Exiles in our Own Home: a spirituality for self-isolation

In this unlooked-for state of self-isolation or as I prefer to call it, Lazaretto which I wrote about in my last blog, the days stretch languidly ahead. They extend beyond the forthcoming spring equinox, beyond Holy Week and Easter, beyond Pentecost, even beyond the summer solstice when the days start getting shorter again.

My diary has been emptied of all engagements. No preaching or speaking, no social events to look forward to, no volunteering in the charity bookshop, no trips to see the grandchildren, no weekends away, no shopping expeditions, no bus or train journeys, no visits to the library or cinema, restaurants, cafes and art galleries, no church services to go to. Lazaretto is a strange land to find myself in.

Who knows how long this quarantine will last?  Twelve weeks are being spoken about. But it could be twenty or more, taking us towards the threshold of autumn. How will we know when it is safe to come out again? Whose permission will we need? What will it be like to take up normal activity again, frequent crowded places, start travelling, socialising, hugging and shaking hands? What will it take to banish worry and fear?

If it were winter, we would call it hibernation. But it will be summer, so the right word for it is aestivation. And spring and summer days will always have the capacity to lift our spirits, make us glad that light and warmth have arrived. They will entice us out into the open to enjoy clean fresh air (all the fresher because of lowered emissions during the pandemic through the sharp decline in air travel that it's brought). They will invite us to find our place once again in the natural world and celebrate its loveliness. Despite what some are saying, unless we have symptoms of infection, there’s no reason not to go outside during quarantine. We should take plenty of exercise. Nature has a renewing effect on mind and body. (We simply need to stay a safe distance away from anyone we meet, but the open air does provide opportunities for social contact that would be risky indoors.)

I've been hunting for analogies to help me make a good aestivation. It would be so easy for Lazaretto to be defined by negation - here's what I won't do anymore, here's what I've had to give up, here's the heavy price I'm having to pay on this long ordeal of empty times and spaces. How might I understand it more positively, as an opportunity for good things to happen, as an enriching and rewarding adventure, as gift? In my last blog, I offered a few practical suggestions. In this and coming blogs I want to see if there are comparable experiences that could shed light on what lies ahead.

My first analogy is exile. I like that image because, like self-isolation, it is unwished for. No-one goes into exile willingly. No-one contemplates the loss of home or land or community, all that's familiar and that makes us feel safe. Exile is an experience of dislocation that is enforced, often without warning. I think all this is to some extent true of quarantine. Like the exiles of Psalm 137, we can become despondent or angry, experience severe turbulence in our emotions. 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?'

But exile can be a great teacher. Much of the greatest literature in the Hebrew Bible originated in the sixth century BCE when the exiles had no choice but to re-examine the foundations of their faith in an environment where the question was inevitably, what theological, spiritual sense can this catastrophe possibly make? The fruits of that deep search are found in the Torah, the classical prophets, and many of the Psalms and wisdom writings. Israel could never have expected that the destruction of the temple, the end of the monarchy, the conquest of the land and exile to a far country could possibly be gift. But so it proved.

So in the light of that observation, I am asking myself, how should I contemplate these coming weeks of exile in my own home?

I'm inspired by a passage in one of those great prophets of exile, Jeremiah. We're used to thinking of him as a man weighed down by a sense of doom. It's true that his laments are among the most passionate outbursts of anger in the scriptures as he internalises the people's experience of exile and the conclusion that God must have abandoned them. But how different is the tone of a letter he wrote to the exiles in Babylon.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29.4-7)

How to be at home in exile, how to inhabit it? - that's the challenge Jeremiah puts to the exiles. It seems extraordinary to ask of them that they should befriend this experience of disorientation. It goes against all their instincts to invest in exile in this way. Yet Jeremiah understands how adversity always invites us to renegotiate life on a new set of terms. And when we do this, undreamed of possibilities open up. No doubt he has learned this through his own experience. There is no landscape so barren that life cannot begin again - even if it takes time to glimpse the green shoots that promise springtime at the end of a long winter. 

