When it comes to defending the flourishing of country, and of human life, I am no pacifist

The war in Ukraine is, of course, just one of the conflicts raging in the world right now. For the moment, the conflicts in Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, northern Iraq and many other places, no longer enjoy sustained attention from international media organisations. The extent to which the following comments about the war in Ukraine might pertain, also, to these many other conflicts, I will leave to the reader to decide. I am no expert on the geo-politics of any of these places.

I begin by pointing out that, in this world at least, we are dealing not with the ultimate and the perfect but with the penultimate and the imperfect. So whilst a more robust form of pacifism might suffice in the face of lesser forms of violence - refusing to fight in a morally ambiguous war in another part of the world, for example - pacifism of this kind does not seem sufficient when one's own land, livelihood and the lives of one's loved ones are under threat.  In the face of such clear and present danger, I believe the Christian has not merely a right, but actually a duty and responsibility, to mount some kind of defence.

My reasoning goes something like this. All life is sacred because it is brought into existence by the action of the creator. Inherent in the gift of life is a right and responsibility to maintain the conditions by which that life - within reasonable limits - can flourish and become what it was created to be.  Insofar as that is possible without, simultaneously, seriously curtailing the flourishing of other forms of life, we might speak in this context of a 'responsibility' to live and flourish. That word 'responsibility' suggests that a life is lived before the one who gives it. That 'one', I would posit  - as both a Christian and trawloolway man -  is the creator, the one who gives us life in all its myriad forms. We are responsible to our creator. We live our lives in a way which responds appropriately to what is given.

Now, it is clear that human beings have a responsibility to take life for the sake of our sustenance and our thriving. We may take from what is given in creation - its flora and its fauna - in order to sustain our lives. But there are limits to what we may take.  We may not, for example, hunt particular animals to the point where their own capacity to thrive and flourish is severely diminished. Neither may we do so with plant life. For if we do so, we risk compromising the entire biosphere's responsibility and capacity to flourish before, and to the glory of, our creator.

The same principle applies when it comes to human life, but perhaps in an even more robust form. Both the Jewish and Christian traditions put severe limits upon the taking of human life. 'Thou shalt not kill', whilst not an absolute command which applies in any and all circumstances, nevertheless inscribes a serious duty to do everything possible to avoid the taking of human life.

What this means, I think, when it comes to the theatre of war between human nations, is simply this: that one should avoid policies and practices that are likely to lead to war. One should never be the aggressor or the provocateur. One should never be the one who creates the conditions - whether these be political, cultural, economic or environmental -  in which war becomes the most likely outcome. We should do everything we can to avoid starting wars. For wars destroy life - not only human life, but also animal and plant life - on a scale which makes the likelihood of recovery exponentially difficult.

There are circumstances, however, in which war becomes inevitable. Having done all that is rationally and morally possible to avoid conflict with an aggressor, sometimes one simply has to take up arms in order to defend one's right and responsibility to live and to flourish before the creator is a way that is commensurate with the equatible distribution of that right and responsibility across the whole biosphere.

An example, from the recent history of my own people, is the way we took up weapons to defend our country and our way of life from the British invasion, which took place in ever more disruptive and devastating waves from 1802 until the present.  In the face of that invasion - which proceeded on the assumption that Aboriginal people enjoyed no right or responsibility to life and its flourishing - we had no choice. Before our creator-ancestors, and because of their injunction to care for country and for each other, we had to fight.

Now, the fact that we lost those wars and continue to sue for a more just settlement for our people and our country, means that the nation named 'Australia' by the invader is no longer the biospheric wonderland it once was. Thousands of specifies are now extinct as a result of the destruction of habitat. The ecosystem on which all of life depends is now either dead or dying in much of the continent. And the right and responsibility of Aboriginal peoples to life and flourishing - precisely as we care for country - remains of little consequence to our religious, commercial or political leaders.

But we had to fight. To preserve the way of life to which our creator-ancestors had called us. To prevent the destruction of that way of life by a people who had little regard for the call and injunction of the creator. We lost, obviously. But we had to fight.

To the extent that the war in Ukraine mirrors what we have experienced ourselves, I would argue that the people of the Ukraine also have to fight. Before God, they must fight. For the sake of the way and form of human flourishing which God has given, they must fight. For the sake of resisting an evil and destructive ideology, they must fight. And we who believe in the sacredness of all forms of life, precisely as they are given in creation, must offer whatever forms of solidarity we can.

