XIX - Crisis Theology
Crises are good for theology. They are what holds it to account. The Theology of Crisis which emerged in the early 20th Century helped draw academic discussions back to the revealed faith, but also gave it enough resilience to speak into the darkness of conflict and authoritarianism that overshadowed Europe and the world after 1914. Crises are almost always bad for churches. The Church of England, having had a strong sense of mission and impact in post-war reconstruction across Europe, ecumenism and the development of the welfare state, has felt the impact of too many crises over the last fifty years and, now shaking from a series of scandals and crises on a national scale, seems to have lost all confidence.
A sense of crisis can be good for people. It can give a strong sense of meaning, purpose and direction. It can help prioritise and reveal what is important. It can sort the wheat from the chaff and give an opportunity to develop character and virtue. On the other hand, It can leave a person with a sense of being defeated, burnt out, traumatised or locked on. It can distort our view of the world and create bad habits which are not easily shaken off. How we respond to a crisis speaks a good deal about us. But equally important is how we recover from conflict and that is far less often talked about. It is unusual in novels or films to cover this except in great wide sweeps – those two sentences at the end that summarize what happened in the rest of the character’s life. Probably the worst part of the Harry Potter books and films is that creepy epilogue where they’re all still friends and the whole thing is set to start again with their children – as though all development and interest ceased on them finishing high school and they just droned through the rest of their days in predictable fashion, and worse, left their own children to repeat their stories. Tolkien’s epilogue shows more nuance, in particular in the character of Frodo and being unable to adjust to the new world, as has so often been the fate of those who return from conflict.
We’re currently in a little jungle house here in Kerala in the Wayanad National Park. There are no other guests here and have only been four parties this year. It’s strikingly beautiful – a coffee plantation, though we’re also surrounded by hills of tea, which is shockingly beautiful to look at. Again, birds everywhere – something I hadn’t known before coming to India, but both in sound and colour there can be nowhere better to enjoy birds in the world than Goa and Kerala (and, being honest, I wouldn’t have dreamed of “enjoying birds” before coming here). Pleasingly (for parents of small children who are not staying here), a snake crawled past Rhiannon’s foot tonight and slipped into a log-pile house. [update: Rhiannon has now been bitten by this snake and is preparing to sue the Gruffalo franchise for minimising the danger of snakes.] After 7 weeks, we are as far from Putney as possible. I’m beginning to really feel like I’m gaining something back, which I had lost, and get perspective on some harmful acquired habits.
I feel, I suppose, looking back, like somewhere I’d entered a crisis. There were many causes to this. Having children creates its own sense of crisis. Most people who’ve had children will have tried to explain to people without the impact (positive and negative) of having children and failed. And then the step up from one to two (I cannot speak to further gear changes in this direction). For me it’s opened a colossal tank of love I had not previously imagined – and with that a sense of meaning and joy beyond my expectations. But equally, I remember not long after the birth of my first child having emotions of frustration and fear and insecurity that I’d last experienced as a teenager and thought well behind me. And, in all, I now feel a constant emotional turbulence whereby even the most crass sentimentality can bring a tear to my eye, and the briefest mention of harm to a child produces an experience akin to phobia. (Reading The Covenant of Water, a great novel set in Kerala and Tamil Nadu was shattering.) Then the cost of childcare has returned me to the financial anxiety of being a student through my late twenties, when the first thing I’d think of in the morning was my credit card. Alongside this has been the impact on R’s health, and the impact of that on all that is required to get through a day. I have never made particularly safe or easy choices but the solidity I felt in my thirties has been dismantled in my forties by those fears that something might break, something might collapse, and there might be no end to the fall.
The reality of crisis really came on through the pandemic. Before, I had a clear sense of the role of the vicar and church. From the moment of lockdown, the safe, happy parts of the role vanished, indeed were forbidden. In its place was the inexhaustible horizon of what could and what must be done. The feeling of pressure in responding to the many people requiring essentials – in also seeing more accurately the level of hidden need in leafy Putney, adding layers of streaming, risk assessments and health and safety to everything – created an overwhelming requirement to manage, to solve problems and get people help, with no sense of how to draw lines where I might start saying ‘no’, or step back, without guilt and sadness. This combined with regular funerals and an enormous amount of regulations to keep track of. At the same time R’s entire industry stopped and she was left to face her own demons. And, of course, we also had a young child, and later two, to take care of. Once begun, there seemed no way of switching off. A three month crisis would have been manageable followed by three cheers and a party. After months and then years, key parts of personal happiness, like work-life balance, the ability to have leisure time unaffected by work, and peace of mind, had been severely eroded, and it's the habits formed in crisis which I have been unable to shift. Habits in work and life and thought that are locked on to prevent the fears of anxiety – of letting people down, of causing unhappiness, of failing. One of the worst things about the pandemic was the uncertainty – is this ending, will this end, when will this end? One can keep going for a long time but you can't live in a crisis indefinitely without psychological harm.
We haven’t yet shaken off the old mind-body dualism. And it’s easy to assume that, being rational creatures, we can just spring back to a “normal” state of being: that the mind sees the solution or the new reality and tells the body what to do. But we are our habits and once our habits have been remodelled to cope with extraordinary circumstances they don’t just peel off. Our minds are the product of our bodies and like our muscles it stretches and tightens and sometimes snaps. I am lucky to have very good mental health and resilience, but the habits I developed over 2020 and 2021 have made me a person that I don’t want to be, and really don’t need to be. A crisis can be tremendously creative. It has brought St Margaret’s better sound and streaming equipment, better lighting, more community involvement, a great reputation and many other things. But that crisis is over and I'm realising now I need to reset my mind in order to regain my sense of peace and good health. When there is a critical list of things to do, it’s possible to stop enjoying anything and be single-mindedly focussed on getting through the list – even if it’s a delightful list of enjoyable holiday activities. Each day of a crisis begins with a sense of foreboding and a desire to just get through to the end of the day. This crisis-mentality needs breaking. A theology of crisis also needs a circadian theology that can be alive to the times and seasons in which our health and faith can breathe.
All of which is why we now find ourselves in a jungle looking for wild elephants. There’s plenty of stress but it’s mostly about getting on the right form of transport. Last week we were waiting 18 hours for a 12 hour train journey which took 18 and by the end was 24 hours late. Yesterday we were on a bus that reached us an hour late and made its destination 15 minutes early. Which would have been fine, but it meant standing (and the children sleeping) at the side of the road at midnight and getting off a bus at four in the misty morning. But this is at least a change with enough time and variation to shake things up. And with that, hopefully, the space to discover the life we want to live in which we can find the rhythm and contentment to flourish.
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