The robin on the barbed wire

‘Found it!’ Getting your hands on the perfect gift is the theme humdrum of Debenham’s 2014 Christmas ad, packed with cute kids larking instore after closing time. Marks and Spence promises we can ‘fly with the fairies’, released from the by the M&S experience, zapping perfect presents into people’s laps, and making the world a brighter place. ‘Make someone happy and you will be happy,’ Coca Cola urges.

And then there’s the boy and the penguin in the John Lewis ad. We see Monty, his movements choreographed following intensive research by the film-makers at Edinburgh zoo, through the eyes of the boy’s imagination. Aware of Monty’s wistful glances at kissing couples, and sensing his loneliness, the boy gives him for Christmas a penguin partner in the furry shape of Mabel. In the background: John Lennon’s song Real Love – ‘Thought I’d been in love before, But in my heart I wanted more.’

These ads all have themes closely associated with Christmas: making a difference in people’s lives; the empathic selection of gifts; the power of the ‘right’ present; the joy which blessing others brings us.

But I was concerned by the emphasis on blessing others through buying stuff when in fact we have much more precious things to give which cost nothing financially. Concerned too by the bigger issue that the perfect Christmas these ads encourage us to fantasise about is an illusion.

For many of us will struggle with shadows on Christmas Day – those who are lonely, hurting, depressed, unwell, failed by those who have loved them, accompanied only by memories. There is no hint of this in the artificial magic of the Christmas ads, as carefully conjured as Monty’s animation.

Last Thursday Sainsbury’s released their ad based on the famous football game between German and Allied forces in no-man’s land at Christmas 1914. Here’s an ad which focuses on the masculine, rather than the feminine expression of empathy, an ad which acknowledges darkness. It has the same message as the others – blessing others and being blessed through sharing – but the context is a brief respite in the madness of war. A few hours later the two boys who exchange gifts will once again be trading bullets.

Why can’t we love as consistently and deeply as the Christmas ads urge us? Why do we humans so frequently revert to selfishness and cruelty, inhumanity and war? Are our altruistic instincts fated by the stage evolution has reached to be overcome by the selfish gene?

But the joyful Christmas ads do articulate our longing – at least on our clearer-seeing days – to be better people, helping and encouraging others. I think our deepest yearning is for a purer love than we have known, a purer love which instinctively we know exists, a love which when we find it will make all our previous experiences of love seem, as John Lennon’s song puts it, merely as childish games.

The Sainsbury’s ad has been criticised for making war beautiful – in the lighting and camera-work, in that poignant shot of the robin on the wire fence. Certainly, the trenches and no-man’s land have been sanitised – there are no rats, no decaying corpses – but surely the point of the robin is that in the very place of deepest darkness we can find beauty, love and hope.

And that is the Christian message of Christmas. That into the darkness of a troubled world the light of God’s love came among us in Jesus, a love which is ‘real love’, the love we have longed for, the love which the best of our loving feebly reflects. It’s a love which reveals itself both as tender feminine love, and tough, resolute masculine love.

And whatever darkness we’re facing this Christmas, no matter how deep our pain may be, if we find it in us to lift our eyes, we will see there is a robin on the barbed wire. We are loved by God with an unshakable, unbreakable love, a love which sets us free to learn to love ourselves and to love others.

The powerful tune in the second half of the Sainbury’s ad is The Wicked Flee from the film True Grit. In fact, it’s based on a 19^th century hymn Leaning on the everlasting arms. A reminder that as we seek to live lives of beauty, love and hope in dark places God walks with us, to support and encourage us.

God’s love is a love from which perhaps ‘the wicked flee’ unable to bear its searching intensity; but it’s a love which stands open-armed inviting every last one of us to flee into its transforming embrace. We take the first step when we open our eyes to the reality of Jesus and something deep in us cries out ‘Found him!’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 20th November 2014)

The Stillness between the shells

World War 1 was widely thought in the participating countries to be a ‘Holy War’, a spiritual conflict of light against darkness. That’s the view put by American history professor Philip Jenkins in his new book The Great and Holy War.

We tend to think of the UK in 1914 being much like the UK we know – a largely secular state. But in fact a century ago Christian belief was much more widespread than it is today. Church and state were linked in England, as in Russia and Germany, while the Ottoman Empire was Islamic.

And while some Christian voices - notably the Pope’s – raised calls for peace, there was much inflammatory rhetoric on all sides. London Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram believed it was the church’s duty to ‘mobilise the nation for a holy war,’ and the army’s duty ‘to kill Germans…to save the world.’

The German nation on the other hand saw themselves as God’s chosen people, and the conflict as ‘a war for God against Antichrist.’ An American Episcopalian rector claimed ‘It is God’s war we are fighting.’

It’s one thing to reluctantly believe (as did Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Davidson) that the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary was a sad necessity in the face of these countries’ aggression. It’s quite another to claim that a war is a holy crusade undertaken in God’s name.

Philip Jenkins claims the evidence suggests that this view was widely held, in the trenches as well as in public life. It’s a view which inevitably leads you to demonise the enemy, regarding them as sub-Christian. The Kaiser, Jenkins tells us, believes that the UK was ‘more or less in league with the devil’, while a former US President commented that ‘Germany has mistaken the devil for God.’

One tragedy of the Great War was the fact that Christian fought Christian in the name of Christ. Anglican William Temple said Christ’s body was ‘bleeding as it once bled on Calvary, but this time the wounds are dealt by his friends.’

It’s very relevant to reflect on this warlike rhetoric – so similar to that used today by radical Islam – at a time of war and rumours of wars.

I think Jenkins’ book alerts us to our prone-ness as individuals and churches to enlist God’s name in support of our own agendas, convincing ourselves that we are acting on divine authority, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The incessant violence of the Great War and of the rash to 21st century conflicts makes us wonder if there is indeed some great, organising anti-God influence deluding us, pulling us away from the light.

We long to see fulfilled God’s agenda for a new society but sometimes try to make it happen by force and human stratagem. The German academic who said ‘The German state and its army is the earthly means used be God to bring about the kingdom of God in earth’ seems to have been speaking for many.  Knowing the history, we now see this as madness, yet at the time, in Germany, it was so believable.

Which alerts us as individuals and a society to the fact some of the things we believe with confidence today may in a century’s time be regarded as delusional.

There was a sense in that autumn of 1914 that the Apocalypse had come, that after the war to end war a new, purified, world would spring from the seed of human suffering.

But over the following years, millions were killed, millions more wounded in mind and body, millions were bereaved, there was famine and massacre, and a devastating flu epidemic. The world was broken. Jenkins calls it ‘the Great Disappointment’. God had not acted as many expected God would act, and the German and Russians peoples came to embrace alternative kingdoms offered by Fascism and Communism.

In times of perplexity and disappointment when we are torn between a pacifist instinct and a recognition that sometimes war is necessary in the name of justice, when the world is broken and God seems to have failed us, where do we find God?

God is with us where we are, in the heart of our pain, sometimes known only in our longing for God. Our hearts are secure in God’s spiritual kingdom. There are moments when in the stillness between the falling shells we glimpse what the world will look like when, in God’s time and God’s unexpected way the kingdom fully comes.

The poem Christ in Flanders imagines soldiers who thought little about God when in England saying in nightmare of the trenches ‘We have no doubt, we know that you are here’ while across no-man’s land a German counterpart wrote ‘In our distress we realise the nearness of God.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 14th August 2014)