Hope/less

Since the beginning of Lent, the first few lines of TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday have been revisiting. It's not that I have any great insight into the poem but rather because a phrase is resonant for me just now: "Because I do not hope". It feels to speak to a growing awareness and a reluctant coming-to-terms with the humanly-slow, geologically-fast unfolding of environmental catastrophe. 

"Because I do not hope" -for those with the power to act wisely and in a timely manner. 

"Because I do not hope" -for lobbyists or the business-as-usual crowd to be stood down.

"Because I do not hope" -for systemic changes to take place.

 

In noticing this resonance, I realise that I had been hoping for things that now seem unlikely. 

I had been hoping that enough people would realise, yesterday, how dire the prognosis is. 

I had been hoping that governments would see beyond the next election

and be concerned about future generations

and so to prime collective action with policy, law and finance. 

I had been hoping that our collective consciousness would kick in before tipping points were reached. 

I had been hoping that if enough of us made greener decisions, spoke, wrote, pleaded and even, God forgive us,

shamed enough other people, then maybe disaster could be averted.

 

What to do? To go off-grid would be an act of despair.

What is needed is a turn to a way of living together where doing roughly the right thing by the environment is the default and not a special effort by a few enthusiasts with the time, money and curiosity to hug trees and eat organic.

 

"Because I do not hope to turn" people around me to living a one-planet lifestyle…

"Because I do not hope to turn" politicians and business leaders towards the common good

and becoming better ancestors…

"Because I do not hope to turn" a profit- and rent-seeking, mammonist, System

into a humane, modest and creation-respectful modus vivendi… 

"Because I do not hope to turn" any of these things I cannot hope.

For I am, like you, helpless in the current of hopeless, misdirected, collective striving.

I no longer strive to strive for such things?

I may no longer desire the constant flow of tat and novelty

but I am carried along by the powerful rip-tides of those aggregated efforts;

billions of decisions formed and constrained by the ecosystem-eroding business as usual,

further empowering it in turn. 

 

I know the obverse of lost hope too: anger: at the short-termism, the stupidity, the cupidity.

Anger that speaking, shouting and lifestyle changing during 40 or 50 years were dismissed; ridiculed even.

 

"Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?"

Civilisations -each in turn has been 'the usual reign'- have risen and fallen.

“Why should I mourn?”

Because billions of people some of whom I know and love personally will be harmed and traumatised.

If they survive the floods, the famines, the pandemics, the migrations, the resorts to violence,

they will hope that their new feudal lords may be kind and respond mercifully to their new skills of servility.

 

What is hope in the face of a sixth great extinction? Of another desperate dark ages?

 

Humanly speaking: little or none; only degrees of denial -refusing to think about it.

Perhaps this is a kind of hope. A hope that if we refuse to see it, it will turn out to be a bad dream or a mistake.

Understandable: we sense the lurking trauma in being disabused

of the deeply-embedded cultural hope of Progress and contemplating its casualties.

 

Time and again the usual reign has passed away. This is not new -though it is grievous. 

Yet the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. 

God knows us, eternally.

 

Also in Lent this year, the refrain from Psalm 42 has played recurrently through my mind.

"Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?  

O put your trust in God; for I will yet give him thanks, who is the help of my countenance, and my God."  

-I can answer the 'why?' in one sense:

my soul's heaviness and my disquiet are prompted by climate catastrophe

and the revealed priorities of our Westminster government in the face of the pandemic.

In the face of such entrenched greed, denial and veniality,

somehow, hope-against-hope, it feels like the only recourse is as these verses state.

And as I write that I am mobbed by centuries of teaching about trusting in God,

but it somehow feels like only now do I get it. Only now am I being disabused of a human pride

that somehow with enough motivation, knowledge or cajoling we can do it.

Like with step one in a 12-step program, we can only truly hope when

we admit that we are actually, truly, powerless. Only then can we hope.

But that hope is oblique to the sources of our despair.

Such hope feels small and underwhelming, fragile even. And yet …

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

    for his compassions never fail. (Lamentations 3) 

 

"I no longer strive towards such things" for myself.

But I do continue to strive because it is better to do good than not,

to live the change we desire to see God effect in the world.

I keep on striving because when the Day comes

we should be about our God-breathed business.

And who knows? -We may yet be surprised by hope.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins   

Innoculating British Christians against USAmerican rightist ambitions

I just read this:

Franklin Graham invested $10 million of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money in his 2016 Decision America Tour to each state house in the country. Billed as “nonpartisan” prayer rallies, these gatherings framed the “moral crisis” as a decision between progressive atheist values and God. After the election, Graham called Trump’s victory an answer to prayer. 

The reason I'm concerned is that about 2 years ago, we nearly had a BGEA tour of the UK headed up by Franklin Graham. I was concerned at the time and this has made me more so. I was concerned that Graham was at least as much about networking so-called Christian right personnel with British Evangelicals with a view to creating a bridge-head to amplify an approach to values consonant with the USAmerican right-wing agenda. I wondered whether I was being too 'conspiracy theorist', but now reading this, I'm minded to think it would be precisely that bridgehead-building.

The article goes on to say this:

Today these influences — the Christian and religious nationalist organizations, religious capitalist and prosperity gospel movements, and independent charismatics — have access to the current administration in the form of its “court evangelicals.” The Values Voter Summit has become an important focus point for this coalition and its narrative. Through federal contracts and student aid, Liberty University has become the largest private Christian university in the country 

I'm thinking, having thought over the last 5 years in British politics, and recalling things I've read about the increasing reach of the American right into funding campaigns in Europe and further afield, that this is precisely an aim of Graham's deployment of the BGEA in this way. I think that they see an opportunity to leverage the current situation to build a stable if smaller base of right-wing support using somewhat Christian themes in the way they have in the USA.

As such I think that we need to be moving away from naivety in British Christian, especially evangelical and charismatic circles. We need to be in a position to resist Graham's next overtures. I'm pretty sure they will come once the dust is settling after the pandemic emergency.

So, my question is what do we need to do now to enable British evangelicals in particular to see through the rhetoric to the political agenda? To understand that this isn't the relatively benign BGEA of the 1980s and '90s but rather a vehicle for right-wing agendas which would struggle to answer 'WWJD' with responses that weren't more like responses to 'WWCD' (what would Caesar do?). There are UK evangelicals and charismatics who would covet the 'court evangelical' role, how do we pre-empt that? How do we innoculate against the cunning use of single issues to marginalise more Godly values (check out here for further reflection). It is a characteristic of some of the Pharisaism that Jesus criticised -maybe that's the way to pursue? (WWPD? -what would Pharisees do?)

My hope in this is that it seems that British Evangelicalism has tended to be more focused on justice and mercy than the USAmerican counterpart. I hope I'm not wrong in that, and I hope it is not too shallowly rooted.

This is going to be occupying some of my prayer-time for weeks or months to come.

And for the record, I think that such cynical usage of evangelism and co-option of the good will of those concerned for sharing the Good News of Jesus is despicable. If this is what Mr Graham is doing (and it does look likely given the history) then I think that puts him and those others who do it in the place of those pharisees and sadducees whom Jesus laid into for misleading the poor and the seeking. At the best they may be acting the part of 'useful idiots' at worst ... shudder ...

Source for initiating quotes: Our Demands – Poor People's Campaign: