That Election Prayer!

Before the last general election two years ago I wrote a blog about how we might pray in the days before we cast our vote. I recycled it recently and it got a few appreciative nods. Enough said, I thought.

But then I saw the official prayer issued by the Church of England for this 2019 election. Here it is.



God of grace and truth,
send your Spirit to guide us
as we discover your will for our country.
Help us to discuss the issues before us
with courtesy, truth and mutual respect,
and grant that all who stand for parliament
will seek to serve the common good,
through him who came not to be served but to serve,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Oh dear!

Yes, I have to say that it left me feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and I admit, embarrassed. Judging by responses on social media, I'm not alone. Everyone endorses the sentiments about courtesy, truth and mutual respect. We all want those who are standing for parliament to seek to serve the common good (but why seek to? - such a weak, padding kind of phrase when what we're longing for are men and women who will go beyond "seeking" actually to embrace "serving" without fear or favour). And I'd have thought we would want to focus our prayer specifically on those who are elected to parliament rather than simply standing. But let's not be pedantic when there's a bigger matter at stake.

It's the opening petition that's the trouble. Send your Spirit to guide us as we discover your will for our country. I don't think this will do, either as prayer or as theology. Which is saying the same thing. Lex orandi, lex credendi: as we believe, so we pray; and as we pray, so our belief is formed and shaped. Doctrine, liturgy and spirituality are not separate from one another. They are a single entity that expresses our response to the God whom we worship and serve. I'm saying that this and every liturgical text not only tells us something about how we pray. It's a mirror that unmasks and reflects back to us what we truly believe, in this case about God's will and purpose for us mortals.

Or at any rate, us mortals who make up the United Kingdom. This Church of England prayer seems to put into our minds and mouths the idea that whatever the outcome of the election, it will prove to have been God's will. This is what we are asking the Spirit to help us discover, as if having said our prayers, it's simply a matter of unwrapping an early Christmas present on Friday the Thirteenth to find out what we've been given.

Shouldn't we have learned by now that it's a dangerous doctrine to elide what actually happens in life with God's will and purpose? The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz may have believed that ours is the best of all possible worlds (among other reasons because a world that exists at all is arguably better than one that doesn't). Alexander Pope put it into verse.

All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT".

Voltaire was at first a keen disciple of this kind of optimism. But he had to learn through his disappointments in life that it most definitely isn't the case that whatever is, is right. In 1755 an earthquake in Lisbon destroyed the city and killed tens of thousands of innocent people. That terrible catastrophe put an end to his innocence. It gave him a feeling for tragedy. "If Pope (the poet) had been at Lisbon, would he have dared to affirm that all is well?" Candide is his witty demolition of optimism as a doctrine that does justice to the way things are. It doesn't. It's hopelessly simplistic. And for that reason, perilous.

I think the Church of England's prayer falls squarely into the optimistic trap of believing that whatever is (whatever the result of the election), is right. It seems to believe that the election outcome is the answer to the question we put when we invoke the Spirit to help us discover your will for our country. Job done. Prayer answered. The mystery of providence grasped and understood!

But what if providence were infinitely more inscrutable than this way of praying seems to affirm?

How we understand "God's will" in relation to the complexities, ambiguities and baffling realities of life, particularly to pain and suffering, is called theodicy. Some of the greatest minds of the Bible gave themselves to exploring it, most famously the author of the Book of Job. That book concludes that there is no conclusion, no answer or formula that will "explain" the mystery of providence and the reality of suffering. Events are facts on the ground, but they don't tell us about God's purpose. This was the problem Voltaire had to face when the wake-up call from Lisbon overturned his optimistic view of the world. The outcome of the election will be a fact by Friday, but whether we think it's a good or bad result is in no way connected with "God's will for our country". That's just a lazy optimistic assumption. Politicians (and clergy?) may like the convenient idea that whatever is, is right. But as an intelligent account of the world and of human life, it won't do.

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So what can we say about the election and God's providence? And how should we pray about it?

Kierkegaard said that life has to be lived forwards but understood backwards. This is the only way we can begin to make sense of how God is among us. Not by looking back at events and pronouncing a verdict ("yes, that must have been his will!") but by glimpsing how God is present in the ebbs and flows of human history and in the stories of personal life. How we try to respond when someone is terminally ill or is killed in a road accident can help us here. Intelligent faith doesn't say, never says, "Oh, it must be God's will" (whatever is, is right!). Instead, it tentatively asks where God's presence might be discerned in the very midst of a person's suffering, suggest how God is among us not as presiding over pain but as its victim. Isn't this what the passion narrative teaches us?

So yes, there are election outcomes I would prefer to see this week, and outcomes I'd find it hard to welcome. I'd go further and suggest that some of those outcomes are closer than others to my own vision of society, informed by my Christian faith. But note the pronoun! It's a personal perception. Whether it's held by many or few doesn't make it "the will of God". I'm not even sure we can confidently speak about the will of the nation in these febrile times, let alone the will of the Almighty.

