to me: “Navalny, what is everyone writing to you: ‘Hold on, don’t give up, be patient, grit your teeth? Why do you have to endure it?’ I think you said in an interview that you believe in God. And it is said: ‘Blessed are those who thirst and hunger for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.’ Well, that’s great for you, then!”

And I thought — wow, this person understands me so well!

It’s not that I’m great, but I’ve always perceived this specific commandment as more or less an instruction for action. And so, of course, not really enjoying the place where I am, nevertheless, I do not have any regrets about coming back, about what I do. Because I did everything right. On the contrary, I feel such satisfaction or something. Because at some difficult moment I did as expected according to the instructions, and did not betray the commandment…

For a modern person this whole commandment — “blessed, thirsty, hungering for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” — sounds very pompous. People who say things like that are supposed to be, quite frankly, crazy. Crazy strange people are sitting there with disheveled hair in their cell and, therefore, trying to cheer themselves up with something. Although, of course, they are lonely, they are loners, no one needs them. And this is the most important thing. Our power, the system is trying to tell such people: “You are lonely, you are a loner.”

It is important to intimidate first, and then show that you are alone. Well, because what normal, adequate people adhere to some kind of commandment. The thing about loneliness is very important. It is very important as a goal of power. Excellent, by the way, one of the wonderful philosophers named Luna Lovegood said about this. Remember this was in Harry Potter? And talking to Harry Potter during some difficult times, she told him: “It’s important not to feel lonely, because, of course, if I were Voldemort, I would really like you to feel lonely.” Of course, of course, our Voldemort in the palace wants this too….

I don’t feel alone at all. And I’ll explain why. Because this construction — “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” — it seems somehow exotic, strange, but in fact this is the main political idea that now exists in Russia…

This is very important, despite the fact that our country now, of course, is built on injustice, and we are constantly faced with injustice. We see the worst kind of injustice — armed injustice. Nevertheless, we see that at the same time millions of people, tens of millions of people, want the truth. They want to achieve the truth, and sooner or later they will achieve it. They will be satisfied.

This is the truth, and you can’t argue against it. And sooner or later these people who want the truth will achieve their goal, they will be satisfied.

And the important thing that I want to tell you, and in your person, you, the prosecutor, in general, all the authorities and all the people, is that it is important not to be afraid of these people. And do not be afraid of those who seek the truth.

Alexei Navalny

For those not feeling Christmassy

I couldn’t resist passing on this quote from Nadia Bolz-Weber, who hangs out on Substack, which platform I’m exploring these days.

She’s mouthy, sweary, tattooed, controversial and generally terrifying to me, but she knows a lot about grace, and she can write. I thank God, and her, for between them making the world a better place.

I quote:

…a gentle reminder that Christ will be born on Christmas with or without us “feeling” Christmas-y. Because this pattern of time, this story, these rituals and practices and songs have gone on long before us and will continue long after us. Sometimes we are floating in that river of faith, just swimming in it and feeling the transcendent warmth of the season. And other times we seem to be standing in just a half inch of the stuff; not even enough to cover our feet. But the power of the river, its source and its destination changes not at all. And both things: submerged in and barely having our feet in are the same. There’s no ranking system at work here. One is not “better” than the other. One does not “count more”. That’s just not how this thing works. Thank God

Nadia Bolz-Weber

An update on the New Atheists

Times move on

The New Atheist movement, headed by its ‘four horseman’ of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet and Sam Harris, so influential in the early 2000s, has, I read, ‘fractured and lost its spirit’. 1

The author of that quote, Sebastian Milbank, a critic and editor and (I think) Blue Labour sympathizer, notes that part of the reason is that the political left has shifted. Back in the day of Peak New Atheist, the left (in Milbank’s telling) were happy to stand on science and observable facts and what worked rather than the religion-inspired dogmas of the right-wing. So New Atheism with its talk of reason and evidence, was a natural fit (regardless of the politics of the Four Horsemen themselves): a powerful alchemy: the trendy centre-left fused with a newly articulated atheism.

But as well as New Atheism splintering internally, the political left has headed towards (again in Milbank’s telling) ‘an ideology of “care”; ‘the lived experiences of victims’; ‘indigenous ways of knowing.’ Cruelly, it might be said to have headed for the touchy-feely and the subjectively felt instead of the proven, and may indeed have come to view science and rationality as a power-grab rather than a bipartisan quest for common truth and common good. This is bad news for New Atheists, who don’t have anything else to offer, don’t do touchy-feely at all, and who have been left becalmed by the fickle winds of the zeitgeist.

Then look at what the ever-thoughtful Peter Dray writes.2 He works for the Christian student movement UCCF and is a keen observer of changing trends in student life. He quotes the ‘Russian born satirist, author and political commentator Konstantin Kisin’:

The reason new atheism has lost is mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?

Dray goes on:

It’s this kind of existential questioning that characterises many students today. If there is no God and no purpose, and the universe is wholly indifferent to our lives, then what’s the point? How can we make sense of our apparently innate sense of justice? Where can we turn when we feel overwhelmed by life’s anxieties? Are we really happy to reduce love to an unfortunate side-effect of our evolutionary psychology?