Garry Deverell

With thanks to Dr Jonathan Foye, who provoked me to give this some thought.

Trees and Logs: Discipleship in Time of War

Texts: Isaiah 55.10-13; Psalm 92.1-4, 12-15; 1 Corinthians 15.51-58; Luke 6.39-49

Today’s texts can be read as something of a manifesto for the following of Christ, written not in the doctrinal formulas that will characterise later centuries, but in resonant images and metaphors taken from the non-human world.

Isaiah, for example, writes to the Hebrew survivors of the exile in Babylon, promising them that the word of the Lord will be for them like rain or snow that waters the earth and makes it fruitful. Just as there is joy when seed is plentiful and the baker is able to make bread in abundance, so the word of the Lord will bring joy and peace to the exiles. On the other side of all the devastation they have endured, the returning exiles will be like strong trees, Cyprus and myrtle, a sign that God’s favour is with them.

The psalmist also speaks about joy, about the making of glad music as a response to the good and faithful work of God in his or her community. The psalmist rejoices in the strength she or he has received from the Lord, again invoking the image of a large and fruitful tree, this time a palm or a cedar, which reminds the poet of the steadfast support of God and the joy it inspires.

Even the resurrection discourse from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians can be read as a riff or midrash on the world of trees and their fruitfulness. The language of sleeping and then rising was common parlance in the ancient near east for the moment when a seed that has lain dormant in the earth crack open and put out a shoot, rising miraculously out of the earth to reach towards the heavens and life. What was dead, is now alive. 

There are few poets who have explore this connection between trees and resurrection more wonderfully well than Rainer Maria Rilke, who writes:

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

Wonderful stuff, hey, and far more joyful in its expression than the Nicene Creed! So, if we take Rilke and St Paul and the Psalmist and Isaiah all together, what are they saying? What is their advice, their message for believers, their manifesto? Just this, I think: God is steadfast and faithful; God has your back. So, rejoice and be glad! Put your roots deep in God and reach for the heavens with the life that God so richly shares.  Good advice for the baptised, I would say. Good advice for anyone!

Rilke’s paradoxical inference that the power of God moves with a certain ‘submission’ through the world gives us occasion, though, to turn to our gospel reading, which has a decidedly different mood.

Luke is concerned with those in his community whose joyful discipleship has turned sour and become just that little bit self-serving and even hypocritical. So, if, like me, you’ve ever been guilty of proclaiming certain ideals, but not living up to them in real life, wake up! This bit is for you!

Luke first expresses concern that some of the younger, less experienced, disciples in his congregation are getting a bit uppity with regard to their older, more experienced, teachers. Note that he is not talking about differences in age here, necessarily, but rather about experience or inexperience with living the faith. The problem here is that an inexperienced believer, who is full of enthusiasm and what my Baptist forebears called ‘the joy of the Lord’, can quickly come to the conclusion that they see all things and know all things and that their more cautious and discerning pastors are just that bit too lax when it comes to courage, faith or holiness. That was me, in my teens and twenties. A puffed-up, blustery, self-serving version of a Christian who couldn’t even see that it was so because I had a log in my eye, a log created through that fatal combination of genuine smarts and very low self-esteem that seems to afflict a great many of our young people.

Immature Christians are, very often, like Luke’s builder, who heard something of Christ’s words but screened out the bits that didn’t suit her, the bits that seemed obscure or difficult. This builder raises a splendid house near a river but is in too much of a hurry to adequately prepare the foundations. When the river rises, unsurprisingly, the house is swept away.  The immature Christian can spout the words but has neglected that crucial foundation of humility and loving action that makes it real.  As a young Christian, I could have learned a lot from those around me, those who had lived the faith ‘through many dangers, toils and snares,’ as the hymn puts it. But I was in too much of a hurry. Especially to judge my elders by standards that I wasn’t able to live up to myself.

Now I want to shift focus, somewhat, and propose that it is not only inexperienced disciples that can be quick to judge. It is also countries and nations. 

We have all been shocked, his week, by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Putin apparently believes that Ukraine is part of an ancient Russian empire and part of the God-given domain of the Russian Orthodox Church. He has also spoken publicly about his desire to purge the Ukrainian government of what he calls its ‘evil’, 'Nazi' tendencies. Such language, and such action, shocks us. And we imagine that we are better than he is, better than the Russians, more civilized. Even more Christian.

