Explainer
Creed
Easter
5 min read

Faith, chaos and carnage

Remembered rituals comforted many who mourn. As Easter comes around again, Graham Tomlin examines the underlying hope found when all is carnage and chaos.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A photographer, standing next to a tripod, atop a pile of rubble is a destroyed factory.
Chaos.
Peter Herrmann on Unsplash.

One afternoon in that week after the Queen died back in September, I spent a short while watching the live video footage from Westminster Hall of people filing past the Queen’s coffin as it lay in state. Ordinary members of the public, after their nine hour wait in the queue, stopped for their precious few seconds in front of the coffin before being ushered on to allow others to have their moment. It was clear that many of them were not quite sure what to do. Some just stood silently, but most felt they needed to do something. Some bowed or curtsied, others seemed to utter a quiet prayer, others crossed themselves in a slightly awkward fashion as if it was something they weren't really used to doing.  

It was clear that people needed some kind of gesture of respect, and it was significant how many turned to some kind of religious action to do that, whether bowing a head, signing the cross or muttering a few words of prayer. 

Throughout that week, at every turn, from the ceremony to recognise the new king, to the lying in state, to the funeral itself, everything seemed to happen in a context of Christian prayer. They were all deeply religious ceremonies and came in for surprising little resistance, despite our increasingly secular frame of mind as a nation. It was as if at that moment, in that difficult week, it felt as if the Christian faith held the nation’s grief for a short while. 

Having taken many funerals in my time, I recognise the same dynamic in more ordinary circumstances. Many people who maybe have a dim recollection of Christian faith from their background find the rituals and ceremonies of the church - a hymn vaguely remembered from school, a vicar saying prayers, the rich and hopeful words of resurrection in the presence of death - a valuable handrail to hold onto at a time of deep instability and profound change.  

It might seem that this outbreak of religious observance at the death of the monarch was just a temporary thing before life returned to normal, but perhaps it pointed to something much more significant.  

It always feels a little odd with the beginnings of spring, daffodils and sprouting flowers in the garden, but Good Friday is the bleakest moment of the Christian year. It is the moment when we remember how, for Christians at least, the most complete human being who ever walked the planet, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed in a huge miscarriage of justice. If this really was the day we killed God, it was the darkest moment in human history. 

And maybe that is part of the genius of Christianity – its ability to hold people in moments of grief and pain, when there aren’t easy answers to be found.

Good Friday is followed by Holy Saturday, the day when Jesus’ body lay still and decaying in a cold grave, and everything seemed to be at an end. Of course, we know that Resurrection and the joy of it was just around the corner, but they didn’t know that on the first Good Friday, and you have to go through Good Friday and even sit with the devastation of it all through Holy Saturday before you get to the joy. And maybe that is part of the genius of Christianity – its ability to hold people in moments of grief and pain, when there aren’t easy answers to be found. 

Nick Cave’s recent book, co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, has as its title, not the traditional trio of Faith, Hope and Love, but Faith, Hope and Carnage. The book explores Cave’s re-discovery of faith in part through the tragic death of his 15-year old son Arthur, and the capacity of faith to hold and sustain him in the middle of carnage, despair and tragedy. As Rowan Williams put it in his recent interview with Nick Cave: “The book reveals the way in which faith, without ever giving a plain, comforting answer, offers resources to look at what is terrible without despair or evasion.” 

The Christian understanding of evil is not that is it good dressed up in dowdy clothing. It does not tell us to believe that somehow premature death, cancer, or childhood leukaemia are somehow good for us. It says that they have no point because that is the nature of evil – that it is pointless. It has no meaning because it is the absence of meaning. It has no purpose because it is the absence of purpose.  

That is why Christians gladly say they have no neat answer to the problem of evil. Because evil is the absence of answers. It is nonsense because it makes no sense. Instead, we believe, not because we have found an answer to the problem of suffering, but despite that fact that we haven’t. We believe because we have heard a more compelling story that does make sense of everything else - the unlikely and sometimes scarcely believable hope of Resurrection, which makes sense of so much else – even the mysterious rebirth of nature that emerges from the seeming death of winter into new life in the Spring. Only unlike pagans, Christians see the natural rhythms of the world as an echo of the central story of the Resurrection of Jesus, rather than the other way round. 

Christians see in the events of the first Easter the turning point of history. That when we tried to kill God on the first Good Friday, he did not stay dead, but rose again, bringing with him the promise that those who face death or tragedy hand in hand with Christ, will somehow come through the carnage and the chaos with a life and a future.  

When you’re in agony you don’t need an explanation, you just need someone to hold you.

Of course, when you’re in the middle of pain, it’s hard to see that. When you’re in agony you don’t need an explanation, you just need someone to hold you. And that’s exactly what Christianity offers – someone to hold you. Someone who has been through the worst that life and history can throw at him and knows the worst that can happen. It offers the presence of God in the Jesus who is no stranger to pain – as it says over and over again in the Bible “I will never leave you or forsake you.” It is, as Sian Brookes explains in her excellent review of the film Allelujah! on Seen & Unseen, what we will all need at the end of our lives - someone to be with us.  

