‘CHAOS: FACING FEAR AND TERROR’

 AN INVITATION TO

THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION

 Ross Kingham[1]

Chaos. How we have reeled at the unfolding tragedy in Asia in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami, 2004. Untold hundreds of individuals and subsets of family units plunged into chaos.

Then again, we love movies and stories that are include the elements of fear and terror; it adds zest to an otherwise monochrome existence; we are absorbed into it in the lives of others and in world events that take on the shape of the extraordinary.

But we do not like it erupting in our own life!

Hagar meets an angel at the fringes of the desert wilderness (Gen 16); Moses and Elijah each see God from a tiny cave on Mt Horeb (Ex 33; 1 Kings 19) … such as these find God as they stand at the edge of life and at the brink of despair. This may be where God’s presence is most easily to be found.[2]

CONSIDER a time of your own personal chaos…physical, psychological, spiritual, or relational:

·         Name it (‘The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly’ Richard Bach, Illusions). This naming may be incredibly difficult to do. Some writers refer to ‘difficulty of access’[3]: cutting through description (where it is so easy for us to get enthralled and over-excited to the point of missing the meaning) to emotional/spiritual impact. This ‘difficulty of access’ is represented, for example, in the physically arduous settings of many shrines and sacred places.

·         Enter into it (‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious’ – C J Jung)

·         Frame it (when did it occur…what preceded it, what followed on). Incidentally, one possible reason many people find solace in a shrine, or in a religious symbol, is that the desire to go back to places of past struggle, where our ancestors also had their backs to the wall and were hard-pressed, leads to the discovery of new insight, new wisdom. Our ‘framing it’ may be aided by focussing on other, historical, frames. Many of these are to be found in biblical stories (See ‘More Surprises of the Spirit’[4])

·         Locate it (where is that chaotic experience….at the forefront of your mind?                                    almost forgotten? healed? festering?)

 

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January 18, 2003 was a day set in a series of days of fierce heat, low humidity and high winds in SE Australia. It was the day when 500 homes were destroyed in the ACT by a firestorm with winds estimated to be around 200kms ph. Our home was one of them.

No-one in our family was burned; no-one in our family died. Even so, when my wife and I found, after several hours, that we and our offspring were all accounted for, I had little appreciation of the profound effect that day was to have on our health and our future.

The morning after the firestorm we began by finding temporary accommodation and purchasing the basic necessities of life – toothbrushes and paste, underwear etc. In the days to follow, we raked through the ashes of our home, finding some coins, jewellery, pottery…..just a few precious symbols of life and love.

Many friends have commented on the loss of our home, of most of our possessions: few have any clear appreciation of the trauma behind the loss; the experience of knowing that at any moment hundreds of people could have died; the apocalypse-like scenes of the streets, of our street…deep darkness, screaming wind, fires breaking out on the parched lawns and the tan-bark at our feet as if ignited by pools of petrol; the inability to hear the screams of people close by; the decision to try to escape by car, leaving most of our photograph albums in our second car; the choked streets…choked with traffic, with burning embers, with fear; and our feelings of utter vulnerability and powerlessness. There remain the obvious myriad of relocation issues to do with finding a new home, and settling into it (after two temporary homes early in 2003) and the after-affects of post-traumatic stress.

INTERRUPTION … evolution of meaning

When chaos strikes, there is an interruption to our normal life-flow: something completely from the blue has intruded and disrupted our living. It may be the case that there is never any real closure concerning life-changing disasters: there is only a change to the meaning of such events… “as the years go by, the meaning of the event develops and changes….there is  no real closure in these big life events, they just slowly evolve in their meaning”[5].

 There is no return to the emotional and spiritual state that existed before the trauma. You never ‘get over’ such wounds in the sense that you can return to the same state as before. As with the case of Jacob at the Brook Jabbock, there remains a scar, a limp…reminders of the painful episode.  Some people who experience burnout seek to return to the same condition of health as before the burnout: such a dream is a fantasy. Rather, the search may best be described as a seeking after the God-planted seeds of wisdom that come amidst the trauma.

FINDING AND CELEBRATING YOUR OWN PATTERN

Religious life is largely shaped by laws, expectations, rules. However, the ironic truth is that the great myths show us that when you follow somebody else’s pattern, you go astray: the hero has to set off by him/herself and must venture into the darkness of the unknown where there is no map and no clear route.

It sometimes happens that, as a reaction to trauma, we fall back on a form of legalist principles to comfort us in the terror.

