Death To The World

Someone recently asked me why I don't write columns and articles for magazines and other publications anymore and why I now mostly post banter, junior football, hiking, cycling and music stuff on my socials, rather than serious theology and political content. 

The answer is simple, the climate of online debate within both faith and political circles, is increasingly toxic and I am done with rancour and resentment, it is totally unhealthy and unfruitful. I am done with theological bickering and polemics, it is embarrassing for us Christians to be slagging each other off so much (myself included). 

Especially, while we all sit back and watch an ongoing genocide in Gaza unfold and wait to see how Iran will respond to Israel's recent strikes against Hezbollah. Or how Putin will respond to Ukraine's incursion into Russian territory in the last few days, or how the UK race riots will eventually play out, or what the diabolical Trump-Musk alignment means for the world.

It is also depressing, I've never encountered so many hard-hearted, irritated, angry, legalistic and judgmental Christians than in recent months online (again, myself included, on some occasions). 

As the late Fr Thomas Hopko reminds us 'They (we) think they're zealous in the faith but their zeal is for their own righteousness not God's righteousness.'

How can we possibly continue to behave like this when only today, we learned in the news that the number of deaths from suicide among men is continuing to increase and its even higher in Scotland and even higher again among low income communities.  What the hell are we doing and who really gives a rats ass about all our petty internal Church politics?

So much of what we see and read online at the moment seems to be excessively pharisaical and self-righteous, designed to be read and seen by men, not coming from the heart, not focused on God, in any real sense.   

The final straw for me was a recent well known Catholic media outlet posting a fairly harmless meme which depicts Jesus reminding the Apostles not to hate anyone. This meme resulted in literally hundreds of angry comments from upset Christians complaining about woke and liberal Christians trying to change church teaching. The lack of good catechises alone, was quite terrifying. 

Add to this, the recent overreaction to the Olympics opening ceremony and the growing amount of calumny, hostility and abuse being directed towards my friends and I, following any form of peace work, social action, witness or protest by Glasgow Catholic Worker, coming from the so-called conservative Christian Right, and its not really worth the hassle anymore.   

I am mindful that all of this is quite obvious to very many sane and reasonable Christians who don't choose to pour all their crap out on social media or wear their hearts on their sleeves.

However, more than ever, online religious discourse seems to me, to be at odds with being able to maintain any kind of meaningful rule of prayer or periods of daily silence.  

Sure, we are all damaged in someway and we all unconsciously (sometime consciously) project all our own prejudice and pain from our personal lives, onto the comments section of a particular debate or onto an international issue. 

Yes, much of the anger and bitterness we see online, comes from a place of fear and despair at the fallen state of the world around us. Yet, I cannot see how it is possible to reconcile being mean online, with trying conform yourself to the gospel, let alone anyone else.

If this is the case, then we should stop, discern, pray, reflect and then arrive at the conclusion (as I have) that we need to be nowhere near online debates, until we've repented of our own ego and pride and resolved all that remains unresolved in our own hearts or lives. 

Or in other words, I am not convinced that Henri Nouwen's 'Wounded Healers' become effective helpers, until they process their own pain.

Rather they (we) are potentially dangerous, like so many Christians currently being co-opted into right-wing politics and Christian nationalism, are extremely dangerous.   

I am at the stage where I deeply crave an expression of faith which is far more aesthetical and focused on the internal rather than the external. 

Not a withdrawal to that ivory tower of theological intellectualism or the passive aloofness aloofness of 'by-stander Christianity' or the sterile inactivity of scholarly academic Christianity. 

For example, many years back I recall reading in the brilliant 'Death To The World' fanzine, that  'All extremes are to be avoided - both worldliness and super Spirituality'.

Instead, I look to the example and inspiration of so many elderly parishioners I've known, who have now gone to their reward.

The quiet faithful whose seemingly hidden, simple and unremarkable lives of devotion actually done more to glorify God than any blogger, commentator, boastful online polemicist or vainglorious public intellectual.

I think of the lady in our parish who used to stand and pray the rosary at the nativty crib in town, early every Saturday morning during Advent.

