I am emerging – trying to emerge – from
my ‘narrow space’, my sense of constriction. Over the last few months some of
you have contacted me: ‘Where’s your blog gone? We need something in these
difficult times’ – so I realise I am not alone in feeling in Mitzrayim/Egypt,
feeling the power of the mythic narrative of enslavement, the hard daily living
of that existential condition that the etymology of Mitzrayim/Egypt evokes: narrowness, constriction, entrapment.
So the festival of Passover/Pesach arrives – and this year
concurrently with the drama of Easter:
stories about suffering and despair followed by the miraculous transformation
of life; when all appears lost, and yet new life, new possibilities, spring
from the darkness. These stories offer the seductive framework of a narrative with
which we can identify: they move us from oppression and suffering to liberation, to a new
sense of freedom. But is this what we experience? The undeserved arrival of the
God of Surprises (as the Catholic spiritual teacher Gerard Hughes named it)?
Are we that blessed? Are we that open? Is the myth still alive, and resonating?
I don’t know the answer to these
questions. What I know is the narrowness – I have been trapped by my inadequacy
in dealing with my dependence on technology (computer issues, internet and broadband
issues, that world in which I am immersed and feels like an extension of my
very self, so that my well-being depends on its smooth functioning); trapped by
the body’s ageing, and the always present awareness of dependence on its own organic
functioning, the taking-for-granted of physical well-being, until suddenly all
is not well and although not serious, our common frail humanity is starkly
revealed – and with it comes the helplessness, the powerlessness, and the question
of who to turn to?
So I know the narrowness of living in Mitzrayim/Egypt. And I know too that we
each have our own personal Mitzrayim/Egypt.
But also that there is a sense that our personal entrapment and constriction
and narrowing of horizons is mirrored in what we see around us: political and
social forces that oppress people’s well-being – and the list can seem endless:
the crises in the UK in the NHS and in social care and prisons and education,
no area of life unaffected by the poverty of imagination, and the lack of
generosity, and sometimes the systemic aggression, of the powerful and wealthy,
as well as our ongoing national trauma of the narrowing of our future hopes
because of Brexit.
And the concentric circles of concern,
that ache in our bones, are known to us all: Europe’s increased populism and racism,
and America’s; the destruction of species and natural resources and the air we
breathe; Putin’s and Trump’s threatening grandiosity, and calculated (or
impulsive) braggadocio, millions on the move, random terror, wars without end –
our lives touched or not touched – but we can’t shut out what we know. The
unthought known: Mitzrayim in us. The
list is too painful to contemplate – but it all increases our sense of
uneasiness, helplessness, fearfulness. It all adds up to our collective Mitzrayim/Egypt.
In the mythic narrative that underlies the
Pesach story of liberation, our
storytellers took a bold gamble when they wrote: “And the Israelites were groaning
under their slavery and they cried out, and their cries from the midst of their
oppression rose up to God and God heard their groaning and God remembered his
covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and God saw the Israelites and God knew.”
(Exodus 2:23-4). Why was this a gamble? Because it means that every generation
now wonder about their own oppression, their own inner experience of Mitzrayim/Egypt, their own “groaning”
and “cries” (in whatever form they come), and they wonder: ‘What’s happened to
the covenant? Does God any longer see
and know what we poor struggling human
beings go through?’.
Historically, Jews have often been
eternal optimists that this story still contains a timeless message of hope: that
somehow, in ways we don’t understand, the divine energy that animates the
universe is still in operation and oppression can and will give way to renewed
life and openness and well-being. But we Jews are also skilled in disillusion –
skilled in asking difficult questions about salvation. For we ask: so how does
liberation happen today? who takes responsibility for it? are we waiting passively
for salvation from some divine force outside ourselves? or do we have to liberate from within
ourselves our own powers, our own capacities to transform hardship into hope,
our own compassionate ability to see
and know, our own passion for justice?
Are we ready to take the mythic
narrative of the Exodus seriously enough to internalise it and recognise that this divine energy that the storytellers
of old projected outside themselves in the service of an inspirational
narrative of how liberation from oppression happens – this divine energy is an
energy within us?
Are we ready for that?
We all carry a wound, deep and scary
and scarring. It’s part of our modern condition. Jews are not alone in bearing
the scars of the 20th century, the wounds of modernity. This wound is
a universal spiritual trauma, barely recognised. That wound is being pressed on
every day. We feel a pain, undiagnosed but present. From where, from whom, will
healing come?
In 1965, in his poem ‘The Cave of
Making’, the poet W.H.Auden wrote some lines – filled with wisdom and hope, shadowed
with ambiguity - which are accompanying me in these days that lead us into these
shared festivals of pain and liberation, Pesach/Passover
and Easter:
More
than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
but we shan’t, not
since Stalin
and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we
know that, subjectively,
all is possible.
May this be
a season when we resurrect the miraculous nature of being – in ourselves and
for others.