But it's the conclusion that's so starting. Seek the welfare of the city and pray to the Lord on its behalf! You'll forgive the intruded exclamation mark, but this arresting instruction deserves it. We thought that exile meant that God had forgotten us. We thought this city was an unclean, godforsaken place. We thought that the best we could hope for was survival, not building houses, sowing harvests, bringing up families. But look! The prophet says we must say our prayers for this place. We must look for it to flourish because if it does, we shall too. Which can only mean that God is as present here in Babylon as we knew him to be back in Judah. He is not an absent deity after all. As the covenant promised he always would be, he is with us. And he will not forsake us.

As a person of faith, I want to discover how these insights speak into this twenty-first century expression of exile. Self-isolation, as I said last time, is a depressing term that seems to me to encourage all that the prophet wants to resist: self-absorption, self-concern, self-pity. Jeremiah's letter is saying: don't let exile diminish your life. Don't let it erode your capacity to reach into each new moment to uncover the possibilities latent there. Keep hope alive. Remember your community of fellow-exiles, especially people in need. Try to ask, even in times of crisis, where God might be found in what is happening to us. See if there is wisdom to be distilled in the events that happen to us, however painful or baffling or bleak. Share what you discover. Ask others what they are learning too. 

I know from my own previous experiences of exile that all this takes time. Whether it's been disappointment or failure, conflict or bereavement, it won't be hurried. It's important to acknowledge what we feel when we feel it, and to be emotionally and spiritually honest in recognising it. We mustn't rush prematurely out of Good Friday into Easter. But time will do its work. I can't predict as this exile begins what life will be like in one month's time, or two, or three. But I profoundly believe that God will be with us throughout it. Even with those for whom these coming weeks pose real threats of economic hardship, loneliness, physical and mental health or bereavement. 

Especially them, especially those who will suffer the most. It's for all of us to bring help, support and comfort to our fellow exiles wherever and however we can. And hope in dark times. This is the quarantine spirituality of Lazaretto.  
 

Thoughts on Brexit Day

This is one of the hardest days of my life. 

Brexit Day feels like a kind of dying. Born as I was of mixed parentage, to a native German mother married to a British father, I belong as much to continental Europe as I do to England. I am equally at home on both sides of the English Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea. From my earliest memories, Europe formed me, shaped me, made me aware. When this country chose to join the European Community in 1973, I had a sense of homecoming. I believed I saw the hand of God in this.

So to walk away from the European Union as a member state is a source of real grief. It’s not simply turning our back on one of the greatest projects of peace and reconciliation the world has ever seen. It’s not only giving up the economic, research and cultural benefits our belonging has brought us, the security and influence that come from pooling our sovereignty. Nor is it merely (!) collaborating in the pursuit of justice and human rights, and taking action together to address the climate emergency. Though all these things matter very much to all who care about the future of our world.

No, for me it’s very much a sentient, intangible, and I need to say, spiritual, matter. It’s to do with my personal history as well as our national history. My father was a Londoner, an Anglican by origin, while my mother an assimilated Jewess from the Rhineland who fled the Nazis and found refuge in this country. You’ll see why the idea of a Common European Home, a family of peoples and nations bound together for the sake of the common good, exerts such a powerful hold on my imagination. That Brexit should be happening in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day makes our departure feel especially poignant. 

********

But what of today?

Brexit is perhaps the biggest rite of passage our nation is experiencing in our lifetimes, at least for those of us born since the last war. Which makes it a rite of passage for all of us who are citizens of the UK, and all who are citizens of EU27 countries who are living among us. (And, let’s not forget, for millions of people across the EU who care about Britain, love us British, and wanted us to stay.) 

Anthropologists warn us that we take risks when we cross thresholds. They are liminal places where landscapes shift, and roles and relationships change. At times of transition we can become disorientated. Questions are put to us about our direction of travel, emotions are heightened. We can find ourselves sad at the thought of what we are leaving behind, afraid of what lies ahead, perplexed, angry, longing to have reached the other side and find our feet on solid ground again. Every crossing over is a kind of bereavement - like my recent retirement or my mother’s death soon afterwards. We are never the same on the other side. 

