There is no sense of justice

The following words from David Hartley, whose wife Marie was killed in the 7/7 bombings in London struck home to me, amidst all the celebrations on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and comments that justice has been served:

They have got one but there are more behind there.
I can't see this meaning terrorism is likely to stop there. They might try retaliating a bit more now.
There is no sense of justice. They have some one but there are plenty of people willing to take his place.
He is just one of them.


Of course, I am not saying that David Hartley speaks for all those who lost loved ones in 7/7 or 9/11.  Many of those will feel a sense of justice; and be glad that an evil man who had no conscience about killing innocent civilians is now dead.  I guess for all of us there is a feeling of "he got what he deserved".


But evil atrocities, whether they are on a mass scale or perpetrated by one individual on another, make us all feel angry.  In my voluntary work, I get to talk to victims of the most appalling abuse - be it sexual abuse, domestic violence, or emotional bullying.  I've witnessed the devastation it wreaks on people.  Just because it's one person (or maybe two or three in the case of abuse of children within the family) doesn't make the perpetrators any less evil.


I confess I have a hard time dealing with the anger I feel about this.  It is hard not to feel burning anger against someone who for instance has inflicted sexual abuse on a child of under five, or the husband who beats his wife up in a drunken rage (not forgetting that sometimes it is the other way round and violent women abuse their husbands as well).


What is one to do with this anger?  One popular way (in the case of sex offenders) is to "name and shame" - to expose sex offenders and hurl hatred and vitriol at them; for example on a "name and shame" website I saw one article about a particular offender.  The phrase "piece of shit" seemed to figure prominently in this article and was repeated several times.  This particular offender died recently; a local newspaper carried the headline: "Pervert dies, aged 72".  Does this help?  How does it make the world a better place to say "I'm so happy this piece of shit is dead?"


But there is a different way to respond to this kind of atrocity.  Reach out to the victims.  Very often victims of abuse descend into self-loathing - blaming themselves for their misfortune.  To reach out involves trying your best to understand what it is that they are going through & to try and stand alongside them and understand their feelings.  I am not so sure that saying to them "what an arsehole!" is the most helpful response.  Indeed, telling them it's not their fault when they have got stuck in a mindset where they firmly believe it's their fault isn't going to help.  What helps is trying to understand those feelings - maybe even if you feel they are wrong to have those feelings, to walk with them a little, rather than brush them aside.  The journey from self-loathing to anger at the perpetrator, to the ultimately healing process of forgiveness is a difficult and long one, and the last of those steps is easily the most difficult to take.


But there is a difference with Bin Laden.  A sex abuser/wife abuser is not my personal enemy, but Bin Laden appeared to be an enemy of everyone in the West.  In early rhetoric he stated it was only Americans who were his enemy, but then Al-Quaeda atrocities extended to many others in the Western world, and the 9/11 attack killed many Muslims as well.  So I guess he was my enemy.


Someone commenting on Krish Kandiah's thoughtful blog post produced one of the most apt Biblical quotations to address this, from the book of Job:


Have I rejoiced at the extinction of my enemy,
Or exulted when evil befell him?
No, I have not allowed my mouth to sin
By asking for his life in a curse.
Job 31:29-30 NASB


I think many of us must have thought of Bin Laden "I wish that f------ b------ was dead!"  I'm sure I have; I'm only human.  But the celebrations erupting over the world make me feel quite uneasy.

One in Fifty Thousand

[Author's note:  One of the biggest questions facing believers is the problem of pain and suffering.  There are no easy glib answers to this question.  It is clear that on a planet of fixed size, if there is birth there has to be death to make room.  But what if all pain were removed and death was always painless?  I have tried to imagine what this would be like in the following story ..]

One in fifty thousand is not much to worry about.  It is hardly worth concerning yourself when you go to sleep that one in fifty thousand will not wake up the next day, and you could be one of them.  One in fifty thousand will go to sleep, content and happy and painless, and will be carried off by the silent swathe that passes over the slumbering.  One in fifty-one thousand one hundred and thirty-five, to be precise, the statisticians have calculated.  It is so curious an exactitude that one may expect to live, on average for precisely threescore years and ten, just as it has been decreed in scripture, that many have seen this as evidence of the existence of God.    But the timing of the swathe for each individual has no pattern or apparent purpose; it favours not age over youth.  One may live to seventy and then expect to live another seventy.  One in sixteen may live to two-hundred and eighty, still looking the same as when they were twenty-one, and still expect to live another seventy.

