Last year I was interviewed for a podcast on how young people view faith. I had been invited to share my experience and wisdom. In the end, though, it was a humbling experience as it was me who ended up learning from the two young interviewers and being inspired by them. At one point they explained that young people today, who are so often missing from our church pews and seats, are tired of being chastised about what they do and what they believe. As they described this to me, I couldn’t help but picture the receptionist in Little Britain, the BBC comedy from a number of years back, banging at her laptop keys and then looking up and announcing glibly: “computer says no”. Is this how our faith is seen by people today? Are we seen as surly, judgmental hypocrites, announcing to the world that: “church says no”?
If so, this is a huge challenge to us as Christians, and it is so different from the Jesus we read about in the gospels. The woman accused of adultery didn’t feel judged by Jesus, neither did the children running up to him, nor the woman who washed his feet with perfume, nor the unscrupulous tax collector. Quite the opposite. They felt loved, accepted, and welcomed, whatever their flaws.
In fact, it was often the disciples in the background who were sniping and criticising those approaching Jesus. And so we need to ask who we are more like today? The Jesus who asserted “let the children come to me” or the disciples who frowned and complained at the noisy youngsters? The Jesus who asserted “let whoever is without sin cast the first stone” or the uptight, judgmental people who grabbed the nearest rocks? The Jesus who sat and ate with broken people or the religious leaders who viewed those on the margins of their society as unclean and beyond redemption?
Jesus has gifted us a liberating and compassionate faith of hope, centred on a God of love. Yet we Christians are sometimes drawn into criticising, belittling, and condemning. When we do, it can incarcerate us in our own self-righteousness and leave others with deep wounds. In secular terms, it could be said that our faith needs a good PR job, as our life-transforming, love-centred way of living can sometimes be viewed as merely a backward, hypocritical superstition. But people of faith don’t look to spin doctors for salvation. Instead, we just have to continue to live out, as best we can, the revolutionary way of the person who said “yes” to radical love, compassion, and welcome.
We live in a society that attempts, as best it can, to avoid pain and suffering. Sometimes, though, the storms of life are inescapable. Last week, someone visited me as I lay on my sofa. “You need to face your pain like the great Bear Hunt”, they said, rather cryptically. It was only when my four-year-old son chose “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” as his bedtime story a few nights later that I understood something of what she meant. In this classic children’s book, we join a family as they search for a bear by facing various challenging terrains – forest, mud, long grass, and snow. With each different environment, we are told that “We can’t go over it; We can’t go under it; Oh no, we have to go through it!”
On my long pilgrimage which followed the coastline of North Wales, I spent many hours gazing out at the Irish Sea as I rested with my lunch or my trusty flask of tea. During those three weeks of walking, I noticed how the sea was brimming with life and activity – seals, porpoise, puffins, gannets, boats, fishermen, surfers. But I also observed how quickly the sea could be transformed, sometimes slowly from day-to-day, but other times in a matter of hours. When my four-year-old son is drawing the sea, he will immediately reach for the blue crayon. By spending a length of time staring out to the changeable sea, though, a plethora of beautiful colours emerge. These are often related to the sea’s condition – sometimes threatening and disturbingly dark, but, on other occasions, calm and crystal clear. One day, as I sat on a rock on the edge of a clifftop, I wrote in my notepad that the waves were like rolling, unforgiving white juggernauts crashing against the headland. The very next day, by now on a sandy beach, I jotted down that the sea was a serene stillness gently caressing the golden shoreline.
Like the changeable sea, our life journey is ever-changing. Sometimes all seems tranquil – we are blessed with times of joy, times of pleasure, and times of celebration. But sometimes storms rage around us – we have to face times of pain, times of anxiety, and times of grief. “There is a time for everything,” ponders Ecclesiastes (3:1), “and a season for every activity under the heavens”.
This thought, and this way of viewing the world, is helping me face the difficult wait of my own recuperation. As such, it is gradually transforming my anxious thoughts by giving me the strength to notice and value those little signs of spring breaking through the harshness of winter – to notice and value those daily moments of joy and grace that break through my continuing pain and frustration. This is as powerful a healing as any physical healing could offer. As an old proverb puts it: “Sometimes God calms the storm, but sometimes God calms the sailor”.
For all of us, opening our eyes to moments of God’s light and grace, even in our times of suffering, have a cumulative ability to transform, illuminate, and bring us hope. Held as a hostage for many years in a dark room in Beirut, Brian Keenan recalls how he made a candle from small pieces of wax and string from his clothing fibres. ‘Quietly, calmly a sense of victory welled up in me’, he later wrote, ‘and I thought to myself without saying it, “They haven’t beat us yet. We can blot out even their darkness”’. Light, of course, does not avoid darkness. Rather, it confronts it head-on. ‘The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it’ (John 1:5).
Trystan Owain Hughes 