This goes a long way towards explaining why our national psyche has felt so turbulent recently, why feelings of people on both sides of the Brexit debate have run high. We are still in this liminal phase. It’s too early to say how our international relations, domestic politics, trading arrangements and societal networks will settle down after this convulsion. And for some, their personal relationships too. Whatever we are destined to become, Britain will not be the same after Brexit. None of us will.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know why I believe Brexit could damage Britain irreparably. What will be lost could well, probably will, outweigh the gains. So I admit I’m despondent about how our country is going to fare during the rest of my lifetime. Yet we should have the best aspirations for our country that we can. I argued in a recent blog that Brexit could be good for us if it taught us to take a more realistic view of ourselves as a nation. I said we need to lay aside exceptionalism as if we were “special”, and learn to understand our place in the world as no longer a great imperial superpower but as an ordinary, middle-ranking country like scores of others. There’s no question of putting the “Great” back into Britain. Of all the unlovely slogans associated with Brexit, that self-aggrandising myth of pride is the most poisonous. I believe we badly need to learn the grace of humility. And that, of course, is a profoundly spiritual task. 

*******

And with humility goes the desire “not to be served but to serve” and to love our neighbour as ourselves. We don’t have any choice about this if we are serious about Christianity. How we look after the neediest people in our midst, be they of our race and faith and nationality or some other, is the acid test of our faith. How we care about peoples beyond our own shores is the plumb line against which our humanity is to be measured. To me, the EU was - still is - one of the noblest projects ever devised on our continent to put the virtues of love of neighbour and service of the other into practice in our relationships as nations. It grieves me more than I can say that Britain has chosen to walk away from these covenants of mutual self-giving. 

So it’s all the more important that after Brexit, we resist the temptation of isolation and throw ourselves all the more energetically into being a good neighbour to all the nations alongside which we live on this increasingly fraught, congested planet. Are we capable of this? Do we have a strong enough collective desire for it, the spiritual, moral will? Or will self-interest win out in the end? I really don’t know. I’m fearful if I’m honest. Nothing I’ve heard in the last three years is reassuring me that Britain will be a better, kinder, more principled country after Brexit than it was before. 

I wish I could be hopeful. But today fills me with anxiety and foreboding. It has sapped what belief I had that our nation, inspired by our history, our instinct for law, justice and common sense, our traditions of courage, fairness and hospitality, could through a great act of the imagination rise above our self-serving agenda and look beyond ourselves in some new, life-changing way. This protracted debate could have been an opportunity for us to engage seriously with questions of identity, nationhood and our collective self-understanding as a people facing a choice between alternative destinies. Instead of which we locked ourselves into the strident rhetoric endlessly rehearsed during the referendum campaign, “What’s best for Britain? Take back control! Britain first!” When what we should have been asking is, “What does Britain have to give so that we may all work together for the good of our continent and our world?”

In fact, “what’s best for Britain” is whatever will make for our truest flourishing as the nations and peoples of the United Kingdom. And flourishing means a lot more than the economy, trade and the cost of living. I’m depressed on this 31st day of January that we never succeeded in putting at the heart of the Brexit agenda, who are we as a nation? What does it mean to be a Good Britain, if not a Great Britain? How can we become a more humane society? How can we be a better neighbour to the nations of our continent and beyond? How can we collaborate more effectively in facing the perils confronting our world?  These questions are not only the agenda of practical politics. They belong to the collective human soul. And therefore, they are questions of ultimate concern. What’s best for Britain is what matters most to God.

********

I ask myself more personal questions too, today.

I began by saying that Brexit felt like a kind of dying, a severing of what I’d experienced as a positive, benign, life-affirming relationship. When politicians speak of our divorce from the EU, they are invoking a powerful metaphor. There are good divorces and painful ones, divorces of velvet and of barbed wire. We must hope that ours will be one of the kinder ones. But I every divorce involves hurt, the recognition that a relationship of loyalty, good will and trust has died or is in the process of doing so. That’s how I’m experiencing it right now. Don’t tell me I might feel differently tomorrow or in a month or two when the dust has settled. Today is all I have to go on. The dust makes it hard to see. 

The image that’s been in my mind ever since the referendum result has been that of exile. I’m well aware that for many, Brexit feels like the opposite of that, a homecoming, a resurrection even. Again, I can only reach into my heart and speak of what I find there. Desolation may seem a dramatic word. But it accurately describes what its literal meaning expresses, which is the sense of being alone, solus. Mystical theologians played on the way that word sounds as though it belonged to the vocabulary of the solum or soil. You could say that desolation is the forlorn experience of being severed from your native soil, just as consolation is to be reconnected, joined back, to it. When the Jewish exiles by the waters of Babylon cried out, “how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137), their lament was called out of the bleakest desolation, disconnection and disorientation they had ever known as they reimagined their existence on unknown soil.