We are supposed not to worry about this.  I am one-hundred and eighty-nine years old, and I am gazing at the sleeping form of my wife, Kate, a mere child of thirty-seven, and I am worried.  She is so beautiful and I love her so much it hurts.  It’s not supposed to hurt, but how can I not hurt and worry that she will be swept away without warning this night; that she will be taken from me just like the four before her?  Why not me first for a change?  I am supposed not to mind, for it says in scripture:

Husbands love your wives; wives love your husbands, but not to excess.  Be happy for them when they are taken away to greater rewards.  Do not mourn your loss, you who are widowed; your body remains unblemished and beautiful - you will find another partner who will appreciate the wisdom of your years that is contained in your soul but which leaves your body unmarked.

I dare not tell Kate how much I love her.  Such levels of love are unhealthy – they would start to poison her and she could lose her mind as I surely am losing mine.  In our lovemaking tonight, as in all other nights, I experienced a few fleeting seconds of exquisitely delicious pain at the apex of the act of union, and only then did I feel real – the wonderful balance of pain and ecstasy that is a release from the numbness of my meaningless existence.   I have wished many times that the end to lovemaking would bring death to both of us, in each other’s arms; such a release from the endless bearing of children, painless for the mother, but with each the potential to bring heartbreak when they are as likely as not to be swept away before you, as eight of my seventeen already have been.

I have identified that pain is the element that is missing, and I long for it.  That is why I say I am losing my mind.  I long for pain. I long for it to bring meaning.   And yet we all seem blessed (or rather cursed) with the inability to feel pain – the inability to feel real.  I try to re-create pain on my own; in the kitchen I slash a knife uselessly across my wrist, feel the slight sting, watch a few drops of blood come out, before, in a few seconds, the wound heals up, leaving no mark, and the stinging abates leaving only the mental torture that is inside my head.  If only it would leave a permanent mark, a scar so I could say on such and such a day I cut myself here to stop myself going mad.  But my wrist is as unblemished as it was a few moments ago – there are no visible memorials to map out my struggle.

 Why is it that we do not feel pain, as animals do?  Why is it that our existence is reduced to one of bland shallowness?  Some have said it is our kind Deity who cannot bear to watch His children suffer pain.  That He protects us from pain and disease, from age and infirmity because He wants our happiness, our joy, our gratitude.   Do I seem ungrateful?  I do not believe so, because I cannot believe such a Deity exists, for if He does, he cannot be good – more a sadistic monster who laughs at my torment and my expectation that it could continue like this for another seventy years.  No, such a Deity is not kind at all.  Would that the Deity would not be so cowardly as to protect us from pain, but would come down and live among us; stand alongside us in that pain.  That kind of God is one I could believe in.  But not the wimp and coward we are told to worship.  I reject such notions – there has to be a natural explanation of why we are preserved till we die, and why we die in exactly the pattern of the decay of  radioactive atoms.

I look again at Kate’s sleeping form beside me.  My arm is draped over her and I feel the perfect, womanly shape, and the smooth, regular rise and fall of her breast as she sleeps.  I want so much to shake her awake – to say don’t go there where you could be swept away like the other four.  Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me I cannot bear to lose yet another.  But she does not know what it is I’m going through – she does not appear to suffer internally as I do.  I shall not poison her mind and allow her to plunge into my turmoil.

I cannot continue any longer, Godless and hopeless. An end to life is all I want; not easy to achieve given the uncanny robustness of my body.  I get up from the bed, and pack a rucksack with heavy rocks from the garden. 

I now stand on the bridge over the river; the rocks will weigh me down, and ensure I don’t return to the top before my breathing has ceased.  I take one last look round, on the bridge top, at this pointless world, then launch myself towards the water, ready to embrace the nothingness that surely follows …

…

Suddenly I am awake.  My pulse is racing and there is a slight sweat on my forehead.  The nightmare is over, but as the pain starts to take hold, jabbing its vile spikes all over me, I know it is time for the next dose of morphine.  The nurse comes and administers the temporary relief.  Kate sits on my bed, holding my hand.  As the pain subsides, I gaze upon her face, no longer flawless as in her youth, but lined with the ever-advancing edge of age.  I don’t care – I can still see all her loveliness, and there is no reason why I should not tell her.  I put my arm around her waist and feel her warmth.  Our eyes gaze at each other and three unspoken words pass from one to the other.  In a few days’ time (it cannot surely be more than that) she is going to lose me, and she is ready.