But let me remind you of some inconvenient truths. Many of the British who invaded this country in the first half of the 19th century cited the wickedness of Aboriginal leaders and the 'God-given' or 'promised' character of this land as sufficient reason for what they did. The first Anglican bishop appointed to the colony, WG Broughton, was prominent amongst those who justified the mass killings of our people, the removal of survivors to internment camps, and the annexation of our lands, in precisely these terms. 

How, then, can the beneficiaries of that invasion and that annexation condemn the Russians for what they are doing? The nation subsequently named ‘Australia’, was founded on exactly the same imperialist theology, and exactly the same imperialist actions. So, we can condemn Russia, certainly, but not without hypocrisy. 

What does it mean to be spiritually mature about these things, whether that maturity is sought as an individual or as a nation?  I put it to you that the mature person, the mature nation, is not one which believes that they are righteous, good or just, and can therefore judge their neighbours from an unassailably great height. The mature person, the mature nation, is one who knows themselves to be a sinner – mired in unrighteousness, evil, injustice – and therefore of equal standing with everyone else before the God who knows and judges us all. The mature person or nation, the mature Christian, is one who knows that not one of us has a snowball’s chance in hell apart from the mercy show us in Christ, and that all we are called to do in this world is to live in the truth, and to treat our fellow sinners with mercy.

For the other message we hear in the metaphors about trees which grow toward the heavens, with joy and peace in their woody hearts, is that it is God who causes them to grow and gives them the resources they need to do so. They do not grow on their own, from their own ingenuity or wealth or moral rectitude, as it were. Human beings are like trees. We grow because of God’s favour. We thrive because we are loved and forgiven and loved again.  So let us not condemn the Russians any more than God does. Let the power we are given move through the world by the way not of an imperial-styled mission, but of a cross-shaped ‘submission’. Let us speak the truth in love: not least about our own shortcomings! And, in prayer and action, both, let us cast ourselves and our world, entirely, upon the love and mercy of God.

Garry Deverell

8th Sunday after Epiphany, St Paul's Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

Two Poems. Christmas 2020

YB Yeats – The Second Coming (1919)

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Yeats wrote this poem in 1919 as the world lay waste in the wake of the Great War, and as Ireland held its breath to see how the British would respond to its independence movement, and as his wife lay sick in bed, apparently dying in childbirth, having contracted the Spanish flu. The poet expresses his real anxieties about both the future of the world, and about his personal and domestic peace.  What is to become of us, he muses, if the centre cannot hold, if the falcon can no longer hear the falconer’s voice, if every sense of order and meaning that one might have once counted on is no longer there? What if anarchy takes over and the notion of a common good is replaced by the rule of the angry mob or, worse still, the rule of  some kind of monstrous sphinx-like dictator who cares nothing for life or for common decency? Is the monster a man, or is it a virus, some kind of cosmic force? The poet doesn’t know. But he has a deep sense of foreboding and wonders whether an anti-Christ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born in a grotesque mockery of the birth of Christ. 

Greg Weatherby 'Birth of Jesus'

There are equally anxious voices out there in the ether right now, on this very night.  For it has indeed been the worst year many of us are able to remember. The Australian bushfires that raged from late December to mid-January were the most destructive on record, destroying 9 million hectares of forest, farmland, town and residential country in the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. In some places, the fires burned so hot that stone structures melted and even the biomatter below the surface of the ground was utterly obliterated. Ecologists are now saying that in such places, nothing will ever be able to grow again. Even where this is not the case, in parts of the forest where regeneration is possible, whole ecosystems – millennia in the making - have been utterly laid waste. It is also estimated that over 1 billion native animals perished in the fires, many of them belonging to species already close to extinction such as koalas and mountain pygmy possums. A large portion of those animals apparently died either because the fires were travelling too fast or because they could not make their way through fences erected by property owners.  The response of government is to continue to bury its head in the sand and go ‘la la la la’ with regard to the now decades of warnings about climate change that have been coming in, across the airwaves, from scientists and Indigenous peoples alike.  2020 has been the warmest on record, and next year will be warmer, so get used to the Australia you know going up in flames or being washed away by floods and gale-force winds.

