Lent

I suspect many of you will be familiar with the quotation: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. 

It’s from 1984, George Orwell’s classic novel on the exploitation of power and the exploitation of the masses. In it, the general populous are gaslighted and manipulated to the nth degree, so that they no longer know what is true. 

This so-called doublethink seems to be closer and closer to how the world is behaving with every week and month that goes by. And it seems to be the presumed ‘good guys’, as much as the obvious culprits. Donald Trump may still be talking about the person he calls ‘crooked Biden’, seemingly oblivious to the mirror, but we also now have a Labour government in Britain that is proposing welfare cuts. 

We live in a world that gives toxic mixed messages. A world that says ‘low fat’, then fills products with sugar instead. And then when this is pointed out, the next batch of products say, ‘no sugar’ and instead are pumped full of worrying additives and other unhealthy fillers. 

We live in a world that says be thin, be young, be beautiful, and yet obesity is on the rise and life expectancy has a negative correlate with poverty. In a world that says be rich to be happy, we discover the most content nations are not those with all the millionaires, but those where the differential between the richest and poorest is smallest and where there is the greatest equality between people, and where there’s no need for riches if just everyone has enough.

And we also live in a world where some in the church accuse other Christians of ‘giving in’ to the terrible licentious mores of the secular world, by… wanting to settle down, be family and get married?!?

At this February’s CofE General Synod, we listened to young women proposing that a requirement for the committee that selects the next bishop for a diocese should not have to have a bare minimum of one female member of the clergy, to combat the dire and embarrassing and shameful fact that although women have been able to be ordained for over 30 years, more than one in four such committees have not had a woman representative in this quinquennium. 

When we know that the evidence shows again and again that more diverse groups and decision makers making better, healthier, more creative, ultimately more successful decisions; when we know that representation and equality are gospel values that Jesus upheld, we have to do better. 

The deep irony was that General Synod had already said in separate debates on working class vocations, youth representation at synod, and the racial justice agenda, that all under-represented groups (barring an obvious exception), should be supported and encouraged in the church, but when the challenge to actual influential power (in this case regarding the selection of the episcopate) came up, elements of Synod wanted to rein in those voices. 

As we travel through Lent, we walk with the one who upheld the oppressed, the ignored, the silenced, the down-trodden, even the reviled. He challenged all power, not just Roman power. This is a challenge to us all, as it’s easy to notice the abuses of power and the sin of our opponents, but a lot harder to notice where we too succumb. And the thing is, following the one who was God’s Anointed One (Messiah), means recognising this is a pathway that requires us to let go of much that is comfortable or convenient. It is a path of sadness and persecution at times, the Via Delorosa. There is no guarantee that his way will lead to victory in this life, even though we are called to follow it and bear our crosses too. There is, I fear, a slight danger in the claim that ‘the arc of history leans towards justice’, as many have found it has not been so simple. 

But that is not to stop us from doing it. We have the paradoxical Servant King, who loves and serves through opening the gate of glory to the outsiders, the rejected, the disaffected, the hurt, the lonely, the broken, all those who know they are failures, but turn to God in Christ in humbling asking for compassion and healing. 

And this leaves us this Lent with the challenge to find our siblings. Many of us have ourselves at times been part of these groups. We have known disaffection, we have been hurt, we have been excluded, and sometimes we still face that, though I pray, through OneBodyOneFaith and other faithful groups, we have also experienced wonderful kinship through him, the one who says we are family through his love, not by birth or blood. As we walk through Lent, let us challenge the false messages of those who have failed to hear his message of a love like no other, that does not succumb to earthly biases, and may we know true peace, true freedom, and be strengthened in and by and through that. 

Jo Winn-Smith, Trustee