Christ and the Chocolaterie

Hilary Brand

Week Four: Getting Real -The Power of Acceptance

To start you thinking

Accepting difference

Time was when Britain was a Christian country. By that I don't mean that everyone was moral and pious. Rather that you were either moral, pious and worshipful within a Christian framework, or you were not. Whether you lived within its boundaries or without, Christianity was all that was on offer.

Now it is different. There are large numbers of people in our country who believe quite different things from us. We cannot share the same island without respecting them. And we can, and often do, leave our island and discover for ourselves countries which are quite other - in their beliefs, their customs, their attitudes. We have made the shocking discovery that it is possible to be moral, pious and worshipful without being Christian.

Not only are we exposed to other religions, but to those who embrace beliefs, practices and spirituality outside the framework of any organised religion at all. We live in a society increasingly mistrustful of any authority structure and any claim to truth (and sadly it seems with increasingly good reason). A myriad of alternative therapies, philosophies and spiritual practices are on

offer. Some seem helpful, some seem dubious, some seem downright dangerous. Christian reactions vary from vociferous condemnation to limp acceptance, mostly accompanied by ignorance!

Recently I visited Kuala Lumpur. In the middle of this teeming cosmopolitan Muslim capital was something very odd - a row of mock Tudor villas round a cricket green. It was, of course, where the British lived and ruled back in colonial days and you will find similar 'outposts of empire' all over the parts of the map that were once coloured pink You may also find more contemporary variants in places like the Costa del Sol with its Red Lion pubs and fish and chip shops. This is one way of living with difference - to retreat into your own tight `expat' community, to cling to your traditions and to become 'us', carefully insulated from 'them'.

In the UK, practising Christians are now pretty much `expats' within their own lands. We are a minority and very often our reaction has been to huddle together, cling to our traditions and minimise our contact with anyone who might threaten us.

To be a minority is threatening. And to be a minority in matters of belief is even more threatening. Belief is by its nature fragile. It deals with things that cannot be seen or touched or proved. And it is precious and personal, at the centre of our being. We would be strange believers, then, if we never felt threatened by those whose beliefs were different from ours. To feel threatened by difference is a natural reaction. It is what we do with those threatened feelings that matters.

Dealing with difference is never easy. But dealt with it must be, or the Church will gradually retreat into a world of unreality, like wheezing, retired colonels taking tiffin. There are some who say it already has done! This is doubly difficult where issues of faith are concerned, because they have to be dealt with on two levels. On one level there is the objective evaluation of the belief or practice itself. Is it untrue, or simply a different way of saying the same thing? Is it harmful, or just unfamiliar? And on another level there is the need to deal with our threatened feelings. How can I evaluate objectively when it raises so many uncomfortable questions within me? Even if I believe this practice is wrong, how am I going to love and respect the person who practises it?

At root perhaps the question revolves not around what we believe in, but whom. If we have learned to trust a loving God, who not only made but invades the whole of life, if we have learned to flow in the footsteps of a humble, forgiving Christ - then very little can threaten us. We can embrace those of other faiths without losing our own. We can begin to celebrate and explore difference rather than fear it.

Read John 4:4-26

Jesus was not afraid to talk to someone from a different ethnic and religious group - and a woman of dubious morals, to boot! When he started getting too close for comfort on personal matters, she was quick to divert him on to more general religious controversy (a common technique). Jesus did not ignore the controversy or give way on his belief, but he was quick to turn it round to the essence of the matter - not where you worshipped or what you did, but how you did it.

Pause for thought

Of those from other belief systems whom you have met, whom have you found the most threatening and why?

To continue your thinking

Read Matthew 5:43-8

What on earth does Jesus mean by that last statement in this passage? 'Be perfect.' To be honest, I'm not sure. (I don't think I've ever come across anyone else who really knew either.)

But I think I can be pretty certain based on the other things Jesus said and did, about two things it doesn't mean:

It doesn't mean that only people with an unblemished record can get into the Kingdom of God. Jesus made it clear that he had come not for the righteous but for sinners. He made it clear that God the Father welcomed back prodigals. He told the criminal on the neighbouring cross, 'I tell you the truth, this day you will be with me in paradise' (Luke 23:43).

It doesn't mean that anyone is likely to achieve perfection. Jesus' model prayer makes that clear: 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation' (Luke 11:3-4). He told the religious leaders of the day that for all their law-keeping they were like 'whitewashed tombs' (Matthew 23:27). He said that prayer was not about telling God how good we were, but about asking mercy for our sins (Luke 18:9:13).

So why did he say it? Was he having a brainstorm? Did the Gospel records get it wrong? Well, as I said, I'm not sure. But one thing I have discovered: these outrageous, unexpected sayings of Jesus have an immense value, because what they do is stop us in our tracks and make us think.

If it's impossible to be perfect, then why advocate it? Well, maybe to make it unequivocally clear that living life God's way is not about achieving a pass mark. There is no 65 per cent pass, 85 per cent distinction. It just doesn't work like that.

Thank goodness it doesn't. For if it did, we would be forever evaluating how well we were doing, trying to gain 'brownie points', checking our grade average — eternally looking inwards.

Read Mark 12:28-31

And the essence of a perfect life, as Jesus makes supremely clear, is about looking upwards and looking outwards.

Yes, there is some looking inwards to be done. Because as Jesus also makes clear, we are to love our neighbours 'as ourselves'. And in those two words, Jesus demonstrated that he understood, centuries before Freud and Jung had drawn breath, what whole libraries of psychology and self-help books have tried to say since, that in order to love and accept others, you need to love and accept yourself. And to do this you need to know yourself forgiven.

And this is where the circle returns to the beginning. Because in order to love and understand ourselves, in order to love and understand others, we need to know unequivocally that none of us is perfect.

None of us lives our lives with perfect wisdom and compassion. None of us never gets tired or ill or fed up with our nearest and dearest. None of us fulfils our potential. None of us has a perfect grasp of the truth.

Years ago, my father said something that stuck in my mind. He remarked that if we did meet someone perfect, we'd never recognise it.

I think he was probably right. Because when it comes to it, we have a pretty odd idea of what perfect is. We expect the physique of Michelangelo's David, the brains of Einstein, the charm of Princess Diana, the compassion of Mother Teresa, etc. We make an assumption that perfect people would be good at everything, that their bodies and their behaviour would confirm to some norm of beauty. Perfection would mean perfect conformity And so, not surprisingly, we all secretly feel that if we did meet someone perfect, we would instantly dislike her or him.

I think, though, that what my dad was trying to say was that perfection would mean being perfectly and wholly yourself, quite unique in how you looked and what you did and thought and said. (I have since discovered that the original Greek word for 'perfection' used in this verse has more to do with maturity and fulfilment than with being unblemished, so it would seem to bear this out.)

I don't think any of us totally achieves this maturity. I suspect, though, that the ones who come nearest to it are those who would never in a million years imagine themselves to be so. Those who are so accepting of themselves — of their gifts and strengths and of their flaws and failures — that they can happily get on with looking upwards and outwards without thinking about it. I suspect that the ones who come nearest to perfection are not the ones we envy most, but the ones who most make us feel good about ourselves.

And I bet, although I have no theological evidence to support this, that if we did meet someone perfect, one evidence would be their ability to laugh at themselves.

Pause for thought

Look around you, as you go about your daily life, this week, for those who may be nearer to perfection than you had ever suspected.