And then there’s the pandemic. Not the Spanish flu this time, but Covid-19. To date Covid-19 has killed 1.8 million people and sent the global economy into its worst recession since the early 1930s. The disease has been cruel in the choices it forces upon both governments and individuals. Some have continued to work, to keep their businesses open, to meet with friends and family in the same way as we’ve always done.  The cost of this choice is very often contracting the disease and passing it on; many who chose this path have died.  The other choice is not so good either, really. To stay at home, to cease working in the social way we have been used to, to stop meeting up with friends and family in order to slow the progress of the disease through the community. But, for many, embracing this second set of options – often in the name of caring for others – has unleashed unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and, for some, a life and death struggle with that equally merciless killer, depression.  To avoid one kind of pandemic, it seems, many of us have had to throw ourselves into the path of another.

Climate change. Pandemics of body and mind. We could go on to consider the impact of these things on the refugee crisis, the plight of Indigenous peoples, international students, casual workers and so on. We could talk about Trump and Sco-Mo and Boris, we could talk about populism as a symptom of anxiety. But I will refrain.  You get the point. There’s a lot of anxiety out there, and the anxiety is not a response to things that aren’t actually there. There are very good reasons to feel anxious.  There are good reasons to believe that the centre can no longer hold, that the order of things we have come to take for granted is about to go belly-up.  Very good reasons.

I want to point out, however, that when Yeats wrote his poem in 1919 he conveniently forgot a few things. He forgot that the British has been brutalising and starving the Irish for several centuries already, and that the prospect of a new crackdown on the independence movement was therefore hardly unexpected.  He also forgot that the Great War was not the first conflict to have devasted Europe. It was simply the latest in a continuous series of conflicts that had already killed or maimed millions and destroyed economies utterly. Hardly new. He also conveniently forgot that the Spanish flu was not Europe’s first pandemic. There had been plagues and 'black' deaths for centuries.  Again, hardly unprecedented.  All of which is to say that whilst Yeats brilliantly captures the anxiety he felt in 1919, his poem can hardly be taken as a witness to something entirely new or unforeseen in the story of humanity. 

Quite simply, there has never been a ‘centre’, some kind of cosmic or moral order, that is suddenly falling into rack and ruin. Rack and ruin has been the name of the game from the beginning. There has always been war, there have always been bully-boy politicians, there has always been poverty. There has always been illness and death. At the time when Jesus was born, for example, the Jews had been ruled by foreign powers for three centuries already.  They knew well that everything had gone to pot. The life-expectancy of your average landless male peasant was around 30 years, and just 40 years if you happened to have a trade, such as carpentry. Most of the Jewish population now expected that life would be short, and it would be brutal. You were born, you worked yourself to the bone to keep your family from starving, and then you died very young, and usually left a widow but hopefully some sons and daughters who could take over the family business and do it all again.  To a family like that, just like that, Jesus was born.

It’s easy to give into despair. Very easy. Most days, especially in the lead-up to Christmas, I am sorely tempted to go there. Afterall, my own people were colonised by the British and felt the savagery of the moral 'order’, the ‘centre’ they wished to impose. I still carry the trauma of that in my mind and my body. So, too, this stolen ‘country’: our lands, seas and waterways. There are deep wounds in our dreaming-places wherever you turn. But I don’t go there: to despair, I mean. And the reason I don’t is actually very simple.  I believe that in spite of all that is wrong, there is a power in the world for right. That is spite of all that is brutal and cruel, there is a power in the world that is caring, and knows how to offer love and succour to all who are hurting. I believe that in spite of the darkness and ignorance that floods our country and our lives, that there is a power in the world for light and life, and for living with country as kin, as family. That this power is here with us - that it is all around us, that it waits patiently to seep into our minds and hearts at the first indication that we are willing and in need - I can never prove to anyone. Not in the unassailable manner that many expect, anyway. But I can testify to its reality, to its power, and to its essential character: love, kindness, welcome, shelter, hospitality.  I see and feel and know these things every single day.

Rather than rabbit on and on and on about love, and about Jesus as the way in which love shows itself to the world, I want to read another poem: a poem, this time, from a humble parish priest from the Welsh countryside, a place somewhat subaltern to the English seats of power. 

RS Thomas - The Coming

 

And God held in his hand

A small globe.  Look he said.

The son looked.  Far off,

As through water, he saw

A scorched land of fierce

Colour.  The light burned

There; crusted buildings

Cast their shadows: a bright

Serpent, A river

Uncoiled itself, radiant

With slime.

               On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky.  many People

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs.  The son watched

Them.  Let me go there, he said.

