GHOST

 

 

He is the oddity in the Trinity: like Winnie the Pooh’s East Pole, people don’t seem to like to talk about him. Well, Anglicans and Catholics, annyway. He is an ancient embarrassment: it was he, after all, who was at the origin of the notorious filioque clause, on account of which rival groups of medieval monks came to blows. Does he, did he, “proceed from” the Father, or from the Father filioque “and the Son”? The author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (Luke?), on the other hand, is quite at home with him: Pentecost/Whitsun is his feast. Genesis says that he was there at the beginning: like a vast and formless fowl he “brooded over the waters” of the tohu-wa-bohu, the primeval chaos. “By him, all things were made;” yet at the same time he “bloweth where he listeth” and none can tell whence he comes and whither he goes. 

            St Ephrem of Syria was called his harp. Perhaps his wind-harp, sounding as he passed. And there is always in meditations on him a sense of air moving. He is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin: in each case words of three meanings, “breath”, “wind or breeze” and “spirit”. (Our, or rather Cranmer’s, “ghost” comes from the Old English gast, linked to German geist, always a spirit.) In John 20:22 the resurrected Yeshua gives him to the disciples: “and then he breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost”.

            Theologians tell us that he is the love between the Father and the Son. This ties him closely to both, and reminds us that love is the language, the essence, of the Deity; but in no way does it enable, or even encourage, us to regard him as a person. This is a bother in prayer. Do we pray to him? We can pray to the Father; we can pray to the Son; but can we pray to (someone who is) a relation(ship)?

            Strangely, I think we can. It does, of course, seem presumptuous; but no more so that praying to the Creator of everything the Webb telescope sees as if he were our dad, and no more so than calling upon the Resurrected King of Peace and informing him that I, a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe, have sinned today. If we can forget scale, and address him firmly but humbly, experience has convinced me that he listens. If we ask him for such things as he is not only able but willing to give, we shall usually receive them: guidance, for instance; direction; love where we lack it; discernment; and courage. 

            And as this happens, and goes on happening, in our nighs and quiet moments, we do gradually get a sense of a person on the other end of the line. A person who rarely speaks in words, but who sometimes forms a perfectly clear idea or response to the eye of our mind. One surprising example: one night, I asked him to help me, a former Protestant, better to understand the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There was silence, both aural and visual; then, suddenly and briefly, a clear vision of a deep well in time, at the bottom of which I saw a clearly prehistoric, clearly female, hand reach out and make fire, and light some kind of primitive candle or oil-lamp. That was all; but it was a clear response, and equally clearly it was up to me to make sense of it. I should be hard put to it to explain it; but my feeling of having understood was, and is, entire. 

            When I need him, I call upon him; and if his answers are never simple, he has never let me down. 

            Accende lumen sensibus:                    unto our senses strike the light
            Infunde amorem cordibus:                 abundant love pour in our hearts
            Infirma nostri corporis                        shore up our bodies’ weakness now
            Virtute firmans perpeti.                      with virtue that will bend nor end. 

 

(from Hrabanus Maurus’s glorious 9^th-century hymn Veni creator Spiritus)

 

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

 

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we say – with one of those mysterious optatives – “Thy will be done, in earth as it is in Heaven.” So that with each recital of the most famous Christian prayer, we brush up against one of faith’s most stubborn mysteries: the Will of God. We know that we ought to do God’s will; we know that our will ought to be aligned with God’s; but how do we know what God wills?

            When we are dealing with our own choices, the subject is not terribly hard. God the Father may be silent to our clumsy ears, but we know that “he who has seen me has seen the Father” and so, when faced with a choice or a decision, we can ask ourselves some version of the question WWJD --  What Would Jesus Do? The answer to that is not always simple, as there are many situations in an average life that did not present themselves to Yeshua when He walked the earth, or that the chroniclers of the Gospels did not see fit to include in their accounts. But still, we can often have an idea of the way we might usefully follow. 