Therefore, faced with the inscrutable mystery of divine providence, I'd prefer to say nothing about God's will, and not speculate about things I can't possibly know or even guess at. "Before that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent" said the twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in one of the most important sayings of our time. To say nothing, that is, other than to urge us all to continue in the spiritual task of discerning the signs of the times and responding as intelligently as we can to whatever the present moment suggests we must do next. That can begin to happen when theology and prayer learn how to be humble, cultivate reticence, discover how not to resort to words when the silence of not knowing would be the better, wiser, more creative response.

I think this could help faith gain respect in an era when we are so much more aware of the complexity of things than our forebears. We must wean ourselves off the easy talk about "the will of God" and the old religious formula and its modern equivalents, whatever is, is right. That kind of God-talk may bring comfort in the short-term. But it won't sustain us for long, because it's not only manifestly false to our reading of events, but as we've seen in our own times, utterly discredited. It's religion-lite with an untroubled conscience, not the tough, demanding Christianity we learn from the New Testament that requires us to wrestle with the dilemmas of believing. The assumption that mortals can ever know God's will in any ultimate sense shouldn't even be hinted at in the way we pray.

And if we're ever tempted back into naive spiritual optimism, all we need to do is to whisper a word or two that symbolises what we can't know and ought not to speculate about in terms of the providence of God. We simply have to name catastrophe or evil for what they are to put paid to idle theorizing. The Lisbon Earthquake. Auschwitz. All cruelty, slavery and abuse. Or when death is untimely and wrong as it so often is. And when the pain won't go away. Or when a relationship is irretrievably fractured. Or simply when events bewilder us, when the paper the book of providence is written on seems darker than the words themselves and we can't make head or tail of them.

Why do we pray? Because we believe that God cares about the world, about nations and peoples, about every human life. It's an act of trust in our Creator and the grace and truth we recognise in him. By praying, we defy despair and affirm that we do not lose heart, whatever the circumstances. Who can say what effect this great project of hope may have? But we do know for sure how it affects us in our best moments, even if we often seem to be doing little more than holding other people in our hearts. That "work" of prayer, for me, is to do a very great deal! Prayer deepens our feeling for others, aligns our care and compassion with God's. It makes us open to new possibilities, helps shape our aspirations, commits us to act in the name of all that is right and good and so point to the grace and truth that are already among us. In the end all prayer is an act of love - for our neighbour as well as God.

Which is why we must pray this week. If we didn't love our nation and our fellow-citizens, why would we bother praying for them? Here’s an excellent prayer produced by the Methodist Church that does it beautifully.

And  here  once again is the election prayer I commended in my earlier blog. It's not a perfect text. But at least I can say for it that I'd be content to say Amen at the end if I heard it read in church. Which is more than I'm able to do with the C of E's latest offering. Sorry! 

"The best things just happen to you."

It was the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said that. I came across it while reading an intriguing book** by the child psychotherapist Adam Phillips. He is writing about how a lot of learning happens, not as a result of formal schooling but through hints and nudges. He means the things that "just happen" to us, inconsequential in themselves but for the fact that we remember them and find ourselves returning to them in our thoughts and reflections, even find that our lives were changed because of them.

He quotes a fellow philosopher who recalls a walk Wittgenstein and he were on. Wittgenstein "had seen a play, a third-rate, poor play, when he was twenty-two. One detail in that play had made a powerful impression on him.  It was a trifle. But here some peasant, some-ne'er-do well says in the play: 'Nothing can hurt me.' That remark went through him and now he remembers it. It started things you can't tell. The most important things just happen to you."

I stopped reading to think about that. Is it true, I asked myself? The most important things Wittgenstein says, not just happy conjunctions of events that please us but things that really matter, or as we might say, things of ultimate concern. Bishop Ian Ramsey of Durham, a philosopher of religion who was much influenced by Wittgenstein, spoke about disclosure experiences, "when the penny drops". Carl Gustav Jung would never use the language of coincidences. For him, the fact that we notice them at all, pay attention even fleetingly to how events have come together in a particular way, confers significance on them, gives them meaning. There are no coincidences. If they are important and matter to us, there are only synchronicities.

Personal experience has to be the test of Wittgenstein's dictum. What does my own memory tell me about this? How have the things that "just happen" been significant, touched my life in some way? Looking back over six years of blogging, I find I've mentioned some of them. For example: my love of maths that led me to read it at university; the part music has played in my life for as long as I can remember; the books in childhood that influenced me; my lifelong commitment to the continent of Europe that comes out of my having a British father and a German-Jewish mother; memories of Christmas past; and much more recently, the birth of my first grandson. In that last blog, I wrote about how I would always remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard that news. Most of us can tell similar stories about how certain events impinged on us: when our team won the Cup Final, say, or when we heard the news that someone close to us had died. Maybe that's one criterion by which we measure the importance that certain events hold for us, that in an instant, our lives as they were then seem captured as in a photograph.