The Son did come here, to live amongst us, to teach us his way of love, and to save us from the worst excesses of our inhumanity and hatred of country. It is that coming, the coming of light and love and kindness and compassion, that we celebrate tonight, and to which we commit ourselves anew for a more hopeful future.

I wish you all a holy and most joyful Christmas.

Garry Deverell

Christmas Eve 2020

The Rituals of Faith

Texts: Exodus 12.1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13.8-14; Matthew 18.15-20

Today I want to talk to you about the importance of ritual. Now that might sound strange coming from the mouth of a Protestant minister. One of the concerns which Protestants have always had with the Catholic and Orthodox churches is that they have been ritualistic churches – concerned too much with ceremony and ritual, and not enough with living out the faith in more practical ways. But I have come to believe that many Protestant churches have made a great mistake in trying to do away with rituals. Because rituals perform a very important function for all of us. They help us to celebrate, to mourn, to remember, and to move on in life. In short, they help us to grow up and grow wise in our faith.

Today’s reading from Exodus underlines the importance to Jewish people of a particular ritual known as the ‘Passover’. All over the world, Jewish people celebrate this ritual together on the 14th of Nisan, which falls within the first few weeks of April by our calendar. Here the family gathers to share a meal of lamb, unleavened bread, wine, and bitter herbs. Words are said over the meal, and prayers are said, which remind the people that they are loved by God, who liberated them from slavery in Egypt and brought them to a land of abundance in Israel. According to the Exodus passage, the Passover ritual was instituted by God’s own command to Moses. On the night of their liberation, the people of Israel were told to gather in their households and cook a lamb without blemish or defect. They were to eat this lamb, along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, in readiness for the flight from Pharaoh to freedom. They were to eat the meal with their travel clothing on, and their bags packed. And they were to spread the blood of the slaughtered lamb on the doorposts of their houses, so that when the Lord came to kill the gods of Egypt, he would pass by that house. Today when Jews eat their Passover meal, they do so with a great sense of thankfulness for the mercy of God. The slaughtered lamb is understood to symbolise an offering for Israel’s sin. The herbs remind them of their terrible suffering under the Pharaoh. The unleavened bread is a reminder of their haste in departing. And the wine represents the blood by which God spared their lives, even as judgement was visited on the strongest in the oppressor nation.

For Jews, the eating of a Passover meal is essential to their faith. It is a ritual by which they both remember their liberation and express the hope that an even more wonderful liberation might be theirs in the future of God. For Jews, the Passover is a ritual which tells a story, the story of a people and their faith. But it is also the story of each life captivated by that story. In the celebration of the Passover, individual worshippers come to see how it is that God has wrought mercy and rescue in their own lives. And they are called and empowered to live out that liberation within the concrete facts of their own bodies and relationships. By participating in the Passover rituals, individual worshippers learn how to leave the slavery of Egypt behind and enter into the journey towards life and hope in the ‘Land of Promise’.

Christian rituals function in exactly the same way. The Christian equivalent to the

Passover meal is the Easter Vigil – which happens during the night before Easter dawn. Here the Christian community gathers around a fire outside a darkened church. The Easter candle is lit as a sign of the promise that Christ shall be raised, and the community follows that light into the darkened church, where is placed in the centre of the sanctuary. In the liturgy which follows, the whole story of God’s salvation is told through a series of readings from the Scriptures, beginning with the creation in Genesis and ending with the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. As the story unfolds candles are lit, one by one, to bring joy and a future into the lives of all present. The church grows brighter, the shadows retreat, and hearts grow warm with hope. Then, at the very moment when the crucified Jesus is acclaimed as the Risen One, those who have been preparing for baptism come forward. You see, the season known as Lent, the forty days that proceed Easter, was originally designed to teach baptismal candidates about the way of Jesus Christ, and to encourage them in the solemn vows that they would be making at their Easter baptism. Now, in the midst of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, those vows are made. Having heard the whole history of God’s salvation, each candidate now owns that story for themselves. They are ritually submerged in the water of the red sea and of the Jordan, and emerge to their inheritance in a land filled with milk and honey, the ‘promised land’ of God. They are crucified with Christ and buried in the tomb, and then raised to life with Christ. They put off the clothing of their old allegiances and ways of life, and are clothed anew with Christ himself, the garment of their salvation. In the joy of that moment, the whole community reaffirms its baptismal vows, and shares in the Eucharistic supper, thus taking to itself, once more, the Christ who lived, and died, and lives for ever to pray for our release from slavery.