            Where it get much more difficult is when it comes to distinguishing God’s will in the life and the world around us. Yeshua was not clear on the topic. He points out that when the tower of Siloam fell and killed a number of bystanders, those who died were not greater sinners that others (Luke 13:4-5); but he does not say whether or not God willed the tower’s fall or the people’s death. He says that not a sparrow falls “without your Father” (Matthew 10:29) but the Greek áneu “without” does not decide whether it is without the Father’s knowledge or without His will. And in both cases, the point he is making is different.

            Does God “will” all that occurs? There might be a case to be made to that effect: He is, after all, supposed to both all-knowing (omnisciens) and all-powerful (omnipotens); does it not follow that nothing occurs without His willing it? Thomas Aquinas, in the twelve articles on the Will of God in his Summa theologica, comes uncomfortably close to this position. And I say “uncomfortably” because when we consider such an explanation, we almost universally rebel. If (to take a recent happening in France) a madwoman tortures and murders a 12-year-old girl, did God will that? Does God will the suffering and death of the Ukrainian civilians in Boucha? Does God will the death of 600 people in a tsunami in Indonesia?

            This very proper revolt on our part leads some people to dismiss any idea of God’s existence: if such a God existed, they say, He would be a monster. But for those of us whose faith, though put to a severe test by this, subsists, it does so perhaps because of a third attribute we ascribe to God: not only all-powerful and all-knowing but all-good. This raises two questions: 1) how, then, do the events I described relate to His will? and 2) how, in view of a world in which such things occur, should we align our wills to His?

            I have previously written about the first question: the fact that His nature is love implies that He must of necessity allow us free will. Love’s very nature means that its reciprocity can never be forced or commanded. This, then, explains the occasional flourishing of human evil. He cannot command us to return His love: it is the only limit to omnipotence. The horrifying effects of natural phenomena, on the other hand, resist explanation. One can only assume that He, for reasons of His own, has decided not to micromanage His creation. (It is interesting that, even if we accept this, we still have an instinct for spontaneously giving thanks when we have a narrow escape.)

            The second question is the real purpose of this post. It assumes that we do not, and cannot, know whether anything that happens to us does so with, or because of, God’s will; and that He is much more concerned with our reaction to the happening than with the event itself. The point Yeshua was making about the sparrow was not whether the Father intended it to fall or not, but that if it falls, it does not do so at random and anonymously. And you, he said, are worth a lot more than a sparrow: hence, he did not say but did not need to, at the moment of any occurrence that involves you, you are surrounded by your Father’s loving attention. And hence, we may conclude, it is at that moment that we may or may not do His will. Where His infinite care for us operates, but cannot command us because of love and free will, is in relation to our reaction to the, to any, event. 

            He does not will that we shall win four million dollars in a lottery; but He pays close attention to what we think, feel, and do when we have won it. He did not will that such-and-such a young woman should die of breast cancer; but He surrounded her with His loving spirit during the ordeal (whether or not she recognised that spirit’s origin) and He attends with love and hope to the reactions of her family and friends. 

            At no time is discerning and/or doing His will easy. The crusaders who in 1096 AD went into battle shouting “Deus lo volt! Deus lo volt!” (“God wills it!” in Romance Latin) were perhaps, to our modern minds, rash if not painfully misguided; but are we sure we would feel as strongly if that phrase accompanied a Ukrainian counterattack? A special degree of caution is perhaps needed when trying to discern God’s will for human beings in the plural and collective; it would appear wise to practice humility in discernment and limit ourselves, as much as possible, to individual matters.

            Finally, we should not forget that Yeshua both taught and showed us the overwhelming and permanent need for prayer. Aligning our will to God’s can only be done after, and in, prayer. Perhaps this is a secondary meaning of the optative. We are not simply told “Do God’s will”; we are invited into a process that involves much more than our individual selves. “God’s will be done.” Amen.   

OUCH!

 

Mè dōte to hagion tois kusin mède balète tous margaritas humōn emprosthen tōn choirōn mèpote katapatèsousin autous en tois posin autōn, kai straphentes hrèxōsin humas.

 

 ⁶ `Do may not give [that which is] holy to the dogs, nor throw your pearls to /before the swine, or they may trample them among their feet, and turn and rip you.

 

A curious interlude in the Sermon on the Mount. It seems quite separate from the surrounding sayings, which is perhaps evidence that the Sermon was not noted down as one continuous sequence but compiled from scattered jottings. 

