WHAT ROUGH BEAST

France, where I live, is currently caught up in an extraordinary political crisis: the Yellow Vests. Triggered by the announcement of a sales tax jump on diesel fuel for cars – billed as an ecological move but mainly to help out the budget --, a protest movement went super-viral on Facebook and Twitter, and quickly spilled into the streets. Wearing the yellow safety vests mandatory in French cars, the protesters began blocking roads, motorways, traffic circles and toll-gates; and, as French protests will, it all culminated in monster demos on the Champs Elysées in Paris. Uniquely, though, this movement has no structure and no leaders, and therefore no one the government can talk to. Moreover, its demands are as varied as its makeup: they quickly went beyond fuel prices to anything anyone feels mad about. Lower prices, lower taxes, higher minimum wage, ecology, all the way to the resignation of President Macron. And there is such a general disgust with “politics” that anyone in the movement who proposes actually talking to the government to negotiate something immediately receives death threats. Obviously, the parties of the extreme right and left who would love to co-opt the Yellow Vests are being told to get stuffed. It’s an extraordinary moment of universal rage (75-85% of the French support the movement, at least in the comfortable anonymity of opinion polls) that combines real anguish, especially economic, with nihilism; while the big demos are being briskly and gleefully taken over by the “Black Blocks” and other violent urban-warfare and pillage instigators.

I’ve written this long introduction to set the scene for what really strikes me in the whole affair: the complete silence of the Church and the churches. Christians have for years felt a little uncomfortable about St Paul’s exhortation to treat legitimate government as a gift from God. In Holland during WW II, as the German occupiers put the boot in, the Dutch sarcastically sang the German hymn’s adaptation of the Pauline text: Die Obrigkeit ist Gottes Gabe. And both the Dutch, fighting against Spanish King Philip II’s legitimate but tyrannical rule, and the French, creating their iconic revolution and beheading their elites, have proved that they are not slavishly obedient by nature. However, in a time when smartphones and social networks are threatening to destroy every sort of social cohesion and sending the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, there should be no ambiguity at all about a Christian reaction to a nihilist tsunami.

Christ made it clear that his kingship was not “of this world”, and that the radical life he proposed considered social and political change not as a goal but at most as a natural result. He left social and political structures intact, telling his followers to pay Caesar’s taxes and, if they owned slaves, to be good masters. The conversion he envisaged would change individuals, and thus make certain kinds of behavior unthinkable. Meanwhile, almost any form of social structure can be made to work decently if the human beings operating it are filled with the love of God.

This said, though, Churchill was right in saying that democracy was the worst possible form of government with the exception of all the others. In creating modern democratic society, the Enlightenment has played as great a part as Christianity, and the rational safeguards democratic institutions present against wickedness (and sometimes even against stupidity) represent a treasure not lightly to be put at risk. In no way are they perfect: among today’s great challenges are the equitable incorporation of ecological change, the curbing of financial mega-greed, the encouragement of citizen initiatives and volunteer projects, and the management of communication. But in all these areas the Church and the churches ought to be leaders: not by making themselves into yet more NGOs but by insisting on the position of each individual in relation to God. Can you, John X Doe, look the Meshiach who died for love of you in the face and behave as you are behaving, speak as you are speaking and tweet as you are tweeting? He loves you and needs you to help fix this gravely ill dot in the galaxy. He is standing at your door and knocking: are you making too much noise, or reading too many texts, to notice? Or care?  

A TIME (NOT) OUR TIME?

This is a year of which many will be glad to see the end. I see the sentiment everywhere expressed, often profanely. And for this late post for the Second Week in Advent I was moved to consider the ways in which we relate to the “time of the world”. There are so many kinds of time we live in, as someone on French radio, discussing Gilles Deleuze on Proust, said recently; and what I call the time of the world is one that seems to occupy more people more of the time than ever.

The “time of the world” is not a measure of time, although years, decades and centuries might be related to it. Rather, it is “time” in the sense of Zeitgeist, a “spirit of the age” as the Germans call it: an expression dating from the nineteenth century, and which the sixteenth might have found bizarre. The sense of a Zeitgeist seems linked to what we now call communication, which in its modern sense is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and which participates (and is in part at the root of) the accelerating J-curve of “rapid social change” which the Victorians were the first generation to have to confront.

It has continued to accelerate and has now (for the time being) culminated in the smartphone. This, together with the social networks it gives us permanent access to, has had the effect of bringing the “time of the world” into individuals’ lives in ways, and to degrees, never before experienced. As such it far outstrips newspapers and television. Much, perhaps too much, has been said about this, and I’ve no wish to repeat it. But it does change the felt quality of this season of the year. Not its essence, which is darkness and hope, sorrow and the promise of light; but the felt quality, different as the Wind Chill Factor makes the felt temperature.

A year such as 2016 has brought to the world a series of misfortunes, some unavoidable (the hurricane in Haiti), some avoidable (the Syrian civil war and the American election result – which will soon be seen as disastrous by all but the few who sit on the pork barrels). And because of the “time of the world” it appears to have been a uniquely ghastly twelvemonth, spreading gloom all around. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, the world has not become worse: it still carries on in its difficult journey from the Fall to the Second Coming, a journey full of sin and misery but equally full of kindness, generosity, love and hope. That these last are not felt by many as part of the “time of the world” shows the degree to which that concept belongs to the public world and the media that reflect and comment upon it. A French radio programme, “Carnets de Campagne”, each day interviews founders and members of local organisations that work on the bases of co-operation and solidarity: the number of these, and their quality, is astonishing. I shared on Facebook today the story of Torrington in North Devon and its experience with child refugees. In a little-repeated story, France in the last 10 months has seen anti-semitic and anti-Moslem acts diminish by ca. 60% from the year before. And virtually all of us personally know people who, at whatever level, make the world a little better.

At this time of the year, I propose placing “the time of the world” in perspective by more attention to two other dimensions: the “time of our lives” and the “time of eternity”. The Time of our Lives is what happens to us personally. It may be fraught with difficulty and danger, but it is our time, to savour and to deal with and to improve. And if, as also often happens, it is a time of happiness, joy or even prosperity, we should not let the Time of the World embitter that. The Time of our Lives is the time in which we can be kind, generous, positively effective and spread comfort and joy.

And the “time of eternity”? That is God’s paradox: dark and difficult, we tend to think until we remember that those supposed to understand it best are little children. It is the time which eternity underlies; the time which eternity penetrates; the time which eternity suffuses and lights with a glow that is permanent, if only intermittently perceived. It is the time of faith, of hope, and of love, at the smallest level (a child grasping its parent’s hand without looking) and at the greatest level, a dimension far beyond our understanding. That is God’s paradox, totally incorporated in the apparently simple phrase “Our Father which art in Heaven” – which always makes me catch my breath, when I think of Hubble’s view of a corner of the Universe: the Creator and Father of that, all that, is here in this room and hears my prayer? 

Stupendous. And quite enough for two candles.