I’m not saying that most of us will experience an exile as painful as that, though for UK citizens living in the EU and EU27 citizens living in the UK, the consequences of Brexit may well be bitter indeed. But for me at any rate, today does invoke an echo of that Psalm as I find myself amputated against my will from so much that I loved and valued. The Hebrews were severed from all that had given their lives shape and meaning - their land, their temple, their institutions, their monarchy, their homes. Without these givens, they had to renegotiate life on a new set of terms. It’s clear from the prophets that it was a bewildering experience. After today I shall have to renegotiate life without the constants of my European Union citizenship. And especially the sentient environment that has been part of life simply because of my being a citizen of an EU member state. It’s hard to describe when it’s as pervasive as the air I breathe. But maybe you recognise that sense of connection to my own continent through the hard-won bonds of peace and friendship and everything else this time of gifts has brought.

********

I said earlier that I wish I could be hopeful. Abraham, the scriptures tell me, “hoped against hope”. The exiles would indeed learn to find hope again, one day. But it took time. The psalm of lament would be their bitter cry for many days to come. They would need to learn the hard way not to trust voices that made easy speeches about an imminent brighter future against the evidence of history and the instincts of their own spirits. It’s too soon for me to speak of hope today. I need to be as present as I can to this disappointment, this journey of exile, try to find what meaning in it that I can. I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy. As I’ve said, this is one of the hardest days of my life.

But I want as a Christian citizen to do what I can to serve the common good. I may be at odds with what Britain has become as a result of Brexit, but it is still the country of my birth and upbringing. I owe it my love and loyalty. I want to do what’s in my power to help heal our divided nation and recover a sense of common purpose. Yet in just the same way I shall never stop thinking of myself as a European, a citizen of the continent that has so shaped my personal history and my understanding of what it means to be me. I owe love and loyalty to Europe too. Not least because by lifting my sights beyond my own nation’s shores, the EU taught me how to take the first steps towards becoming a citizen of the world, a child of God’s worldwide human family. 

I’m done raging against this “dying of the light”. So I ask myself, is some transformation possible? Could this exile that I do not want to contemplate, this parting of friends, become a grace-filled pilgrimage in time? Who knows? Only by setting out will I begin to glimpse what this journey could become. I dare not call it hope just now. But if I can’t find hope at this moment, can I perhaps hope to have hope again one day? For the nation I mean, and for the world, as well as for myself? On Sunday, the First Sunday after Brexit, the church celebrates Candlemas. We light candles to honour the Holy Child who came into the world as a light for all the nations, who makes us glad because God is among us. This Kindly Light will teach me to walk this unfamiliar landscape and travel safely across it.

“Hope to have hope.” I can live with that for now. One step enough for me. 

Quirinius Lives: the Home Office Says “Register!”

Someone in high places wasn't paying attention when their Home Office video was launched on the Third Day of Christmas. It was early in the morning of the 27 December, the first tweet out of the Home Office after wishing everyone a happy Christmas. If you haven't heard, this is the video that tells citizens from the 27 overseas EU countries who want to go on living in the UK after Brexit how to set about applying. "EU citizens and their families will need to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK after 31 December 2020" it says. It takes 55 seconds to watch.

It's deeply ironic that this video should have been released during the twelve days of Christmas. Only a few days earlier, more than half the nation must have heard St Luke's account of the birth of Jesus read at thousands of nativity plays, crib blessings, Christingles and carol services. In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. In the ancient world you had to fit in with the requirements of a process-driven bureaucracy. Plus ca change. So Joseph and Mary have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, she nine months pregnant. They get there only to find there is no room at the inn. You know how the story continues.

So around 3.2 million people will need to register before 2021. That's a lot more form-filling than even dreary Quirinius could have dreamed of. Who doesn't love a good registration? What better excuse for a public holiday? Better still if you can anticipate government coffers swelling with unbudgeted income from it, for many of our EU27 friends will have to pay for the privilege of registering. I don't know if this was entirely clear to them before.