 

What is the point Yeshua is making here? Who are the dogs, who are the swine, and are they the same? If they are, the second saying is a restatement of the first, in a manner familiar to us from the Psalms. 

            One theory is that they are goyim, non-Jews, unbelievers: when the Samaritan woman appealed to Yeshua, his first response was to say that he was sent to help Israel, and that one does not give the children’s food to the dogs. The dogs, here, the kunes in the Greek, are of course not pets like ours: they are at best hounds for hunting, at worst semi-feral scavengers: the word, used of humans, was a term of clear opprobrium. The hagion, that which is holy, might be interpreted as a Temple offering of meat or other food, deposited upon an altar. To throw it to the dogs is an act of desecration.

            The swine here might be domestic pigs, but in view of the final verb which means “to wound grievously” I suspect it refers rather to a boar, as well as to the dogs.[1] Why one would be tempted to throw down pearls before a pig or a boar is not made clear, but the image is obviously constructed out of one element of something precious and another element of something unclean (all pigs were unclean) as well as dangerous. 

            The image, then, is clear and relatively uncomplicated. What about the tenor, though? The simplest explanation is an injunction not to give the Torah to infidels, who not only will not appreciate it and will not be able to be nourished by it but who, so far from thanking you, may in return gore and savage you. And yet the upshot of Yeshua’s teaching, both here in the Sermon and elsewhere, is that the Gentiles are part of the new Israel, and as such both merit and need the new, completed Torah. 

            This creates a real and pressing problem. One solution is perhaps the following: the dogs and the swine might not be known to be such beforehand, but might prove to be so by their reaction to the holy and the pearls. In which case the injunction is a call to discernment. Be careful, think carefully, about the persons to whom you may preach the new Torah that is the eu-angelion. Because if you misjudge them, not only will it not help them but it may put you in danger. And given the fact that Christianity is in our time the most persecuted religion in the world, such an injunction can be said still to be topical.

            

[The majority of commentaries I have read see no problem here at all, because they see it as a text for the modern world – example: do not open a boxing-match with prayers; do not hang a crucifix in a night-club. There may be something in that, but it does not interest me: I want to try to understand what Yeshua said and what his hearers (thought they) heard.]

Image: a drawing by Pieter Brueghel Jr (1564-1638), from a series on Flemish proverbs. The Flemish proverbial version is "Do not throw roses before swine".

              

---

[1] Many commentaries see this as a Jewish inverted parallellism, reading it as “Do not give what is holy to dogs who will rend you; do not toss pearls before pigs who will trample them underfoot.”

THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"

AWAITING A FAVOURITE GUEST

I have been thinking about Advent, which this year has come in with a rush, slightly before I was ready for it. The admirable web clip “Advent in 2 minutes” reminds us, as do churches everywhere, that for Christians the season is one of awaiting a beloved guest whose coming is imminent. And in their naming of all the things Advent is not I was reminded that Christmas is of course also Yule: Yule with its perfectly pagan but enjoyable solstitian festivities, its eating, drinking and huge log fires, its exchange of gifts, its loud and happy Wassail songs, its evergreen tree and its colours of red and green. And I was reminded also that next to the notorious “War on Christmas” (from the curmudgeons who are annoyed by “Happy Holidays”) there exists also a continuing “War on Yule”, pursued by the faithful and the sensitive who every year feel their blood pressure rising at all this pagan commercialism. 

            Just as English is a hybrid language, composed in almost equal parts of Germanic and Latin roots, so the late-December holiday is a hybrid feast: part Dionysian Yule, part hushed and adoring attention and delicate celebration. Integrating the two is possible, indeed relatively easy, in a traditional society where both churchgoing and the Christmas goose are comfortable traditions, observed with care and happiness if not with excessive zeal and piety. It becomes much harder in a world where every tradition is systematically questioned and usually overturned, whether for reasons of impatience or from desire for novelty.  In such a world polemic tends to rear its unlovely head and conflict to ensue. If “peace on earth” is to begin at home, how to solve this difficulty?