But none of those can be described strictly speaking as "chance". They belong to contexts that up to a point were already shaped by upbringing or environment. What about the events that at the time seemed to "happen" out of the blue, unforeseen, unforeseeable, yet never forgotten? I've had to think about that today, but here are three I've come up with.

The first is a very archaic memory indeed, probably my earliest, but it's as clear as anything I can recall. We were in Germany where my mother needed to travel regularly to sort out her family's affairs after the war. My parents had found lodgings under the eaves in a back street of Düsseldorf, my mother's home town. My mother told me once that I could not have been more than just over two years old when we stayed there. What I remember was seeing the outline of a church tower and spire out of the window not far away. It was black, dramatically silhouetted against the sky. That evening, something awoke me. It was the sound of church bells being rung in that tower - not change-ringing as in England, but that random tolling of great heavy bells against one other that every European traveller has heard on a Sunday morning.

To me that sound seemed to penetrate my being from top to bottom. This primitive sound that seemed to batter my heart was deeply frightening, even dread-ful, yet somehow, in a way I didn't yet have words for, enticing as well. It felt as if it mattered. Was it my first encounter with that mysterium tremens et fascinans which is how some writers have characterised religion? That it was my earliest conscious religious experience I now don't doubt though I couldn't have described it in that way for many years. And while it was one of the most important experiences of my life, it did "just happen". It still colours the way I think about the Divine, that as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God". It taught me even at that tender age that religion is a serious business, not a plaything or a hobby.

The second event was altogether happier. I was in my early twenties, arriving at theological college to begin training for ordained ministry. This was a few days before term was due to start. My longsuffering parish priest in London had kindly agreed to transport my books and me to the college in his Mini-Traveller and help me settle into my room. We arrived and parked the car. No-one was around except for a young man of about my age who was busy painting a side door at the foot of a staircase that led up into the building. With the warmest of smiles he explained that he too had arrived early and was busy making himself useful. By the end of the afternoon I was established in a room next to his. Why is that day etched on my memory? Because the person concerned quickly became my closest friend and has remained so for the best part of half a century. We still talk about that day we met for the first time when our friendship was born: a time of gifts if ever there was one. The only detail that maddeningly escapes me is the colour of the paint on that door. I must ask him.

My third reminiscence is about my love of photography. By now I was in my fifties. My youngest daughter had asked for a camera for Christmas, so we had bought her a digital compact. I had no interest in photography at that stage (so much so that on a pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine a few years before, I was the only person not to bring a camera. When asked why not, I pompously replied that for me, images were best encapsulated in words, so I was keeping a journal instead.) I thought nothing more about my daughter's camera until she told us that she didn't want a digital after all, so would I buy it off her so that she could get a traditional film camera instead? I agreed. It lay around unused for a while. But then I got to thinking, I've paid good money for that instrument. Maybe it's time I started using it. Living as I did in Durham's world heritage site with one of the world's greatest buildings a few yards away across the garden, I began to realise what opportunities for photography were all around me. The rest as they say is history. I can't now imagine a life without photography, just as I can't imagine one without music. And if I'm asked where I learned what I've been able to grasp as a photographer, I always say: Durham Cathedral was my teacher.

I think I can say that all three of these stories are about what "just happened". None could have been foreseen or planned for. And all three have been amongst the most important experiences of my life. There are many more, not all of which it would be right to blog about. What matters is the spiritual exercise of asking the question in the first place. An earlier generation of spiritual guides like the great eighteenth century French priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade spoke about how we must reflect often on divine Providence, discerning how God comes to us in "the sacrament of the present moment". That's the theme of one of the best English hymns from the same century, William Cowper's God moves in a mysterious way. Maybe I'll blog about that one day. For now, enough to affirm that whether in light or in shadow, our experiences can convey gifts that transcend the circumstances themselves and, even if we don't know it at the time, prove with hindsight to have transformed us in some way.

Yes, "the best things just happen to you." But we must practise how to pay attention and notice them. Who knows what has passed unnoticed in front of us a thousand times a day with the potential to give us something wonderful, undreamed of, and we missed it? That's the question I find myself asking late in life. It's not about regrets but nurturing a thirst to be more alive, being as fully present to the gift that I am alive at all as it's possible to be. I am a slow learner, but I can now add Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Adam Phillips) to the lengthening list of wise teachers to whom to be grateful. 

 

PS The friend I wrote about above has just read this, and sent me some lines from Mary Oliver:

Let me
keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

**Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery, London (Faber), 1998, p70.