Predictably the video has been greeted with responses ranging from eye-rolling boredom (what did you expect from the Home Office?) through mockery and sarcasm to outright fury. Most striking has been the outrage of many people from EU27 countries who have lived in Britain for decades and thought this was their home. The Guardian quotes one: "You absolute s***! I've lived here 35 years, got a stamp in my passport for indefinite leave to remain in 1985 and now you want me to apply to stay in my own home." This from a Danish citizen who lives in the UK. And this which came up on my own Twitter feed: "Wow. This is making me feel so welcome, after 28 years of life here, making friends, paying taxes, bringing up two wonderful British citizens. Thank you so much for this slap in the face, UK Home Office. Absolutely sickening".

But I've also been struck by the responses of British citizens. "Seeing the impact of this policy on people I know and work with is a wake up call. I feel angry and ashamed" writes one. "I too am ashamed. I feel that I don’t belong here. We are not a civilised nation and the government does not represent anything I believe in" writes another. And this: "Making those who share a citizenship with us register as if they were aliens is quite shocking. Now we describe a few hundred refugees arriving at Dover as a national crisis and debate whether or not we should be rescuing them".

That last remark gets to the heart of the matter. The point about registration, which will not have been lost on Mary and Joseph, is that you are made to feel that your homeland isn't your own any more. It's been taken over by others, occupied by people who think they can control you by insisting that you comply with their requirements. My Jewish mother and her family knew all about this in Germany in the 1930s under the Nazis, and the creeping subjugation of the Jewish community by what might have seemed at first to be harmless bureaucratic processes of "registration". In Roman-occupied Judea, registration was a device to keep a potentially restless population in its place. (Never mind that there's some historical difficulty about Luke's account of this event - what we do know about Quirinius is that he was appointed as Imperial legate early in the first century precisely to oversee an exercise of this kind, even though the dates don't fit Luke's chronology. The nativity story still makes a powerful point about the two kinds of authority that are always at work in the world and confronting each other - human and divine, or we might say, the politics of God and the politics of human beings. Or maybe justification by faith or registration.)

I tweeted about this yesterday: "Like the registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. It reminded the Holy Family that they lived in an occupied land. Precisely how Brexit Britain now is for all true Europeans, whether from the UK or an EU27country". That didn't please one of my followers who wanted to know in what sense the UK today is like first century Roman-occupied Judea. Who is doing the occupying he asked? "Our worst selves" I replied. We are doing this to ourselves and one another. Somewhere, out of the shadow side of our nation has come this self-destructive instinct to "take back control" in ways that distance us, even cut us off from the neighbour we are commanded to love. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, we have come to a time in our history when demons of suspicion, resentment and hostility are being unleashed in our “othering” of those who only wish us well. In terms of our collective national psyche, a spirit is abroad that threatens a healthy sense of our identity, who we are and who we aspire to be as good human beings. This is the occupying power. And it seems to have us in its thrall.

This may seem strong language. Perhaps I'm more coloured than I should be by my family's experience of the 1930s. But how could I not be? But for Britain's welcome to Jewish refugees at that time, my mother would not have survived the Holocaust and I wouldn't be here now. I can feel viscerally the effect of becoming like an exile in my own country, ill at ease, sorry, ashamed. This is not the kind, just, generous, fair-minded nation I thought I lived in. At least, not in this respect. I think many of the Windrush generation will say the same. It's not easy to sing the Lord's song in this strange land.

It's still Christmas. We are still celebrating the wonderful events that followed Quirinius' (or whoever's) registration. Incarnation, God's coming among us as a vulnerable holy human Child is wisdom's answer to the follies of mortals. The Infant of Bethlehem brings hope to our world and promises to deliver us from this occupation we are experiencing by our worst selves. I was heartened by a positive reply to my despondent Quirinius tweet. "I too sometimes feel that it isn’t my country any longer. Then I speak to one or more of the many wonderful people I know, and I am reminded that recovery is both possible and necessary."

We look into one another's faces and glimpse reflected there what we see when we look into the face of God’s Incarnate Son. What we see is nothing less than grace and truth. So my prayer is that we shall all be guided by divine grace and truth into better days in the new year that is dawning. And that grace and truth may free us from all that demeans human life by teaching us to look on our neighbours not as strangers but as friends whom we love with something like the love with which God loves each of us.

Brexit: how to go positively into exile

It's permitted to be sad this week, and more than a little angry. Post-referendum, we are still in the aftermath of a colossal political, cultural, social and - yes - spiritual convulsion. Raw emotions will subside in time and give way to a forensic analysis of where the UK now finds itself, not to mention the European Union and the rest of the world. But it's far too early to be cool-headed just yet, at least for me.