The same lady who used to give out miraculous medals to evey new born baby in the Parish and then take the eucharist to the homes of those too sick to hear Mass. She would go all across town each Sunday afternoon, carrying out the works of mercy in secret, long after the rest of us had returned home to enjoy our Sunday dinner.

Moreso, to watch the way this lady clasped the blessed Sacrament in her hands, like a precious jewel, after being given it by the priest, was to see the face of true devotion and faithfulness. 

As the Russian theologian Alexander Schmemann once said ‘Every personal victory over evil, maybe even unknown to the world, has an impact on the whole situation. A saint leaves the world, lives somewhere else, no one knows about him but he is participating in that great struggle which will be going on until the end of world’.   

Finally, the soldier in the painting at the top of this blog stands in awe, disarmed by the image of the Theotokos, drawing him out of human conflict, into a relationship with Christ. 

I pray that the Mother of God disarms and draws all those engaged in conflict and violence, both physically and emotionally, in our own hearts, our words, deeds and in the world, both online and offline, back home to her son.

For my part, I'm just happy to spend sometime in silence dwelling on this healing prayer which perfectly encapsulates all that we proclaim and affirm 

Lord Jesus Christ,

Son of God,

have mercy on me,

 a sinner.




Popular posts from this blog

Have Gourock’s Catholics Brought The Bands To Town?

Image
  It’s probably worth stating from the outset that I am not actually opposed to Orange Walks and I didn’t submit an objection to the upcoming parade through Gourock. This is because, like many people on the west of Scotland, my own identity, religious heritage and ethnicity is a rich mix of Scottish Free Church Presbyterian, Irish Catholic and German Lutheran, alongside Episcopalian, Welsh, Ulster Scots and Highland Gael on my wife’s side.  As such, I can generally see things from both perspectives and I often suspect that much of the tension which surrounds marching season, is rooted in suspicion, rather than reality. For instance, a significant number of Scottish Catholics feel that those banging the big Lambeg drum outside the chapel each summer, are the descendants of the very same ‘Peep-o'-Day Boys‘, who once carried out the mass wrecking of Catholic cottages and burned their Irish forefathers out their homes, centuries ago. For some within the Catholic community, these se
Read more

Social History In 50 Objects Number 1. - Pioneers Of Total Abstinence

Image
  This beautiful little pin of the Sacred Heart came down to me from my Mum's Haggerty and McGarry side of the family, it once belonged to a Great Aunt who had been a member of the 'Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart'. PTAA members were known as pioneers and they had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, pioneers wore a lapel pin just like this one. Abstinence and temperance have always been a big deal in Greenock, John Dunlop established Britain’s first temperance society in Greenock in in 1829. A few years earlier in 1820, the famous sugar baron Abram Lyle was born in Greenock, in the same year the Scottish radical James Wilson was executed for breaking prisoners out of Greenock jail during the Scottish Radical War. Abram had been the grandson of a weaver and the son of an alcoholic cooper, who left his son in debt and it was Abram's deep Christian faith which drove him to promote sugar and confectionary as an alternative to alcohol. Lyle once
Read more

Of Judges - Scotland, Christians and Labour Zionism

Image
  More than a few of us Scottish Christian Socialists and Scottish Christians on the Left are profoundly influenced by the philosophy of a contemporary political thinker and Labour peer called Maurice Glasman. Maurice is the founder of the political tendency known as Blue Labour, which is in part, inspired by Bundism. The Jewish Labour Bund was a secular Jewish Socialist movement found in Lithuania, Poland and Russia in the 1890's, based on the principles of solidarity, mutualism, autonomy and local democracy. Maurice also often speaks about the politics of his father who was a Labour Zionist and his mother who came from a working class family in Stamford Hill and was a lifelong Labour supporter. Likewise, Christian Socialists with a special interest in civil society cannot think or talk about cooperatives without any reference to the impact of the Jewish Labour Movement. Just as I’ve learned a great deal from Maurice, so too have I been fortunate enough to learn from leade
Read more