Angst

"Why do the nations rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing? " Psalm 2:1.

An interesting satirical piece appeared on my Facebook reading page yesterday morning.

Following through on the current call for disbanding Police forces, it suggested hippies employing John Lennon's 'Imagine' as a salve for the moment was an appropriate response to the current outcry for social justice. It jolted a memory of a couple of moments from the film version of Tom Sharpe's "Bonfire of the Vanities"  where a spectrum of 'colourful' responses arise in regards to a particular indiscretion which impinges on political, social and racial tensions, that become a public affair.

The 'summer of love' scenario evoked by Lennon and co is nostalgically sourced as an acceptable 'small corner' to many, because of its seemingly cosy, mellow invitation to a place where peace descends because we can so readily depict somewhere without anything beyond the 'now'. That, to use 60s language, is what 'feels' right.

The problem, of course, is that we're not living amidst some ideal 60s love-in. What we are living through is far more akin to M Night Shalayman's vision in The Happening.
The film begins with a breaking-in of the inexplicable. We witness nature and society erupting in a fashion that quickly drowns and swallows the entire 'normal' of life. What we then witness is the way in which people respond to this because they cannot explain what they witness.

Our world has been split this past three months by unprecedented change, and as humanity begins to seek to 're-settle' itself in the wake of what has transpired, we find a world aflame with all manner of questions and issues that such a breaking has caused to pierce us with terrible imminence.

The shifting has got us, and it isn't stopping.
Perhaps the thing to ask is why.

Back in early March, the initial response I witnessed was panic. People were clearly afraid of what was coming, because they understood that life as they knew it was over. Uprooted, at least for the present, so many of them literally ran to grab what they could - especially from the shops. It is estimated that there were some 97 million extra visits to supermarkets in those few weeks in March and April in the UK alone.

We haven't escaped what those days released in respect to the rout, so we're now in the throes of another cycle of reaction - this one seeking anything human to grip onto that can become the centre of our attention because we cannot, we dare not, look into the face of the Gorgon that the pandemic has unleashed upon our ruined world.

We are furious at what's happened; at the confused at best and woefully inadequate at worst responses to what has set us in a place where things may appear the same, but where they are as frail as dust, and we are powerless to change them.

Now, as the anger rises, cutting in wherever it finds the slightest pretext for its 'sanctified' expression, we begin to see how deep the wound truly is.

The events of the last few days show us where such indignation can quickly travel.

What does this say?

We are a truly marred race.
Scratch us, and we not only bleed, but we exude venom that so often is only quelled when exhausted by the brutality of violence (vocal and physical) or the blunt excess of war.

The cause, so many would say, is we are not empowered to be what we should be. We must have what will make us so, whatever it takes for that to happen.

Anxiety. Anger. Avarice. Activism.

The Psalm tells us that we are awfully concluded in just such a cycle, and that this is the trap that defines the maelstrom of our existence distant from God. The intention has to be to 
'break' what we deem is stifling - to exorcise what holds and haunts us in respect to the shadow of something greater than our own ambitions. We are highly industrious to rid our lives of the burden of such a higher requirement - to see an alternative that truly makes each of us not only of astonishing value, but truly free to live well.

What we learn from the 'marginalised', the maligned, the miss-placed, is that given a little power, we are all equally capable of a savagery that will furiously hammer not only anyone else, but pulverise the divine image within us into the ground - because the truth is too painful to bear.

We are children of an eternal Father, who has given us the beauty and majesty we are meant to bear in the person of His Son. We took such grace and pulped it into the bloody mess of horrific crucifixion. That is the human condition which marks and condemns us all.

In that man, we see the expression of what we need to understand and need to be - a people destined to be 'one' with each other and our world because we are one with Him who holds it, who intends for it to become whole, and who desires each of us to find our place in such a splendour.

The Happening concludes with the awful truth that what we see in the present is cyclic - naturally, there is no escape from the horror that pursues us here. Only by coming to and 'kissing' the Son, as the Psalmist tells us, centuries before the Son is born amongst us, can we find true resolve to these ever-present troubles.