Now is the time. The place in which we are living, this moment which is always passing away, this present is the time to make the choice. Not usually a significant or life-changing choice, but in every moment in which we are awake we are continually choosing how we will live our lives.
In a world full of lies, half-truths and spin, discerning the truth is hard work. None of us should believe we can do it on our own; multiple perspectives can reveal more than any one of us on our own. But if we can honestly bring into conversation what we see of the truth, and also bring in the possibility that we might need to change our own minds, we’ve got a good chance. Otherwise we might outsmart ourselves to death.
The churches have, slowly in the case of mine, woken up to the fact that everyone is gifted, though we’re still not good at living out that belief. Too much tradition has built up around believing that certain groups of people were the only ones to listen to (bishops, sometimes). But that is not the root of the Christian tradition. It is fundamental to my faith that all people are equally loved by God, and that all those who are disciples of Christ are equally his brothers and sisters.
Wisdom is part of the divine, so it is beyond us, but also woven into the fabric of the world which God created. Because it is part of God’s created order, wisdom is not morally neutral: true wisdom is integrally linked with righteous living.
“Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
and to depart from evil is understanding.”
It feels at the moment as if we have partial maps, each showing something of the terrain and the way ahead. To add to the challenge, some of the maps are fake, showing ways that don’t exist or removing features from the landscape. Interpreting all that partial information, in order to plot a way ahead, can only be a shared task.
The problem comes when there’s no process: when it’s impossible to get beyond denial. The death of a loved one is too obvious a loss to be denied forever. When a threat is more diffuse, less graspable, it’s possible just to keep on denying it’s there, especially when the consequences of doing otherwise just feel too great to deal with.
President Obama often used a phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. But it appears that King was paraphrasing a portion of a sermon delivered in 1853 by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. Parker said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
‘Sophronein’, ‘thinking well’, comes up a lot in Heraclitus. It’s that Greek word which sums up what it means to live a good, balanced life. It’s not just about ‘thinking’ as we might define it; it’s about a way of living. This saying pushes the point a bit further, and makes it clear that this sort of thinking is not just something inside our heads.
Losses over the last few months have been of different kinds, but few of us have escaped without any sense of losing something. Living with loss is one of the hardest pieces of work for the human psyche. The loss of bereavement is the greatest, but at every level work needs to be done, not to ‘get over’ our loss, but to find out how we can continue to live with it and through it. Let us not underestimate how much there is to do, for ourselves and for our communities.
Times of crisis are exactly those in which the rule of law is most challenged. Emergency legislation restrains our normal rights, extensively so in this pandemic. The danger is that we become used to it: that law becomes something which only reflects the needs of the moment, unmoored from any deeper principles of justice or equity, from a vision of what we believe society should be like.