Parable

Quakers believe that something of God may be found in every human being.  That thought prompted me to dream up this modern reworking of a very old joke.

After a long, good, moral, and kind life, an atheist finally dies at a ripe old age.  Much to his surprise he discovers that there really is such a thing as God, and life after death, despite never having entertained such notions during his life.  Moreover, he discovers that God, whom he had previously been warned was a jealous and judgmental character, was in fact the source of the good that was in his life - and indeed he had lived a very good and noble life.

So, as a result, completely unexpectedly, he finds himself admitted to Heaven.  It is a wonderful place: a massive party with tables laid out with delicious food that never seems to run out,  and plenty of drink which you can drink without ever getting too drunk.  Laughter and dancing abound all over the place.

He takes a stroll around and comes across an immensely long wall.  Looking into the distance, he sees that the wall eventually disappears, like the horizon, and he realises it encloses a gigantic circular region.  Out of curiosity he puts his ear to the wall, and hears similar sounds of merriment coming from the other side.  Wondering what the purpose of the wall is, he calls over one of the angels who is serving the drinks, and asks "What's with the wall?  Who is it on the other side?"

The angel replies:  "That'll be the Christians.  They think they are the only ones here."

PS in the original version of the joke, it was the Catholics who thought they were the only ones there.

Our Labour Paused

Inspired by Carol Ann Duffy's new poem Silver Lining (hear the Poet Laureate read her poem here), I took some photographs, and wrote my own poem, which bears no small debt to "Silver Lining".  The weekend where the skies were so empty of planes felt like a pause at home; a pause that caused havoc for those stranded however, serving to remind us how dependent we are on a precious resource that is bound to run out eventually.

Our Labour Paused


Not in fifty springs
May I see the cherry-blossom thus:
Dancing against a plain and planeless blue,
Endless shades of white undulating the petals,
Stamens accosted by hoverings of wasps and bees;
Nature reclaiming the skies and continuing to work.

But this morning, deemed safe
To receive our own outpourings
Of earth's innards,
The blue infinities,
Criss-crossed with kids' crayons,
Streaked with white fragments
In straight lines, billowing to a dull blur,
Witness:

Lovers, reunited,
Supermarkets, restocked,
Business meetings, rescheduled.

And for who knows how long,
Our labour, unskilled beside Nature's,
Propelling the world into our mould,
Resumes?

Does Suffering have a meaning?

Coincident with my daughter doing an essay for her English Literature coursework on Beckett’s “Endgame” on the proposition whether tragedy creates a sense of meaning to suffering, I find myself also pondering this subject – a fitting one for a Good Friday, when we remember Christ’s suffering on the Cross.  Rather than consider academically whether the literary genre of tragedy can create a sense of meaning for suffering, I shall try and consider the broader question of whether suffering has a meaning at all, or is it the the inevitable consequence of a blind, pitilessly indifferent nature , as Richard Dawkins has argued in “River Out Of Eden”?

Dawkins’s materialistic explanation has the merit that it is the easiest to understand.  If there is no God, then there isn’t the difficult part of explaining why such a God should allow suffering.

And yet, we all somehow want to find meaning in suffering – and some better explanation for it than random chance.  I do not know why this should be, and yet even in Beckett’s bleak masterpiece “Endgame”, there is this need to find some meaning, or perhaps someone to blame.  There is one point in the play in which three of the characters attempt to pray in silence to God.  After a short pause they all decide that absolutely nothing has happened.  The main character, Hamm, comments “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”  This comment was originally censored in England when it was performed in 1957.  The objection was to calling God a “bastard”, and not to asserting that he didn’t exist, and the word was changed to “swine”.