In 1883, Mt Krakatoa erupted, at 10.02am, Monday 27^th August in an island group in NW Java. Waves 30m above normal sea-level, along with tidal waves of ash and gas, killed 36,000 people. Between 1883 and 1888, a series of rebellions broke out against the Dutch (who aided in the relief efforts after the eruption): these rebellions had not only political, but also religious, influence.[6] Islam became strong enough to dictate at least some of the major political events of the period (as earlier in India when Mogul rulers arose; and in Spain, following the invasion by the Sib-governor of Tangiers via Gibraltar in AD 711. But in the East Indies, “particularly amongst the unusually pious people of Banten , … (we see) the beginning of militant and anti-Western Islamic movements…fundamentalist, militant, anti-colonial, anti-infidel Muhammadanism”[7].

Islam had been first introduced to the East Indies by Arab traders in the C13th. East Indian Islam was always of a much milder stripe than that practised in the Middle East and in Africa[8]. The leader of the new, militant Islam of the 1870’s and 1880’s was Hajji Abdul Karim. He predicted before the eruption of Krakatoa that the Mahdi, the messianic figure who would appear to save the world from godlessness in its last days, was shortly to appear. “Then came the volcanic explosion, along with the movement for political change. The prediction made by this charismatic Islamic mystic, and ardently accepted by tens of thousands of his followers, that the Mahdi was about to come, turns out to be intimately connected to the eruption of 1883…. The Islamic teaching concerning the Mahdi and his holy war against the infidel holds that the arrival of the Mahdi is always accompanied by a series of definite signs. There would be diseases of cattle. There would be floods. There would be blood-coloured rain. And volcanoes would erupt ,and people would die. And so it happened that each and every one of these predictions occurred in Banten in precisely the manner that Hajji Abdul Karim had forecast.”[9] The mullahs expanded their influence in the period which followed. Yemeni fundamentalists sent inflammatory letters….teams of 40, clothed in white robes with white turbans, set about attacking selected villages where strongholds of Dutch influence existed.

And so it is when, as protection against that which threatens, we fall back on legalistic prescriptions. Scripts are written to quell insecurity. Cults emerge. Counsellors of all kinds are tempted to try assure frightened people with advice, and when they fall to temptation, the deep desire is that they themselves will feel better. Remember the line from the Medibank Private television advertisement…. “I feel better now!”: well might it ring in the hears of the counsellor as he/she closes the door on the traumatised client at the close of a session of such advice-giving!

The Abbe de Tourville: “The best directors are not those who are tied to any system, but those whose aim is to direct, help, and further each soul according to its own nature. For God never makes two souls exactly alike……”  “We are the brothers and sisters of the Saints. They became holy in their way; we must become holy in ours, not in theirs. Otherwise sanctity would be for nothing but a wearisome routine…. Why should we always give pre-eminence to the minds of the dead rather than to those of the living? …Come! Come! We must wake up and try to be what we are reasonably meant to be and not that which other people have been. One does not become holy by copying others but by making good use of what is truly part of oneself…”[10]

Your own pattern: one of the things that gives form to the unique pattern of our being is what Kosuke Koyama describes as ‘the emotive regions of the heart’.

• How open do we dare to allow ourselves to be in order to hear again how God’s Spirit can touch our hearts? Cf  projection, defense mechanisms, fear etc)
• In what ways has ‘chaos’ been the crucible for new birth in your soul?

EACH STEP AN EXPLORATION IN WONDERMENT

G.K. Chesterton, in his book, The Man Who Was Thursday, recounts a debate between two poets, Mr. Gregory and Mr. Syme. For sake of space I have paraphrased their dialogue.

Mr. Gregory speaks:

“I will tell you why all the passengers in railroad trains look so sad and tired. It's because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for, that place they will reach. After they have passed Sloane Square, they know the next station will be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street.”

Mr. Syme answers with equal conviction:

“If what you say is true, your passengers can only be as prosaic as your poetry. For the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epochal when a man with one arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also miraculous when a man with one engine strikes a distant station?

“Chaos is dull; in chaos the train might go anywhere. The magic is this: the conductor says, 'Victoria,' and lo, it is Victoria. Every time the train comes into the station it has … triumphed over chaos.

“You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square he must come inevitably to Victoria. I say one might do a thousand things instead. When one comes to Victoria, he should arrive with a sense of hairbreadth escape; and when he hears the conductor shout, 'Victoria,' it is indeed Victoria!”

 

GOD CREATES IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS

Some events in the life of Jeremiah are of great help for us in dealing with the mystery of chaos. Jeremiah found that God creates in the midst of chaos.

The closing years of the 7th century BC were a time of decline for Judah. Jerusalem was to fall to the Babylonian armies in 597BC. About 30 years before the overthrow of the city of Jerusalem, Jeremiah was called to his impossibly difficult prophetic ministry in an environment of political folly and religious corruption. His ministry was to last about 40 years.