          My own instinct would be to stop calling “Christmas” all that is really Yule, and vice versa. Unbelievers could happily wish one another “God Jul” as the Scandinavians do, and shops could sell Yule cards alongside Christmas cards. Christians who hate Yule could banish from their hearths as many of its characteristics as their children will allow; unbelievers could celebrate the Yule Dinner as they could the Yule Log. Christians who find that the culture of gift-giving interferes with the coming of the Saviour could give and receive their presents on the Eve of St Nicholas (December 5), as do the Dutch. The Christmas Tree could become the Yule Tree, and take its place among older English traditions of the season, like the Kissing Bough.

            For believers, Advent has moved – and I think happily so – from a minor penitential season, a sort of semi-Lent, to a season of waiting, awaiting, hope, and at least prospective joy. We await a favourite guest; so a little house-cleaning is in order. But to me the best preparation is to look around with care and attention and observe the sheer grinding, raging need of a world without faith: the misery of meaninglessness is piled on top of that of poverty, of illness, of solitude, until it is a wonder that vulnerable bodies and souls are not crushed by the peine forte et dure of unbelief.

            We are always being told by our churches to be missionaries: the thought seems to most of us outlandish. But when we look at the tragedy of indifference all around us, we can glean from it at the very least a motivation. This in no way diminishes the dilemma of action: we all know how those loudly proclaiming their faith and/or, worse, trying uninterruptedly to convert their friends produce new unbelievers as if by magic. So what can one do to counter the dark tide?

            An old spiritual adviser, wise in the ways of the soul, would probably tell us This is where ‘discernment’ comes in. And repeat the parable of the Good Samaritan. This last is a two-edged sword. In the first place, we are asked to identify, not with the Samaritan but with the victim: however secure we feel, in God’s eyes we are poor robbed and bleeding travellers, greatly in need of help. On the other hand, we may identify with the Samaritan himself, well-off but looked down on by the Chosen People as a Jewish tradesman might have been in the Paris or Vienna of 1900; and we might remember that he was not sermonising about the mounting number of robbery victims along the highways each year. He went about his business but kept his eyes open; and when he saw a bleeding figure in the bushes he did something. That is discernment. When life confronts us in a specific situation with someone suffering from unbelief (and yes, for many it is a suffering) as well as from other privations, then it may be possible to help in every way. Keep our eyes open; discernment.

            And, of course, there is Hope. Advent is par excellence the season of Hope. Surrounded by darkness and freezing fog and bone-piercing cold humidity, we do not give up, we do not give in to the night. Surrounded by the idiocy of Clown A and the venal rapacity of Clown B, not to mention the self-righteous demagoguery of Clown C, we do not give up on the prophecy, we do not surrender to the tempting idols that preen in every window and catalogue, nor to the bel canto of Cynicism and Despair singing in seductive harmony. We do not join the tempting troops of Anger, nor yet the raffish rakehelly rout of Entertainment. As we carefully tend the little oil-lamps of our vigil, we have our love to keep us warm.

And a glorious Christmas as well as a merry Yule to us all.

ALL VOLTAIRE"S FAULT? (OR, COME BACK, WILL BLAKE)

(A friend reminded me of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Blake: this conversation is hardly new. And in France, “C’est la faute à Voltaire” is an old expression, probably as old as the Revolution.)

The award-winning French daily La Croix, reporting on the current meeting at Lourdes of the French Catholic Church’s bishops, mentioned how different the situation now is from that of 50-100 years ago. Then, the problem was anticlericalism: the Church was seen by many as the Enemy, to be reviled, resisted and refused. Now, on the other hand, the problem is indifference.

After a month’s travelling in the United States and Canada, and now returned to la République française, I find myself agreeing ruefully with this statement. Quite apart from political situations and the public personæ driving them – a play with strong characters, a chaotic plot and no visible playwright – I see everywhere human situations of need, urgency, grief, pain and sorrow that cry out for faith where no faith is.

