Fully Alive

I am purportedly a ‘grown-up’, but don’t know the answers. I feel bone-weary from carrying around heavy things. I hate that the monsters exist, and that they often win, and that some of them live in me.

Especially in the UK, we associate faith with weak tea and polite restraint. It’s a sort of boring background noise to the nation, like Radio 4 turned down low.

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes about the difference between résumé and eulogy virtues: The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral – whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?6

I noticed that when I’m triggered by adults I react the exact same way, easily ascribing malign intent to what are usually misunderstandings or thoughtless moments. My own misconceptions and insensitivities become irrelevant to the important task of winning. If I’m in a tense conversation with you, my own threat reaction tends to trigger yours. We will likely both emotionally arm up, withdraw and disconnect.

I used to have no idea how to apply them. I don’t think I have ever been hit, let alone in the face. I failed to see the relevance until I started learning about the way our threat response easily kicks in not just when we’ve received a blow, but when we’ve been insulted, or ignored, or just disagreed with on something that feels important. The injunction suddenly makes practical sense.

Evagrius, our desert father guide to the original understanding of the sins, wrote as if he could see into my experience: ‘boiling and stirring up of wrath against one who has given injury – or is thought to have done so. [wrath] constantly irritates the soul . . . seizes the mind and flashes the picture of the offensive person before one’s eyes. Then there comes a time when it persists longer, is transformed into indignation, stirs up alarming experiences by night.’14

As we have seen, an excess of circulating stress hormone cannot help but make people defensive, liable to lash out and blame. It temporarily suspends or represses the functioning of the part of the brain that makes more considered rational judgement, weighs arguments and solves problems. If our cause is correct and our position is right (and we are genuinely seeking to persuade rather than just playing to the gallery of our own side) then we have a vested interest in helping the other person or group get out of fight-or-flight. We need their whole brain on the subject, not just their defensive reptilian attack mode. It is incredibly difficult to persuade anyone to change their minds or their approach if they feel threatened and destabilised. Contempt is like kryptonite for real change. It can only harden us into our pre-existing positions. Turning the other cheek by remaining open, calm, curious, even vulnerable gives our perceived adversary the best chance of feeling safe enough to listen. If you need another reason to try this approach, try it because it works, and because we are going to need it.

I honestly think it is impossible to pray for someone and remain full of wrath. It might take more time, depending on the size of the offence (perceived or real), but it brings relief. Resentment doesn’t seem able to coexist with blessing. Empathy, the necessary precondition of love, sneaks through the crack in the wall and spreads like hot honey.

I don’t want my life defined by wrath, to spend it clenched against the wrongness of others. It feels like death. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. If I want more tender compassion and second chances for my own mistakes, the deal is I have to give that to others. I have to wean myself off the high of self-righteous rage, the hit I get from finger pointing, and stand my ground instead, look the other person in the eye, refuse to let my mental image of them collapse into stereotype, maybe even try to bless them.

What scares me about tackling my greed is that I might end up in scarcity.

Honestly, my top-level response to all this theory is grumpiness. I know, I know, I know, my brain mutters, sitting here in expensive leggings, typing into three different Apple products. FFS.

Avarice is just a fancy word for greed, but specific to material possession and money, as distinct from gluttony. If sin is disconnection, the sin of avarice disconnects me from the world, from what I really want and need, and from other people.

We – and I very much include myself in this – have been so reluctant to accept the smallest limitation on our comfort and convenience that we may well have rendered huge swathes of the earth uninhabitable for the very near generations.

The number of scripture verses about sex are outnumbered many times over by verses about money, which you wouldn’t necessarily get from media coverage of the Church. In the whole Bible there are around 500 verses on prayer and over 2,000 verses on money. It’s almost as if the whole thing is spiritually important.

