Think Question Believe

What’s the expression, ‘There are none so blind as those who will not see’?We see it in those who won’t even have a conversation about faith, and we can see it in ourselves.It is a situation familiar to psychologists:We tend to trust information more if it agrees with things that we already believe. It’s called ‘confirmation bias’; we screen out challenges to our beliefs, anything that makes us uncomfortable and uncertain, and more readily let in news and ideas that fit neatly alongside what we already think we know.We listen to the politicians who tell us what we want to hear, we read the newspapers that tell us what we want to read, we dismiss the opinions of those who might help us flourish beyond our expectations and imaginations.And this can sway us either reject information, that actually may be helpful to us, and that actually might be true, or we can only partially perceive, limiting the reality we experience to our preconceptions and pre-judgements, so bound up in our own expectations, our own wants and concerns, that we can’t see that the answers to our prayers and yearnings might be staring us in the face.One of the tragedies of human experience is that we will not let go of our fixity of thinking until grief or trauma, or pain or shock force us to re-evaluate our world, our expectations and ourselves.

Recent studies have found that the national and cultural stereotypes, that we hold of ourselves can be pretty wide of the mark.And if we portray, even to each other, an inaccurate and dishonest image of our shared culture, are we any more honest in the way that we represent ourselves?For in many ways it is true to say that we are all strangers, strangers to each other, but also to ourselves.There is always something held back, something in reserve, something behind the mask that we have created, and which we wear to the world.And if the mask begins to slip, we can go to enormous lengths to glue it back into place.And whilst at times the mask may seem to comfortably fit, all too often we continue to wear it, long after it has failed to serve us, indeed even to the point where we can become disliked or made to suffer for projecting a personality that isn’t even ours.So fearful can we be of showing our real selves, that we can protect the artificial mask at real cost to the person behind it.And if the mask can hamper and sabotage the depth of our relationship with others, it can also serve to undermine, even more destructively, our spiritual growth, the growth of our soul.

The supreme error of Palm Sunday, the critical failing of the crowd, and us too if we fall prey to the same temptation, is to look for the wrong kind of Christ, the wrong kind of God.There is the great danger that we can worship a God of power and greatness, that we crown Jesus as Lord and King, but we actually want a God that conforms with our own egos, a glorious God to give us the glory. Hubris.He is so great, because we are so worth it.Look at how popular certain forms of religion can be, how confidence and certainty can empower and electrify the worshipper, temporarily at least. Look at the absolute, if only superficial certainty, of Christian Nationalism in the US, supposedly everything they do, think and desire is ordained by the almighty. America is God’s favourite country, Trump his most favourite president and servant, and the hard right as his most favoured politics and social values. For now.But faced with the harsh realities of life, beyond the febrile self-delusion and fragile conviction, the drowning out of any inner doubt by ever more vehement assertion, those brittle certainties turn to dust, just crumble away and disappear with the breeze.To mix my metaphors, religion that is too big for its boots, will one day be cut down to size.So, Palm Sunday is an object lesson in the dangers of religious triumphalism.

Jewish tradition saw the wilderness as a place of transition, of fundamental changes and intense physical and spiritual experiences - of stark need for food and water, of isolation, of danger and divine deliverance, of renewal, of encounters with God.So, there is a psychology and spirituality as well as a geography of wilderness, of faith and courage and devotion fired in the crucible of the wilderness experience.In the story of Jesus's temptation in the desert, all that evil could offer, can ever offer, was and is, the victory of the moment, the glory of the fleeting instant.In Jesus’ struggles and wrestling with himself, and the inner voices that assailed his conscience, Matthew also points to the continuing struggles of Christianity to follow the path that Jesus walked for us.We must ask ourselves this question, are we, will we ever be ready, to walk ‘The Way’?

The priest and Franciscan Monk Richard Rohr published a book called ‘Falling Upward: A spirituality for the two halves of life’.In it he speaks of something long defined by philosophers and more recently by such psychologists as Carl Jung, as the first and second halves of life.In the first half of life, we are naturally and rightly preoccupied with establishing our identities – climbing, achieving and performing. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, a job, relationships, friends, community, security, and building, both a foundation and a ‘container’ for our lives.But too many of us stop there. As Bill Plotkin, a psychologist, and wilderness guide once observed, many of us learn to do our ‘survival dance’ but we never get to do our ‘sacred dance’. How sad that is.If we as a society were wise, we would do well to remember the enormous contribution that the oldest among us can make to our community life.In the story of Simeon and Anna, we hear how they came into their own in old age. Their testimony was revolutionary, shocking to conventional minds and systems.For the job of a prophet is to challenge, to test the fads and fashions of today against a measuring rod of long years and experience.Something, if they chose to, that the older among us could do in our present age……