All Saints 2022

Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. INFSHSA

I am frequently in trouble with my wife. I believe the cause of this is a generation gap – she is 10 years younger than me but in the era of technology that makes a significant difference. I got my first mobile phone at the age of 23. She had one at around 13. If I don’t answer the phone she is furious. My feeling is that this is because her generation just cannot imagine life without a phone – Whereas at 22 I travelled across the entire world for a year without one. And no one died. We have a lodger in the vicarage who is 22. She was born with a phone inserted into her face so she can access Instagram just by twitching her neck. Ok perhaps not, but she has had a smart phone since she was a child, with all the social media, notifications and constant clamour for attention that brings with it.

And we don’t think about it anymore but on this phone you can email, message, whatsapp, facebook message, tweet, Instagram, snapchat – is that still a thing? – message me on linkedin – I think there are at least 12 ways in which you can make my phone vibrate. Incidentally, I read that there are 130 working mobiles for every 100 people in the UK, so some people clearly have at least two of these little brats.

Before I was ordained I went on retreat for just over a month. It was a silent retreat. I didn’t talk to anyone except a spiritual director for twenty minutes a day. I didn’t read the news, watch tv, read any books, turn on my phone or use the internet. The question I’ve been asked many times since is was it difficult to be silent for so long and to not hear from anyone for a month? Well, basically, no. It wasn’t difficult at all. 

What was difficult though was coming out of the retreat. After a month of letting go of all relationships and situations which were outside of my immediate bodily reach, suddenly being returned to the considerable pressures of time, money and energy required just to maintain friendships, let alone professional and social ties suddenly felt almost intolerable. And a month’s backlog of emails, messages and mail was enough to almost send me back on retreat. The fact is that whether we realise it or not, and mostly we don’t, we live under a hitherto unprecedented weight of demands, which are now, thanks to various technologies, almost impossible to escape.  Most of us actually have become so used to it that now we actually feel we need it. And let’s be honest, people revel in it. They draw confidence from the number of facebook friends, by how many messages they have, by how busy and important and liked they are. People have ceased to feel embarrassed when their phones go off in company – it’s a matter of pride that they are so necessary to the world. Some people even put their phone on the table at dinner, JUST IN CASE something happens that requires their immediate attention.

And in an odd sort of modern way - this is exactly what it means to be rich, to be full now, to be laughing, to be spoken well of. And Woe to that sort of thing. Now there is no blessing in poverty, or hunger, or weeping or being hated. To say otherwise is to make light of those whose sufferings we can little imagine. Jesus isn’t saying that.

These blessings are typical of Jesus though. There is something paradoxical about them and something revolutionary. Fundamentally, they are about reversals, and about how God’s kingdom, a kingdom which Jesus announces as already present, is about overturning our usual values and expectations. How saints are always counter-cultural. It’s about paying attention to what is actually true, as opposed to what everyone else thinks.

And our culture values busy-ness. Business is good! I have a friend, a solicitor at aptly named Slaughter and May who in one week worked 80 hours and slept only 12 hours. And technology, your smart tv, radio, laptop, ipad, ipod, iphone, means that we never need to do nothing. We are never silent. never truly alone. We are rich, we are full, we are laughing and if the only thing worse than being spoken about is not being spoken about, it’s now very difficult to avoid being spoken about – not that it is always necessarily being spoken well of. To give up these things, is to enjoy poverty. To turn off everything, and get lost on Wimbledon Common, is to enjoy poverty. Most of all to avoid the nagging insecurities that require us to be always available, the narcissistic thrill of the phone vibrating, is to enjoy poverty.

And whether it’s for a daily half hour, a quiet Sunday afternoon, a Saturday without distractions, or a blissful month in the country, it’s got to be a good thing. And even if it’s turning off your phone when your friend drops round so you can attend fully to them, it’s at least a move towards greater attentiveness. If our minds are constantly bombarded with people and information pawing at us, we never have the chance to think and reflect upon our experience. The human mind is such that it needs rest, it needs emptiness – not to be filled with all the good thoughts you think you should be thinking, or fluffy clouds and pretty things, or even close reading of the scriptures. But actually our minds sometimes need to be stripped away from the endless distractions, left to themselves in order to come to terms with who we are.

I thought I’d finish with part of one of T.S. Eliot’s late poems, which attempts to capture this: 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art,
the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
…
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Amen.