He argues the key challenge (for those seeking to present the Christian gospel to students) is now ‘demonstrating the uniqueness of Jesus in a world of therapies.’ And he says, We should surely celebrate that today’s students are asking deep existential and personal questions that only Jesus can truly answer. To those with eyes to see, Jesus is clearly about to offer a weightier, more substantial hope – one which addresses us not just at an emotional level but which calls us to repentance and faith, and to life with the living God.

All fascinating stuff. A challenge for me personally, because the realm of science, logic, evidence and the common good is home ground for me. I would be quite happy to dialogue there with New Atheists. Jesus, I would argue with them, is the piece of rogue data you can’t ignore. If he rose from the dead, that upsets everything, even the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is everything.

But what is revealed by the new zeitgeist, if accurately observed in today’s students (which of course must only be patchily true), is surely the shortage, and the centrality, of love, and the golden shackles that bind together love and meaning in the human frame. These things are beyond reason and science and therefore beyond New Atheism and its parallel, Christian apologetic.

Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and God is love. All else falls before the grandeur of this.

If it’s not ‘all in the mind’ quite a lot is.

Gavin Francis’ book Recovery — GP’s take on the neglected art of convalescence –:

has a brilliant example of what good, or harm, our minds can do as part of our well-being; worth quoting. Francis talks about two middle-aged men who ‘a few weeks apart both suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed, ostensibly dead, but who were successfully resuscitated with electric shocks. Both were then fitted with portable electronic defibrillators …[that were] about the shape and size of a matchbox’. If either man collapsed again, ‘the portable defibrillator would sense the change and shock the heart back into a healthy rhythm.’

‘For one of the men, the intimate experience of the proximity of death, the fragility of life and his new reliance on the implanted defibrillator was utterly traumatic. He began to suffer panic attacks and fiddled ceaselessly with the swelling beneath his collarbone. He couldn’t find a way to stop fretting that it might fail. At the time of his cardiac arrest he had been working as an administrator but he found himself unable to go on working. He was afraid to be alone, and his nights became a torment of insomnia.

‘For the other man, the almost identical experience of collapse and then resurrection became an epiphany of gratitude. His new life was a gift, he said, for by rights he should now be dead, and all the tedious, niggling irritations that once troubled him seemed to dissolve. It was enough to be able to breathe this air, walk on this earth, see his grandchildren. He had always lived modestly, but now began to emjoy sumptuous meals, fine wine, and booked holidays to places he would never before have considered visiting.

‘He had died, but then he lived again, and that new life into which he was born seemed one of richness, tenderness and gratitude.’

Healing: the future of the NHS

Photo by Daniel Chicchon on Unsplash. The photo is of San Francisco; note that bridge in the background.

I read a short article by Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the NHS federation, in the current Wired magazine (July-August 2023). This is an unashamed abridgement of that fine article.

Taylor points out that the human species is better at developing technology than thinking through its consequences. He sees these issue for the NHS:

  1. A revolution in diagnostics. This really good thing– catching disease early– depends a lot on how willing we are continuously to monitor our health. This is not so simple. Already there are harmless incursions in my life. Under my bed is a device that downloads my pacemaker data and sends it to my hospital in London. One time when I was developing symptoms, they asked for a download, then called me in, then re-timed the pacemaker and fixed the problem: really nice. On the other hand, when I was in hospital recently, nurses were taking observations several times a day. My observations are problematic and sometimes set alarms off. At least twice they sent a more senior nurse to redo the observations as they didn’t believe what a junior nurse had recorded. These constant readings do no good whatsoever to how I feel about myself. They are stressful and discouraging. Heaven forbid that I should have a thing on my wrist that did this to me all the time.
  2. The fact that diagnostics are usually probablistic, not black-and-white. In any case, diagnostics don’t help as much you’d like. If you might develop cancer, or might not, but will develop side effects to treatment, whaddya do?
  3. Inequality. Matthew Taylor points out that technology empowers people, but usually it is only some people, and inequality increases given that other people, already disadvantaged, don’t benefit. (This actually is a slightly curious argument when things are on average getting better, but let it pass.)

Finally he talks about care. He makes some fascinating observations: ‘Medicine is technocratic and scientific; care is human and relational‘. Medical expertise is sort-of expected by us patients; care is what makes the difference to how we feel about our treatment. That is very true in my experience.

Medicine is technocratic and scientific; care is human and relational

He points out this issue is especially important in end-of-life care. End of life treatment is usually the most expensive medical phase in a person’s life, but still ‘a lot of people don’t get the end of life care they want. They might receive expensive care, when they would rather have cheaper care that’s more humane, at home, with loved ones.‘ This is fascinating. Having watched friends die both in government hospitals and in our local (charitably run) hospice, I know which of the two I would choose. Give me the lovely hospice every time.

Perhaps a contribution that people of Christian faith can offer in their last days is choosing not to have every possible intervention to keep us hanging on, but to decide our time’s up, go home, or to a hospice, to face the end of life in peace? It is oddly the opposite of euthanasia, realizing our time has come and accepting it. Interesting.