Though this line is shockingly blasphemous, I think it’s pretty funny at the same time, and also very profound.  To call someone a “bastard” implies that you believe they exist, so the juxtaposition of this on an assertion of non-existence creates a paradox that makes us think.  Some part of our rationality wants to have someone to blame for suffering; it seems a blind indifferent universe isn’t sufficient to have a go at:  because it is not a person, you can’t call the universe a bastard.  Or it might be that the speaker is angry at God for not existing.  Why didn’t you show up and help us through all of this?  In the same way, one of the emotions experienced in the grief of bereavement is anger at the person who died – how dare they die and leave me alone?

So how does our religion deal with this big problem?  In a way it provides and doesn’t provide an answer at the same time.  The debate over meaning in suffering goes back to the most ancient times.  In the book of Job in the bible, there is much debate over the reason for Job’s immense suffering.  For his three so-called “comforters”, it is clear that they want to find a rational explanation for it.  They argue that Job must have sinned, and as a result he is suffering.  All he has to do is admit his guilt and God will forgive him.  In this, the suffering is seen as a consequence of Job’s actions.  But throughout all this, Job maintains his innocence – he hasn‘t done anything essentially wrong to deserve this.  In the final chapters of the book, Job is confronted by God, and yet still, no complete answer is given to the riddle of his suffering.  Instead God shows him the vastness and intricacy of His creation, and reminds Job of his ignorance – how little he knows, and how he wasn’t there when it was all put together.   In the end, Job realises this and states “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3).  By the end, Job is vindicated and, but his friends have been foolish in asserting that there is a rational explanation – bad deeds and their consequences; and they are rebuked and have to seek forgiveness.

All of this seems to imply that suffering does not have a meaning, or that maybe the meaning of it is beyond our grasp.

How does this all change with the events we recall on Good Friday?  I have written elsewhere of Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” that one of the characters (Lucky) is an analogue for Christ, through which Beckett negates the idea that Christ’s suffering achieved any purpose.  In contrast to Christ’s last words on the Cross “It is finished!”, the last words spoken by Lucky in the play before his mock “death and resurrection” are “Unfinished ...”.  The hapless Lucky’s suffering has achieved nothing at all, and it proceeds after those events, and nothing has changed.  Likewise in “Endgame”, the first words spoken by Clov  (who is a kind of “suffering servant” to the central character Ham) are “Finished, It’s finished, nearly finished,  it must be nearly finished”, starting from the complete certainty of “Finished” and descending by degrees into uncertainty.  The suffering of the characters in the play goes on, day in, day out, the same farce day after day, seemingly without point and meaning.  The absence of belief in God implies that death can be seen as the end of suffering, and yet the characters never seem able to take that step.  In Hamm’s first speech, perhaps echoing the famous soliloquy of the similarly-named Hamlet, he states “ it’s time it ended, and yet ... I hesitate ...... to ... to end”.  And similarly for Hamlet, the stark debate “To be, or not to be” boils down to indecision – is it really a question of not existing anymore, or is there an “undiscovered country” (the afterlife) in which even more disturbing dreams may come than in this life?

While for Hamlet, the fear of what the afterlife may bring deters him from suicide, perhaps for Hamm it is still this innate desire to find meaning in existence, and the suffering that existence entails.

Does Christ’s suffering on the Cross provide an answer to all this?  Does His suffering have a “meaning”?  Traditionally the doctrine of substitutionary atonement – that Christ died in our place, and took the punishment that we deserved, is supposed to provide this answer.

But is the answer as simple as this?  In one sense it is.  All you have to do is believe and be saved; that much is clear from the Bible (see John 3:16 ).  But like many deep mysteries, there are always further layers to be explored. The most important moment, perhaps during the accounts of the crucifixion that we read is when Jesus says “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”  This is the cry of someone who suffers intolerably, and has no idea why.  In its fear and confusion, is it not somewhat similar to Hamm’s cry: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist.” ?  It carries the same sense of accusation in "why have you done this?"

So for me, as a Christian, it seems what this shows is that we still don’t know the reason why suffering exists, but we do know that God placed himself in the same position as us, of not knowing the reasons, and enduring all the fear, anguish and suffering that this entails.  Just as Job was innocent, so was Christ, and innocent people suffer for no reason.  What Christ’s death and resurrection show us is that one day we may find a reason, and an end of suffering.  God is not a non-existent bastard,  but a real entity who knows just as we do, what it is to suffer.

