James Lawson reflects on the way forward to the as yet unknown world ahead of us
In 399 BC, the Athenian philosopher Socrates was condemned to death for crimes against the state. He had to wait for some time in prison before being executed. In his dialogue Phaedo, Plato describes the circumstances. Although he should have been executed on the day following his condemnation, Socrates was given a respite of 30 days. It was the time when a ship wreathed with garlands was sent to the holy island of Delos, and no criminal could be executed until that ship returned. But the day came when one of his friends brought him hard and grievous news in his prison cell. The returning ship had been sighted.
Perhaps all of us are now in Socrates’ position. The ship with the black sails has been sighted. Catastrophic global ecological collapse is on the horizon.
Our temptation is to despair. And so we are all perhaps also in the position of the prophet Job. Job lost almost everything, but he didn’t lose his wife. As St John Chrysostom once preached, that became his greatest trial.
As Job sits in the ashes, his wife came to tempt him to curse God and die. She came to tempt him to despair. But Job refuses to despair. He glorifies the Lord. Scripture says despite all this, Job sinned not. Job suffers and he protests at his suffering, but he still hopes. He expresses a final, complete and unbroken confidence in God: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the Earth” Job 19:25.
As the prophetic theologian Jacques Ellul argued in his Hope in Time of Abandonment, this hope is not an embittered zeal or a futile rebellion. It is the resolute certainty, in spite of the apparent absence of God, and even his apparent unfaithfulness to his creation, that these perceptions do not represent the truth.
For Ellul, hope is the work that incites God to come and reveal himself in his glory. This work has three foundations. The first is perseverance. Hope involves a choice, a decision not to give up but to keep acting and to keep moving forward and trusting in the Lord. The second foundation is prayer. Without prayer there is no hope. Our loss of interest in prayer is the spiritual proof that we have no hope. But hope is born in those who pray. Prayer is a form of life, a life with God. In an age of almost constant communication and distraction, prayer will require a kind of withdrawal. The third foundation is realism. Without realism, hope has no reality. True hope is the existential force that allows us to fight after having looked unflinchingly at a situation that seems to offer no exit and no future.
One of England’s greatest living writers increasingly seems to be practising this kind of hope. Paul Kingsnorth is an environmentalist who has recently become a Christian. He writes about feeling despair in the face of climate change, and the failure of the environmental movement to stop it. But he says he has not given up hope, only what he perceives as false hope. In the manifesto for his “Dark Mountain Project”, he observes that the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. He believes that together we can find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
Kingsnorth imagines and longs for this world. It is a world that belongs to those who have sustained the enclaves in which life and character and beauty and meaning could continue, and who protected them from destruction. He imagines a twenty-third century in which the rebellion of modern humanity against both creator and creation has finally failed. The future belongs to those who had always known it would fail: to the monks, the hermits, the anchoresses and the forest tribes, and to the earthworms and the shy hedgehogs, the plants and birds, foraging in the ruins of the latest fallen empire. In this future the Amish have bought up most of what was once New York State.
The truth is that at last God will stand upon the Earth and he will be favourable to us. So perhaps we too can dare to hope and pray and work for a future in which the meek – after a long detour – finally inherit the Earth.
James Lawson is Vicar of St Mary Magdalene, Enfield Chase, and the Edmonton Area Director of Ordinands.
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