Yesterday my wife and I went to evening prayer in the tiny "old church" on the remote hillside above the village. It was a gloomy afternoon: a steady rain had set in, and the dark dripping avenue of yew trees we walked along seemed to echo my despondent spirits. The church has no electricity so we sang the hymns by candlelight. One of them was "God moves in a mysterious way / his wonders to perform." Yes, I thought, that's not in dispute. But would I rise to the massive act of faith that could see how "behind a frowning Providence / he hides a smiling face"? Time would tell.

We recited the Psalm set for the service, Psalm 60. O God, you have rejected us, broken our defences; you have been angry; now restore us! You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open; repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering. You have made your people suffer hard things; you have given us wine to drink that made us reel. That feels right, I thought. It's not that a song of national defeat is transferable to post-Brexit Britain. I'm not making facile connections here. Rather, it's the mood that the Psalm caught so exactly: bewilderment, pain, despair, loss of bearings, how to understand the "mysterious way" in which God moves.

I thought of other laments in the Psalter. The most famous is Psalm 137. By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept / when we remembered you, O Zion. It's one of the angriest Psalms in the book, fuelled by the violent emotions that follow any severe trauma or dislocation. The people are in exile, far away from their own country. They have lost their temple, their king and their land. They are at risk of losing their very identity, their soul. 

Their big question is, How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? How will they learn to recognise God both in the events that have brought them to this unwished-for exile, and in the place itself? What happens to faith and hope when they are driven out of a landscape that is familiar into a "strange land" where everything looks different and has to be negotiated afresh? 

This seemed to me to be a good metaphor of Brexit. There's a sense in which we are bound for an exile. Some welcome it, others don't. But it's a plain fact that it is going to be a strange land for all of us. Even Leavers have acknowledged that there is so much they "don't know". It's clear that there are few landmarks and no obvious plan, no historical precedents for our nation to follow. We are on our own. We can expect to be disorientated. We shall have to set our compass bearings as best we can. And given the hurt we have caused our friends and allies in the European Union, we have no right to expect that it will be an amicable departure, though we must hope and pray that it will be. 

The man who more than anyone else taught the faith community how to "sing the Lord's song in a strange land" was the prophet Jeremiah. He too was crushed by the way events had turned out for his people. He saw the disaster of exile coming and said so, much to the displeasure of his audience. If ever a prophet suffered in himself the conflicted experience of the people he was warning, it was Jeremiah. In the light of the past few days, I can understand that.

But he said something very important. It goes like this. There is no point in railing against it. Exile is going to be a fact. We are where we are. So understand that this will be your new reality for the foreseeable future.  It will be hard and painful at first. But if you can make the best of it, invest in it, trust that God has not after all abandoned you but has come with you into this far-away, hostile environment, you will find that life can begin again. In one of the bravest utterances in the Hebrew Bible he pleads: Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare (Jeremiah 29.7). It's an extraordinary - and wonderful - thing to say.

So here's my thinking as another week begins. We are at the start of a journey that will take us into exile - for leaving the EU is precisely what this is in a political and economic sense at the very least. Our place in the world is going to be very different from what it was. Brexiters (those at any rate who haven't had second thoughts about their vote) are telling us that it will be all right. Remainers are fearing the worst. Who knows what this strange land will be like? We are not going to find out this week, this month or any time soon. It's going to take years for the landscape so fractured by this earthquake and aftershocks still to come to rearrange itself and settle down. 

But we should not be swayed by either the optimists nor the pessimists. The best will probably not happen, but neither may all our worst fears be realised. And even if many of them are, and as a nation we come to regret our decision as foolish and mistaken, we mustn't be overwhelmed by negativity or despair. What matters is to maintain our faith in Providence as it works itself out in the present. We must do our equivalent of building and planting good things in the land of exile, as Jeremiah not only urged his hearers to do but did himself. Above all we must keep faith with our country and with Europe by saying our prayers. As I blogged on that bitter Friday morning, we must not lose heart.