Let me be clear. I do not mean that faith is, in the simple and especially in the simplistic sense, the solution. Where grief strikes or pain, faith will not make them go away. But faith will let such moments, such events, be lived in another fashion, another context, another dimension. Faith lets them be lived in a context of prayer – perhaps even of rebellious and angry prayer, but prayer: which means the context of a relation. In a number of languages there exists a proverb like “A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved”; and it is true that sharing a grief with a true friend lightens the burden. Hence, might sharing it with the loving Father of All not lighten it dramatically?

And yet when I look around me I find that increasingly (and more perhaps in France than in America), having faith is looked upon benignly as an idiosyncrasy, a hobby or what the French call une passion: X does old cars, Y collects stamps, Z does religion. Doubtless such pursuits give X,Y, and Z profound satisfaction, but they are best kept to oneself and not shared with (“forced on”) others. Faith is emphatically not seen as something one needs, still less something the world needs. One gets along perfectly well without it, and looking at Islam gives one less than perfect sympathy for those who live by it, let alone a desire to do so. At best, one is sometimes told, “Yes, well, you have faith: I don’t. That’s just the way it is; sometimes I wish I had it, but I just don’t.” End of subject. Faith, in other words, is something you have or you don’t, like blue eyes: the condition, whether of having or lacking, is definitive and beyond one’s control. And (it is intimated) much the best that way. 

What is one to answer to this? The Church tells us, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly, that we must be disciples and missionaries; but it carefully stops there. And all of us know that in the fairly sophisticated and utterly indifferent world in which we live, move, and have our being, trumpeting the Good News to one’s neighbours will be neither welcome nor efficacious.

There is another way, also favoured by the Church. Be merciful, it says; tirelessly do good to and for others; and even without your mentioning your faith, people will start asking themselves and others what on earth makes you tick? And that can be an opening into the subject.  Unfortunately, I have never seen this happen in real life: the indifferent are not indifferent to good works, but do not question their fons et origo. “She is a truly good woman,” they will say; but they don’t ask what makes her so.

On the other side of the picture you have those who do have faith but give it a bad name. These are to be found in many denominations, from Pentecostal to Roman Catholic. They are absolutely sure of their dogma, which they use as a sledge-hammer to beat their opponents with. They relish combat because it is, as they see it, for Christ. In analogy with “Islamists” I call them Christianists. They do untold harm. They insult and injure for Christ; they threaten and malign for Christ; and sometimes they kill for Christ and gleefully urge their government to do so. They create scornful atheists wherever they go.

So those of us who have faith -- though never enough: “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief” – faith riddled with doubt, faith skating on uncertainty – walk very quietly on the whole, between the Christianist cannon on the one hand and the Indifferent desert on the other, hoping against hope that somehow, sometime, God will do something --  appear on CNN, call Time, throw Kremlin, Tienanmen and White House into the ocean and declare Playtime Over. When disaster happens – Irma, Maria, terrorist attacks, high-rise fires – we react with surprising and touching kindness and even, sometimes,  efficiency; but overall we don’t give the impression of believing that faith and prayer are either essential or a Good Thing in this world.

Perhaps we need to feel more confident. Perhaps we need to stop confusing attitudes to religion with attitudes to sex. Perhaps we need to speak up more. Not to yank others by the shirtfront and yell at them, but to tell the world that we are eyewitnesses – not to that Event two millennia ago, but to the mercies, the spiritual gifts, the joy even in grief, that we personally have received. Eyewitnesses to the good that intelligent charity, discerningly directed love, does. Eyewitnesses to the evil that humiliation brings, whether humiliation of persons or of countries.

After all, those of us old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin Wall know that we had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to Russia and to one Vladimir Putin, and we threw it away. Our great-grandparents had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to a defeated Germany in 1918 and instead gave it the Treaty of Versailles. Even today, we have the chance to approach with discernment, charity and brotherhood the millions of young Iranians who look to us and their sometimes approachable government; we perhaps have a tiny chance left to approach that strange young man in Pyongyang to deal with him without naiveté but without humiliation.

And always, always, the basic force that moves our world – our micro-world and our macro-world – is prayer. With prayer, anything is possible. Without it, nothing profound or lasting is. Shit still happens; God does not micromanage; but we need not be helpless in the face of it.

NOT NICE

“We are reminded once again that France is at war!” So said Christian Estrosi, the president of France’s Southeast region, this morning after the Nice massacre. He was, of course, both wrong and right.

