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Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective
The golden thread.
Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount. 

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes. 

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain. 

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out. 

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like. 

Here they are: 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church. 

Living by them is the work of a lifetime. 

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting. 

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love. 

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently. 

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ. 

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another. 

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't. 

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world. 

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done. 

 

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.  

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Thoughts and prayers: why such words can really count

Cop-out phrase or the key to articulating something more powerful, Henna Cundill dissects the neurological power of a platitude.
A Coast Guard officer gives a press conference while looking grim-faced. Others look on.
A Coast Guard office gives the news of the loss of the Titan submersible crew.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected...”

We hear that repeated often enough, don’t we? Some public figure is quoted as saying this phrase in the body text (usually about paragraph five) beneath nearly every gut-wrenching news headline. “Thoughts and prayers” are the panacea, the platitude, the words to say when there is nothing that can be said.  

It's easy to deride and dismiss these words, and many do. There is an understandable frustration when public figures serve suffering people with vapidity instead of vim. But perhaps I can make a case for “thoughts and prayers” being more than just a political cop-out? To be sure, these words are not everything, but they are something.  

I love words, that’s why I try to write for living. (Try to, anyway.) I love languages too; I’m one of those annoying people who finds learning new languages pretty easy. Lots of people think they are rubbish at this, but they have missed the secret weapon: repetition. If you’ve the willingness to dig in and repeat vocab lists and word tables over and over again, and then over and over again, and then all over again. And then again. And then again, again… then learning a new language is easy. Repetition is the key, because repetition forges and reinforces new neural pathways in the brain.  

You see, that’s the exciting thing about learning a new language: you can actually feel the incredible plasticity of the human brain in action. It doesn’t have to be a new language, you can mess with the language you already know – I promise that if you look at a car and say the word “bicycle” to yourself 100 times, the next time you see a car, you will likely have to consciously will yourself not to call it a “bicycle”. Go ahead, try it. (Car) bicycle, (car) bicycle, (car) bicycle … and repeat.  

The human brain is constantly linking words and phrases to objects, emotions and perceptions, grouping things together by association. One study showed that participants were quicker to verbalise the word “priest” in response to a photo of a man in a dog collar when they had been shown a picture of the Pope immediately before. This is because the brain stores words in categories of related things, and this language storage system then has the power to shape what we perceive. Due to the association with the Pope, the participants perceived a “priest” and not a “vicar” or a “minister” or even just a “man.” 

Think again about the word ‘bicycle’ – in your mind’s eye do you now also see a car? See, I’ve played a trick on you! If you saw the car, then I’ve gifted you a new (and, sorry, totally useless) neural connection between the word bicycle and the object car. You’ll probably unlearn this one pretty quickly – neural pathways can fade as well as develop. But philosophers have long pondered this strange power of language to create our sense of reality – we develop our perception of what exists based on what we can communicate. Put more simply: people generally pay attention to the objects and perceptions that they have words for, and often ignore the things for which they have no words at all.  

Having something to say about suffering that gives us the ability to pay attention to it, to perceive and acknowledge it.

Of course, there are no words at all for that feeling one gets when reading about a school shooting, or a natural disaster, a mass murder or an accident. Horror is a screaming silence. “Our thoughts and prayers…” are typically the words to say that we have no words, that we are powerless to articulate what’s going on inside when we look upon the dust and ashes. But, if we take the philosophers seriously, and if we acknowledge the plasticity of the human brain, then putting these words around an event creates certain neural links and associations. It is having something to say about suffering that gives us the ability to pay attention to it, to perceive and acknowledge it, even when we would rather ignore and turn away.       

And if you or I actually do think, and if you or I actually do pray for all those affected – especially if we are willing to do so again and again, and then all over again, well then, we have not only created a neural pathway, but we have also reinforced it. We have gifted those suffering people a little place in our minds – perhaps even a permanent corner of existence. They are perceived, seen, and if you have ever been in a place of suffering, you’ll know how much it matters that someone, anyone, pays attention.

Far from helping us to avoid reality, having something to say gives us the means to engage.

Perhaps this is why the Bible repeatedly emphasises the importance of praying for one another, and for the world, and even for one’s enemies? It’s not only that prayer works on God, but that prayer works on us – developing our plastic brains and increasing our capacity to pay attention, to perceive the suffering of others and to allow horror to birth compassion. Far from helping us to avoid reality, having something to say gives us the means to engage.  

I am by no means arguing for platitudes instead of political power. Words are no substitute for tighter gun-control, better public safety, standards in public office and/or an open-hearted, open-walleted, boots-on-the-ground humanitarian response. Words are not a panacea, but neither are they powerless. Philosophers and prophets alike have long pondered the mystery that thoughts and prayers create realities – advances in neuroscience have only served to confirm the wisdom that was already in the room. To think and to pray is to create, to speak words that will bring life and breath out of dust and ashes.  

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