Church leaders have called for reconciliation and healing after the vote. Our churches both in the UK and in continental Europe will have a part to play in this. But it can't be hurried if it's to be deep and lasting and reach into communities that have experienced deep and bitter division. Nor must we rush into it for the sake of quick closures or the ever-alluring demands of niceness. When there is a deep wound, healing takes time, and surgery may be needed first. But the last words from the cross can help draw us all into the everlasting movement of God's wise and loving purpose for the world. There have been times when we have cried with the psalmist and with Jesus himself, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? But might we begin to pray in a different, more trustful voice: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit? If we can, it could sow the seeds of hope for our future. 

On Saying Farewell to the EU: the morning after

Here is the blog I've written for the "Christians for Europe" website in the light of the Referendum result.

********

This is the day we hoped and prayed would never dawn. 

But it has. The UK has voted to leave the European Union. After months of debate, the voters have decided. And even it's by a narrow margin, so narrow that less than half of the eligible adult population are behind a Brexit, that's the outcome. To say we are disappointed doesn't begin to express it. But a vote is a vote. We respect it.

There will be much to reflect on in the days ahead. There will be post-mortems. Why didn't we Remainers succeed in making our case for EU membership? Why did the nation fall for the self-interested inward-looking arguments of the Leave campaign? Why did our national politics become so divisive? 

And more important, there will be big questions about the uncertain future that now lies ahead. What will become of the EU after this outcome? Will the UK's Union hold together or will Scotland go its own way? How do we reconfigure our trading relationships with the EU and the rest of the world? We suddenly find ourselves in a strange Brexit-land where there are no landmarks and no map. The next few months and years could be turbulent not only for the UK but for Europe and the world.

How should we as pro-EU people of faith respond?

During the campaign, "Christians for Europe" has tried to help frame the referendum as a matter not simply of pragmatic politics ("what's best for Britain") but also of social ethics and a theology of society. We've emphasised the central tenets of our faith: loving our neighbour, standing in solidarity with the disadvantaged, seeking the common good, promoting life together rather than apart. We've wanted to argue that the European project is based on a fundamentally Christian vision of nationhood and common life.

All this still stands. So even if, to our immense sadness, the UK will soon be walking away from the EU, it mustn't stop us from being good Europeans who will continue to work closely with the peoples of our continent who are our natural allies and friends. We must go on taking a global view of our place in the world and not draw in our horizons as if we were some insignificant offshore island. We must continue to work away at trying to create a more wholesome politics of respect and compassion both internationally and in our own country.

In that spirit we shall go on seeking the welfare of the human family and playing our part as good citizens of our nation and our world. That will involve the healing of the divisions that opened up during the Referendum campaign, and we are committed to this too in both word and action. And it goes without saying: we must now, more than ever, say our prayers. 

The Christian gospel of Jesus's death and resurrection makes us people of hope. We do not lose heart.

********

Perhaps I can end on a more personal note. If I say that I am heartbroken, I don't want you to think that I'm dramatising. But as this "day after" dawns, it's hard for me to see any good in it. So much of my own story is intertwined with the story of continental Europe - if you've been reading this blog regularly, you'll understand how. So it feels as if part of my identity is being stripped away, all that is symbolised by the words "European Union" displayed in the cover of my passport. I've been immensely proud of my EU citizenship. I've regarded it as a privilege to think of myself in that way. To face the fact that I am going to lose a fundamental aspect of myself feels terrible. It's as if a light is going out.

When it was clear that Leave were on their way to winning, Paddy Ashdown tweeted: "God help our country". I share his sense of desperation. Or is it desolation? Or devastation? All those words seem to fit. At a stroke, we find ourselves in exile. It feels like a lonely place to be.

But I know, of course, that it is not the end of the world, however bad it seems. What I wrote at the end of the official blog is the most important sentence of all. It's a quote from St Paul's second Corinthian letter where, having catalogued the ordeals and suffering he has had to face for the sake of the gospel, he speaks of his indomitable hope in the God of resurrection. "We do not lose heart."

I need to say those words to myself over and over again. It will take time to come to terms with what we have done as a nation. There are "fightings within and fears without". We undoubtedly face times of great difficulty. It may be that the UK may come to rue the day. But Paddy Ashdown has given me the clue about facing the future. "God help our country" is the best prayer we can say right now. For praying is all I can think of doing at this moment. 

God will not abandon us, for all that we have done something extraordinarily foolish. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. We must trust him.