The most challenging sermon I have ever read is from a fourth-century Turkish cleric called St Basil, who came from wealth, gave it away and devoted his life to the poor. He directly links our greed and others’ poverty: Who are the greedy? Those who are not satisfied with what suffices for their own needs. Who are the robbers? Those who take for themselves what rightfully belongs to everyone. And you, are you not greedy? Are you not a robber? . . . The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you [have saved] is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.24

Uncomfortable, and important. I am learning that all the important things are uncomfortable, which is annoying. In order to change for the better I am required to repeatedly choose against the grain of my cultural formation.

The practice of gratitude is a form of attention training. It builds my ability to keep seeing the things familiarity has veiled from me. So much that I now take completely for granted was longed for and hoped for. Gratitude helps rebalance my negativity bias, reminding me not to just scan for threats and problems to solve, for the next thing to covet, but to notice the gifts in front of my face. There is a prayer I pray over and over: ‘God, help me receive the gifts I have already been given.’

Giving should be enough to break the chokehold of money, not just an afterthought out of surplus but built into budgets and finances and put aside first. It is another psychological middle finger up to the lie that accumulation will save us.

Research on neuroplasticity and the power of habit only confirms what religions have always taught – the repeated, committed choices we make day after day are the sum of who we become. This means our own Rule of Life, the way we structure our time (whether by accident or design), is one of the most important choices we can make

Envy is a clue to who we wish we were, indicating dissatisfaction with who we actually are.

When you’ve spent fifteen years in the competitive fields of media, policy and academia though, choosing not to compete does take a certain weird bravery. But I want to do meaningful, lasting work, the work maybe only I can do. I want to be some use to the world, to the people around me. To do that, it felt important to drop out of the race for a bit, to actively practise caring less how I am perceived, to stop performing myself and start just being myself. To maybe even forget myself. And for that, I’ve found theology useful.

We absolutely need to believe that the desperate refugee, the mentally disabled child, the homeless person, those who have nothing to offer at the altar of productivity and power, are dignified, valuable and unutterably precious.

In many ways this is not my fight. My instructions are clear: love your neighbour as yourself, and don’t judge. I put too little faith in my own interpretative ability to have any level of certainty, but the vulnerability and power lens helps me read these sections with less wincing. My understanding is that committed, equal relationships between two people of the same sex did not really exist in the ancient world. Where sex did take place between (usually) two men, it was within the context of large power imbalances – masters and slaves, older male patrons and adolescents or with prostitutes. One reading of these confronting, painful sections is that what is being condemned is the same thing being condemned basically everywhere the Bible condemns sex – extractive fornication and disconnecting lust that always harms the least powerful; indeed, the Bible implies, harms everyone involved.35

I want to argue for the place of committed, faithful relationships as the most obvious container for connected sex. I’d even go so far as to cheerlead ‘traditional marriage’, by which I mean two equal people committing to care and support each other, to share and struggle together over time. A set of serious, socially witnessed, legally binding and economically impactful promises are the strongest protection we have come up with against extractive sex. It’s harder for me to treat you like an object if you own half my stuff. I think marriage is still a good container for this kind of sexual humanism because like every virtue, every habit that makes me feel fully alive, it takes structure and repetition.

Taking kids to swimming lessons to try to insure against future drowning is one of my least favourite aspects of parenting.

We don’t hear the stories of happy churches, like we don’t hear the stories of happy marriages and happy families. Maybe they are boring, as Tolstoy implied. Bits of church are boring – the bad sermons, the rotas, the people you don’t really like telling you a long story over coffee. Sometimes I sit there and critique it, wincing at the clanger in the prayers or the tone-deaf comments in the sermon, but that just disconnects me. I can’t be part of it when I’m feeling superior, when I let my pride be the lens through which I see it.

Being part of a local congregation is my weekly dose of pride-prevention medicine.

What we have, at the end of our lives, if we have lived them well, is not ourselves, but a team, a family (whether biological or chosen), a weighty legacy of encounter and relationship that rings a note in eternity.