Jeremiah 1:4,5 depicts the young prophet discerning a remarkable truth: that the living God had been deeply involved in Jeremiah's life from before his birth.

Imagine that these words of the Lord have been addressed to you.

You have been chosen for a special life path, from before the Lord formed you in your mother’s womb. God is an active Spirit, influencing your whole life-direction. This purposeful, loving shaping action of God has been critical in your formation since your conception!

How do you respond? Such an awareness generates a fresh perspective on how we see ourselves in this world: companioned by Another, whatever happens!

Further, in Jeremiah 1:6-10 we see that Jeremiah, in the face of a call to a prophetic ministry, felt utterly unequal to the task that lay ahead.

Is there a ‘speechless youth’ within you?

Does the image of the ‘speechless youth’ represent an area of vulnerability, timidity, inadequacy or lack of faith within you?

Jeremiah would not be freed from the rigours and pressures of a demanding ministry. Politically, he was to be a failure. He lived as a prophet for 23 years without seeing any result.

This man, the 'weeping prophet', may have had wholeness as his objective, but his condition was frequently one of brokenness.

...but he would be companioned by God.

…and he would live a life of amazing courage, withstanding the pressures of friends to seek after their goals, in order to seek after the purposes of God for him. He dared to think and act differently from the crowd. And so his life was continually to experience upheaval and turbulence.

We never know when it will come...the whirlwind of chaos. An unexpected phone call, a medical report, a ruptured relationship, the unheralded rebirth of old wounding memories... in any of a thousand ways we may be swept into the hurricane.

Sometimes, we are like Jesus' disciples in the boat on Lake Galilee, in the eye of a frightening storm. We wait for the storm to cease, we wait for resolution, for peace. But the time of waiting contains within it the time of harsh gifting, the time of experiencing the graceful, tender touch of God

Churches are very good at trying to provide a haven for the comfort of those who don’t want to grow…who are keen to remain with beliefs and practices that have been good for them in the past. But the Spirit is always calling us to move onward in the great adventure of life in God.

Prayerful risktaking is never particularly comfortable…It may be for us the place of chaos! We can only live in such openness and trust if we experience the closeness of God.

The ministry of the Holy Spirit is sometimes a ministry of upheaval, a stripping away of things about which we thought we were certain, convictions that are our own constructions rather than flowing with the stream of God's unfolding.

Such times of upheaval are an opening of closed doors, an unfolding, a moving forward, a giving birth, a releasing of energy. In God, nothing is static.

All that we choose is either an inner shrinking, escaping, dying, or a moving forward, creating as we go.

The root meaning of the word Paraclete, which refers to the Holy Spirit of God, has various translations. It means "the One who stands by us and calls us forth."

The ultimate Being is inherent in all things, creating and transforming without pause. Even

when God rests after creation, that rest is by its very nature dancing within all parts of creation (Gen. 2:3).

Dimly we realise that the ultimately stable is the infinitely variable.[11]

In his theological science-fiction novel Perelandra, C. S. Lewis writes of a mystical chant among the angels concerning the infi­nite creative dance of God's Spirit:

The Great Dance does not wait.... We speak not of when it will begin. It has begun from before always.... The dance which we dance is at the centre and for the dance all things were made.... Never did he make two things the same; never did he utter one word twice.... He dwells (all of him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven is inside him who is inside the seed.. ..Each grain is at the centre. The dust is at the centre. The worlds are at the centre.. . . Where God is, there is the centre. He is in every place. .. in each place the whole God....

 In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock... each is equally at the centre. . . . There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.[12]

In the scriptures the mountains and hills are metaphors unmoving stability, but in the Psalms we are shown a different picture:

The mountains skipped like rams,
The hills like lambs  (Ps114.4)

Mountains dance, but in a time frame so vastly different from ours that they seem to stand still.

Think about this possible interpretation of a saying of Jesus: When Jesus re-named Simon as Peter - a rock on which the church would be built, he told him that 'the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.' We usually picture that as the rock standing firm against all the attacks of hell. But what if it means instead that this 'rock' of the church is sent flying, crashing against hell's gates - and they cannot withstand its power?' Mountains skipping! The stable rock of the church hurling through the air! The flying, dancing rock of God on which we seek to build our lives![13]

Some presentations of the Christian faith are those that offer a static state, resisting change and transformation beyond conversion: an image of solidity and security. However, the image that we are here invited to embrace is that of dancing with our Companion the whirlwind, in which change is all around, a loving life-force in which the changes within our lives are caught up in the ever-changing, ever-living Spirit. That which becomes our security is our ever-evolving relationship with God...ever moving, always transforming, ceaselessly enriching.