Category: Christianity

Christmas Eve – the other story

Christmas is a time for charity – but that doesn’t seem to go far when we think of all the violence in the world.

It’s been a year of refugees and displacement.

I listened to Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom earlier today and the words won’t leave me. (I’m only quoting here, not providing the full lyric.) The second line I’ve quoted remembers refugees. How could we, remembering the crisis at the end of World War II, have allowed it to happen again?

….Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight/ Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight/ An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night …. /

….Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute / For the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute/ For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit …. 

…..Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed/ For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse / An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

There’s an editorial in the Christmas edition of The Week which argues that ‘people … aren’t that nice’, that Scrooge had a point. If we’re to like others, better they think as we do. Best just to come to terms with the fact, and get on with life.

That sounds all very reasonable, better not to seek the unattainable, we’ll do better if we understand our deficiencies.

But it’s precisely what we have to get beyond.

Compassion isn’t somehow a compromise with our selfish side, something which we engage in out of conscience and a mite reluctantly and find to our surprise that it’s quite rewarding. Compassion is where our true nature shows itself, and the rewards are immeasurable. Peace of mind, yes, but not peace because we seek it, but because it goes with the territory of caring for others. It’s the Buddhist message – our ‘original face’, and the Christian message – more than a pre-lapsarian state of grace, Adam and Eve in the garden – something that’s alive in the heart. And it’s the humanist message too, when we get beyond self.

Leonard Cohen sketches a wonderful, haggard and mournful face in his ‘Book of Longing’, literally sketches, and captions the sketch ‘a private gaze’, followed by the words

‘even though he was built to see the world this way, he was also built to disregard, to be free of the way he was built to see the world.’

I like that. We don’t have to resign ourselves to a selfish human nature. We are built to disregard. Dylan reminds us of a few of the million ways the world malfunctions. And we can do something about it.

Why walk the Camino?

Walking for five minutes or five hours, there’s one recurring question we ask each other. Why are you walking the Camino? Usually in life, maybe standing by a bus stop, there aren’t any easy ways into conversation, and most of us, en route to work maybe, are too lost in our own thoughts or anxieties to want to talk. But on the Camino you’re a big exception if you don’t acknowledge someone with at least a ‘buen camino’, and you may well walk together a little while, and that question will always come up, in one guise or another.

And the answer? Spiritual, religious or personal? Maybe it’s simply the challenge, a bit like walking the three peaks in the UK (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon) for the hell of it, often against the clock.

The spiritual and religious blur into one another. This blog is inspired by Zen, but also firmly rooted in the Christian tradition. Walking the Camino with an open mind, and finding peace and serenity, and rejoicing each morning as the dawn turns into day – that experience is the same, whether your Christian, or Buddhist, or simply ‘spiritual’, in the best sense of that all-encompassing term.

When asked why I was walking the Camino I’d say my reasons were personal, spiritual – and historical. I love the tradition, that sense of others walking before me for the last 1200 years.

In medieval times you’d be looking for the church (the Catholic church) to grant you absolution from your sins, and the pilgrimage to Santiago was a uniquely powerful way of achieving that. The journey mattered as much as the destination, as a pathway to merit. You couldn’t take a plane to Santiago, or walk the last five days from Sarria, and receive a certificate, as you can now. Wonderful churches, on a scale which would have left pilgrims agog with wonder, grew up along the route, and the hospitals, hostelries, provided care and shelter. This was the Christian gospel in action, in a marvellous way, and even if our faith is not as theirs was, we can pick up on something of their experience, and be inspired by it.

In the movie The Way James Nesbitt plays Jack, an Irish travel writer who, reacting against his upbringing, refuses to enter churches, but come Santiago, he’s there, in the cathedral. Religion as it should be is both celebration and sanctuary, and the pure Romanesque of churches at Torres del Rio, Villalcazar and Fromista, to quote just three examples, reminds us of that. Maybe it influenced Jack (OK, I know he’s fictional!) as it influenced me.

Walking over 500 miles you find your prejudices challenged. All your petty grumbles and bigotries in time come to seem rather absurd. So too with the church, and I’m thinking of all denominations. Too often in ordinary life it mirrors our own human failings, even encourages them. On the Camino it rises above them in a very literal sense – the churches, the great cathedrals, and a path a millennium old, often climbing up ahead of us, as it does onto the meseta, beyond Burgos.

For me, Santiago, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, they’d been companions and support and inspirations for pilgrims a thousand years ago, and they were for me this October. I’m not suggesting they had a literal presence for me. But I walked with an open mind, and set myself to connect with how pilgrims from another very different age must have experienced the Camino.

An open mind requires stillness and, walking in the pre-dawn with the crescent moon behind and stars ahead, you are walking into the stillness, and it takes you over.

‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

The dry bones of a thousand empires

Also from the Mark Twain quote:

(Damascus) has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

When we talk of being part of a Christian tradition, we do need to widen that to encompass Judaic, Greek, Roman, Arab. Talk of a thousand empires may be a little exaggerated … but our spiritual and cultural traditions have been nurtured and fashioned over many millennia, and they’ve come down to us interpreted and recreated through (for the UK) a fifteen-hundred-year Christian history. When we try and conjure value systems without that spiritual content we are doing simply that – conjuring. Belief is one thing, faith is another, they can be disavowed, but to disavow our Christian tradition, to imagine that our values have simply an evolutionary explanation, is to deny history. I italicise simply. Scientific and cultural evolution work together. The former doesn’t have the conceptual framework remotely to encompass the latter, any more than the latter can explain the former (not that anti-evolution and intelligent design protagonists haven’t tried).

To get back to Damascus – ‘will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies’. Thing long, think in terms of centuries, even millennia. Every generation thinks it has solutions, and every generation comes up short. Put the rights of man and democracy in that context: if there is a promised land it will not come out a eureka democratic moment, it will evolve over historic time.

For Syria, as for all of us.