In the Great Vigil of Easter, Christian worshippers are reminded of who they are, and to whom they belong. There they experience a renewed call from the Spirit to live after the way of the crucified and risen Christ, to follow his way in the concrete relations of their daily lives. The Great Vigil is Christianity’s most powerful ritual, because it tells the story in full that other rituals tell only in part: the story of God’s transformative love, in Christ, for all the world. It is there to transform our lives and renew us in the faith of Christ. What a shame, then, that while the service is in our own Uniting Church worship book, that so few actually do it!

When Paul talks, in the reading from Romans, about clothing ourselves with Christ in readiness for the day of our salvation, he is recalling the experience of baptism, and inviting us to live out of that ritual in an imaginative engagement with the everyday. Here Paul asks us to imagine that we are awake in those moments of darkness before the dawn arrives, those moments of stillness and anticipation when the night has not yet passed, but the day is at hand. We are invited to take the opportunity afforded by that quietness to reflect on a particular question: how may I be ready to live the day which is coming for all its worth? How may I cast off the deeds of darkness and embrace the light that is in Christ? Paul suggests to us that we live in a time where there is no time to waste. We are called to stop living for ourselves, and start living for God. Can you see the potential for powerful, transformative, ritual in the association Paul draws between salvation and the coming of the dawn? Each dawn signals the arrival of new possibilities. Could we not use the newness of each dawning day to renew ourselves in the vows we have made to Christ? Could we not, as we put on our clothes in the morning, immerse ourselves in a prayer of recommitment?

I know of no-one who seizes these possibilities for ritual more fully and enthusiastically than the monks of St. Benedict. They rise before the dawn and put on the simple habit of Christ’s poverty. Then they gather to chant the Psalms, and to invite the Lord to weave his salvation into the simple but demanding work of their day. I aspire to be a monk too, albeit one who has chosen to live in the midst of this messy and complicated world. I want to be one who weaves daily, weekly, and seasonal rituals to remind me of who I am in Christ, and what I am called to be in Christ. I want to be one who remembers the story of faith each day, and makes that story my own. I want to be one who daily finds ways to embrace the transformative power of the deepest ritual of all: the ritual of dying with Christ, that I might be reborn to his love.

In the reading from Matthew, Jesus says ‘whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’. What did he mean? Well, amongst other things, he wanted us to know that rituals change things, that rituals change people’s lives. For rituals are vows. They are a binding of earth to heaven so that the Son of God may become flesh amongst us and carry us home to God in his risen power.

In these days of terror and war, our secular society needs the rituals of faith more, perhaps, than ever before. How is one to make sense of what is happening unless one is able to place it within the framework of suffering, slavery, and the longing for justice expressed so powerfully in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions? If September 11 is able to teach us nothing else, I hope it will teach us that there is no such thing as a ritual-free space. What our secularized political leaders still do not grasp is this: that the attacks on New York and Washington were driven by a sense of the religious and of ritual, albeit a perverted form of the same. In that perspective, the question the world ought to be asking, ten years on, is not “How do we capture, kill or lock up the terrorists so that they can’t do it again?” but “How do we successfully undo the power of this ritual, so that the desire to do it all again is displaced into something more life-affirming?” Why did Bush and Blair bomb Iraq back into the stone-age? Because they asked the first question rather than the second. They didn’t understand that to take that course of action would achieve nothing by way of a real solution. It is clear now, is it not, that the campaign against Iraq played right into the evil ritual’s logic, absorbed into that story as a demonic event by which the desire for revenge against the West would be multiplied a hundredfold.

Let me suggest to you that the only effective way to confront such rituals is to enter deeply into the human roots from which they spring, to know the pain and darkness of that people’s experience, and then to gather it all up into the weaving of a more redeeming ritual, a ritual that has the power to transform darkness into light, and pain into praise. The Easter Vigil (along with the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist from which it springs) does exactly that: teaching, explicitly, that the logic of ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth’ must come to its termination in us, within the dying of our sin-saturated selves, if there is ever to be a real basis for justice and peace. My earnest prayer is that the ritual practice of this power-in-powerlessness would spread even into the corridors of the Whitehouse, and of the Israeli Parliament, and of Hamas and the Taliban, so that their inhabitants may learn the way of peace by which the world may be transformed in love.