Wrong, in that this is not a war in any accepted sense, even the asymmetric: there is no national entity facing France, there is no coherent enemy, there is no enemy command, there is no clear war aim, and there is no realistically imaginable moment when one could declare victory.

But right in another, stranger, sense. And in that sense all Western countries are part of the war. We did not declare it. Curiously, a series of unofficial persons and groups have been declaring it repeatedly for decades, but the communicosphere was not active or developed enough to make it work beyond local outbursts. Now that that sphere is humming 24 hours a day on a planetary scale, several detonators have come dangerously close to an explosive mass.

The mass consists of several million young men between 15 and 35 with hormones raging, frustrated by the cards life dealt them and without the knowledge, means or even sometimes motivation to change the hand. And gradually, their condition can mutate to Hatred.

The detonators are 1) jihadist Islam (an evil stepchild of Wahhabism), 2) a cable-social-network-and-smartphone culture that enables one to find and attend to only sympathetic voices all too glad to pour oil on small flames, 3) a society that constantly weakens the intermediate structures of responsibility between the individual and The State or The Church or The Deity, 4) continued discrimination in hiring and other career-forming processes, and 5) the siren song of the goddess Violence, flattering and seducing the testosterone trolls that live in young men’s brains. Her answers are simple and exciting, flavoured with adrenalin. Any or all of these can bring the mass to explosion.

So far, I have said nothing new. How, though, do we react to a condition that allows, even encourages, an anonymous petty criminal to hire a truck and mow down more than a hundred celebrating people, thus giving him passing fame and (he thinks) eternal glory? The point is that this is not coordinated and commanded as the earlier assassinations were. This is more like the American shooting rampages (except that it shows that a determined assassin can use anything as a weapon): unforeseeable and virtually unpreventable.

In one sense, the conclusion is that we must learn to live as people do in Israel or other toxic environments punctuated by death: i.e. not let the killers win by living terrified but accept that we are all mortal and that, just like a fatal traffic accident, it can happen at any time and in any place. That is passive courage, and it relates to Stoic philosophy.

Do we, though, have weapons of our own? I believe that Christians, Jews and Muslims have two common weapons: our belief in a loving God and our resultant conviction that hatred of other humans is corrosive and evil. (Some may oppose certain verses of the Koran to this, or certain passages from the Old Testament; but I am conviced that on the whole Allah loves the human race, as does YHWH.) We may hate forces that draw people deliberately away from a God who loves them, but we must not hate those who have been drawn into becoming such forces’ instruments.

Our weapons, then, are the recognition that Hatred is the key; that hatred corrupts its desired instrument but that the instrument in question is still human and thus someone (to speak as a Christian) Christ died for and was resurrected for. We do not necessarily have the power to root out the original causes of hatred; but Hatred itself is our business.

Contemplate it. Try to understand where it comes from, and how it works. Study it: it has habits, just as wasps and vultures have habits. Learn its habits and behaviour. Find out where it lives and what it eats. Discover which human beings are its chosen breeding-ground. And look very, very carefully at the people you personally know. Do any of them show any signs of the disease? Not of “radicalisation”; not of “Islamism”; not of “racism”; of the early stages of Hatred.

If you see that X and Y do, make friends with them. Unobtrusively, but do things for them. Go the extra mile. Help them get jobs. Uninvasively, see if you can help them straighten out tangles. Ease them away from drugs, depression or despair. Get them through a relationship breakup. Take them to dinner. Smile and touch (uninvasively, but a hug is often as good as a therapy session). Show them the good things you like and respect in them. If you find yourself discussing politics or public matters, ease them away from rancour, resentment and rage, and toward something or someone they admire for generosity. Ask them to help you, sometimes.

Like cancer, Hatred can sometimes – often, even – be beaten if it is diagnosed early. For Christians, perhaps this is the best interpretation of what Pope Francis means by a Year of (dedicated to) Mercy.

If we can all become alert and aware to the individual (often the lonely) humans around us, frequently young and male but not always and not only, if we can discreetly but generously act, we may have found the one weapon that can eventually win this war.