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What Heals Us?

Trinity Sunday : 16 June 2014

"If any of you write "the Trinity is a great mystery" I will automatically fail you for this essay." So said our lecturer in systematic theology at Leeds University. With this memory to warn me I begin this morning in a different place with two different accounts of how to deal with grief.

When catastrophe strikes in the United States grief counselors turn up en masse to give on the scene therapy. They ask questions like, "What were the first thoughts that raced through your mind at the time of the crisis," and, "What was the worst moment for you?" Where there is no consolation, there is now counseling. But does it do any good? One recent study of bereaved individuals over 25 months found that those who focused on their pain, either by talking about it or displaying it in their facial expressions, tended to have more trouble sleeping and maintaining everyday functions. The suggestion is that there may be benefits to the discredited practice of keeping a stiff upper lip.

Now listen to Martin Smith, an Anglican preacher of note, speaking of the death of one of the members of his religious community of the Society of St John the Evangelist. "This awful pain at James’s death is a good friend and has something important to tell us. It wants to let us know that our lives are meshed together, not solitary, separate, or lonely. God has bound us together and is weaving our lives intricately together in the fabric of Christ, so that the death of this brother, this friend, this son, wrenches and stresses every fibre of our being. With God’s help we shall not fight the pain or try to relax the stress and wrenching that is cutting into our very hearts. The pain is confirming the good news that we are a communion of saints, a web of lives, a "tunic without seam, woven from the top to the bottom" by the Triune God of love."

It is a funny business this community life we share in through our faith in Jesus Christ. Often we enter into it with mixed motives. What can I get for me to enrich my lifestyle or to supply my need? And community is always a precarious achievement. It cannot be taken for granted. Patiently we build it through social events, rituals of belonging, pastoral care and work undertaken together. But the closer we get to each other, particularly under the pressure of events at moments of heightened feeling, the more we stumble upon one another’s hurting points and press hard on them. We become quick to take offence. We do not give each other the benefit of the doubt. And so, in an instant, the warm bonds of belonging are lost.

That we shall hurt one another is inevitable. The question is what happens after that. Do we have the will and the skill to recover the situation? Does our outlook on the world give us the perspective through which we take personal friction in our stride?

A while ago I read a fine novel called "The Catastrophist." It tells the story of a middle aged writer of inward looking, gloomy disposition who travels to the Belgian Congo on the eve of its independence to try and recover his relationship with a passionate, outgoing, save the world type of journalist. Reflecting on the way he has come to depend upon her warmth and vivacity and quicksilver spontaneity he writes, "She exists me." But their relationship struggles. He resents being sidelined while she is off trying to save the African independence movement. And he is easily disheartened by their relational setbacks. Speaking with precision perceptiveness she says to him, "You are a catastrophist. You believe that the situation cannot be fixed. It is always the end for you whenever we have an upset."

How these words struck an echo of recognition in me. How in earlier years I was easily dismayed by other people’s negative feelings. How anxiety and imagination wrote a Mills and Boon script of life long rejection and heartbreak. But experience teaches us that things are rarely as bad as they look. That calm reflection after a good night’s sleep sheds fresh light on the situation. That the years bring a certain relational creativity that can retrieve what looked like an abyss of misunderstanding and hurt feelings.

It is these learning’s that have been so helpful to me in making sense of our life together in the Church. It is as though God has brought us together in a school of loving where we learn by bumping up against each other what community really means. God has community within himself. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity means. And God bestows this gift of community within the Church. But it takes persistence and patience to make the gift come alive, come to birth, come to full maturity. We have to give up being catastrophists. Relational doom and gloom merchants who say at the first sign of personal friction, "Right, that’s it, I’m off."

Instead we are becoming people who don’t give up on each other. We go to the people who we feel have wronged us and we talk it through. We come to appreciate relationships that have become stronger after former passionate disagreements.

But there is more to it than just knocking the rough edges off each other. It is about belonging to a community that heals us through the struggles of renewing and restoring relationships. Throughout the Sundays that follow Trinity Sunday we will be reading our way consecutively through the Gospel of Matthew. Central to Matthew’s Gospel is the theme of the obedient community. He has in mind a community of disciples who are available to the purposes of God. It has given up on its own agendas. It waits on God ready to do what is required to build the Kingdom of right relationships. And that means that the obedient community is ready to be purified by God. It accepts that individually and collectively it needs to be sorted out in all the unhelpful parts of its life. It accepts that obedience and sacrifice go hand in hand.

What unpopular words these are. Since the Enlightenment obedience has come to be seen as the virtue of dogs. And in this blood stained century sacrifice has become a no no ideal. But how else can we be healed at the hand of God of all our internal damage and brokenness. Each one of us is carrying a considerable amount of internal darkness, an inheritance of hurt feelings, disappointed hopes, and frustrated desires. It is this, which makes us quick to take offence, highly critical of others, and vengeance seeking when crossed in our hopes and dreams. The old Prayer book got it exactly right when it talked about, "The devices and desires of our hearts," because damaged, wounded people want what is bad for them. That is why notions of the radical autonomy of the self are not helpful. Neither are notions of the perfectibility of human beings. God is boss in putting us right. Inevitably at some stage of the healing journey we will be asked to give up some cherished desire that we want so badly that it practically hurts. Then comes the test of our maturity. Can we go with the health giving recovery plan of God?

And that makes the Church the crucible of healing community. Over a lifetime of building and restoring community we are changed from within. We acquire a hard won maturity that wouldn’t have come our way any other way. We become veterans of tough love - wise in the tricks of the wayward heart - unsurprised by the darkest inclinations of the greedy self - calm in the face of anxious, neurotic behaviour - courageous when up against arrogance and bullying. The Church is the place where the Triune God teaches us about the patient unstitching of complicated relational tangles. It is the training ground in which the God who is full of community draws us into a pattern of healthy relating. It is a place of gift where the Holy, Blessed and Glorious Trinity encourages us with a first taste of what rewarding relationships will be like in the life of Heaven, the ultimate community.