Christian faith still holds out the hope of Resurrection. Easter Sunday does come around after Good Friday. But even when you’re stuck on Saturday, waiting for a Sunday that never seems to come, when Resurrection is hard to believe in, when all around you is carnage and chaos, you are invited to hold tightly and determinedly to that mysterious presence that stands with you in the darkness, whether you feel it or you don’t, while you wait for the light to dawn. 

Article
Character
Creed
Politics
Virtues
4 min read

Rory Stewart’s search for the hero inside

Who could be heroes today?
An AI image shows a contemporary man looking to the distance in a heroic pose.
Achilles in London.
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Rory Stewart has released a new BBC Radio 4 documentary series. Having previously tackled the concept of ‘ignorance’, he now seeks to investigate and explain the notion of ‘heroism’. What does it mean to be ‘heroic’? How is it that certain people are remembered as a ‘hero’? Can anyone live up to this lofty ideal? To answer these questions, Stewart embraces the full historical sweep, beginning with the ‘heroic’ Achilles, and tracing the evolution of ‘heroism’ through Alexander the Great to Ceasar to Napoleon, right to modern day ‘heroes’ – be they Superman or Zelensky or Donald Trump. 

The Long History of...Heroism is excellent. Stewart is a consummate writer and broadcaster, and crafts the series into a gripping investigation, featuring a line-up of engaging and knowledgeable talking-heads, including favourites such as Rowan Williams, Mary Beard, and Tom Holland. They help to chronicles the many ‘deaths’ the notion of the ‘hero’ has undergone – the combatant and conqueror, giving way to the upstanding Victorian viceroy of virtue, then reincarnated as the one who is true to themselves and their own vision of justice.  

Stewart identifies an overarching problem with ‘heroism’: the possibility of the average man or woman emulating the ‘hero’. I disagree; it seems to me that this is not the real issue at hand. Both Trump and Zelensky are ‘heroes’ because both go above-and-beyond in embodying what seems ‘good’ to the people who love them. As the series makes clear, however, what seems ‘good’ changes from age-to-age and society-to-society. By the final episode the themes coalesce to a crescendo…but not a full resolution. 

Now I would say this, but I believe this series to be limited by the ‘secular’ constraints of a BBC Radio 4 documentary series, put out for the broadest possible audience. The series does touch on the Christian legacy: how the story of Christ began to subvert the ancient Greco-Roman idea of the ‘hero’, the advent of the martyr as a rebuke to the figures of Achilles and Ceasar, how this morphed into the more culturally comfortable figure of the ‘chivalric knight’, and how its radicalism was rediscovered in figures such as Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, it is (understandably) unable to delve too deeply into the Christian idea of the ’hero’. 

The Christian sense of the ‘heroic’ spans the categories the series establishes. There are remarkable feats of physical courage: the martyrs who are willing to die horribly for their faith. There are inspiring feats of charity: the sheer number of hospitals and refuges and foodbanks that the Church has overseen for a millennium now. There are stirring feats of humility: my favourite is St Thérèse of Lisieux who has left us a spiritual diary chronicling her ‘Little Way’ of loving all those around her, especially when they irritated her. Even so, the Christian ‘heroic’ goes far beyond even these noble categories.  

For the Christian, there is no ‘hero’ to emulate, as such. There is only the person of Jesus Christ. Only Jesus is ‘good’ because only Jesus is God – and so only Jesus can embody ‘THE GOOD’. In one sense Jesus embodies the overwhelming and awesome transcendence of the ‘hero’, and in another he is beyond even such a lofty height – not ‘a god’ like Ceasar, but truly and fully the one God who created all ‘beings’ and is ‘being-in-itself’. Jesus is not a traditional hero, because he does not overcome, for as divine he is beyond all that is. Yet, as a man, he is ‘heroic’ by demonstrating what true power and victory and self-sacrifice – culminating on the Cross – really looks like.  

Jesus can be emulated – he leaves us not only an example (which the holy martyrs follow to its natural conclusion) but a set of teachings. Yet of course we cannot emulate his impossible standards, the standards of holiness that only God could fulfil. To be a Christian ‘hero’ is to live in this antinomic space.  

Stewart concludes on a hopeful but flawed note: a ‘heroic legacy’ is feasible for us all! The ‘secular’ flaw of the series I have found, is that even in its promotion of self-effacement, self-sacrifice, and self-transcendence, its ‘heroism’ remains either the egoism and individualism of the ancient warrior, or a modern and post-modern materialist response. At its worst, in our increasingly digital world, the 21st century ‘heroic’ response strikes me as a chilling chimera, uniting the worst of both. To be a Christian is to devote oneself to absolute transcendence; not only of self but of everything other than Jesus Christ.  

To live as a Christian is not only living ‘like’ Christ, but becoming Christ, and ultimately allowing Christ to become us…to live and speak and act through us. Only in this absolute self-denial is the Christian life complete. We are emptied entirely; we cannot become ‘heroes’ of ourselves, but we can make room for the one true ‘hero’ to enter through us. 

“What legacy can we leave?”, Stewart asks. 

“Not our legacy”, the Christian must answer, “but yours, Lord.” 

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