Comment moderation enabled

I regret to announce that I have had to enable comment moderation on this blog.  This is because some moron is leaving comments in Japanese that contain embedded links to Japanese porn sites, disguised as a row of dots.  This has continued despite the fact I have enabled the "Captcha" technology, so the moron has to sit there and manually enter the Captcha code.  I apologise for the inconvenience to any regular readers who might wish to comment.

Wisdom, Knowledge, and Information

In watching the "Lewis" TV detective drama last night ("Lewis" is the follow on series from "Inspector Morse") I was struck by the misquoting of a T.S. Eliot poem.  The sergeant (who is the "intellectual one" of the pair of central characters) states "Where is the wisdom we have lost in information".  On being asked what that was from he said "T.S. Eliot" as I knew he would.  However I also knew that the quote was slightly incorrect.  Two lines have been telescoped into one by the scriptwriter.  The correct quote is:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?


I first encountered the second line during the literature review study for my PhD in Computer Science.  The quote was placed at the beginning of someone else's thesis that I included in the review.  The thesis in question was about techniques for visualising complex multi-dimensional datasets in order to spot patterns among a heap of numbers.  Thus it was appropriate to have the quote, because the techniques the author had developed enabled the extraction of knowledge from what would otherwise be a load of incomprehensible information that could overload us.

Modern technology has made it possible to get knowledge from a huge amount of information.  It helped me in finding the source of this poem.  I knew it was by T.S. Eliot, but couldn't remember which poem it was.  I attempted to speed-read my yellowing copy of T.S. Eliot's collected poems but didn't find it.  Then I turned to a search engine on the internet and typed in the quote.  In a fraction of a second I had a number of hits, and about the first hit revealed the knowledge I was looking for, that it was a chorus from "The Rock", and I was then able to find it in my book.  It is pretty amazing that out of the monumental quantities of information on the Internet, my simple search on Google could give me the piece of knowledge I was looking for.

However, the answer to Eliot's first question:  where is the WISDOM we have lost in knowledge, is far less straightforward.  If knowledge is a higher representation of information (which in computer terms is just a string of zeros and ones, but in Eliot's terms would probably just be a set of disconnected facts), then wisdom is perhaps higher representation of knowledge.

I have been thinking that in using "Knowledge" here, perhaps Eliot is referring to the Tree of Knowledge in the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall, in the early chapters of the Bible.

This knowledge represented a loss of innocence for the two characters; they realise they are naked - they feel shame.  And so, too for us, knowledge isn't always helpful, but can be put to destructive use.  Once the atomic bomb was developed, we had enough knowledge to destroy the planet.  Even without that, we may destroy things by pollution, causing catastrophic climate change, or possibly we shall run out of natural resources such as fossil fuels before alternatives can be found, causing widespread instability, famine and wars.  All of this comes about because our immense scientific knowledge allows us to exploit the earth in ways which it cannot in the long term sustain.

So how does one rediscover the wisdom that has been lost in knowledge?  It is not an easy question to answer.  The only one I can come up with is that we have to listen to our consciences.  C.S. Lewis writes in "Mere Christianity" of the "Moral Law", the innate sense of right and wrong that we all have built in instinctively.  We all know what is fair and right, and that somehow the right thing to do is to act altruistically.  Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, and now head of the National Institutes of Health, has also written about the Moral Law in describing his own conversion from atheism to Christianity in his book The Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief

This moral law is the voice of our conscience, and C.S. Lewis says it is a gift from God, and for Francis Collins it was the realisation of this Law, to which we are all subject, and which nonetheless we wantonly and knowingly disobey much of the time, that was the key factor in the crumbling of his own atheism and acceptance (initially unwillingly) of Christianity.

We should always try and listen to this voice of conscience, even if what it tells us to do makes us unpopular or unfashionable, or even if it contradicts whatever dogma (religious or political) that we happen to follow.  Because the true voice of your conscience  (not necessarily the one you want to hear, but the one that you know in your heart is right) is the true voice of God.  St. Paul writes of this (Romans 2:14) in a wonderful parenthetical comment, a true piece of wisdom buried within all the other knowledge and information presented in his letter:

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, because they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)