A Contagion of Blessing
Sermon by the Rev. Art Lester
One day, soon after we arrived in London, my wife, Gilly, and I were on a bus. You’re supposed to get on at the front and exit at the back. The bus was crowded, with people standing in the aisles, and we were crawling along through dense traffic in West London. Several people came forward at stops and asked the driver if they could exit from the front door. He obligingly opened the door for them.
At another stop, a woman came forward just like the others. She was a black woman in her forties. The driver was a white man. When she asked him to open the front door, he shook his head. The woman started to plead with him, but he just looked out the windscreen and paid no attention. In the end she had to scramble to the back doors to get off. I saw her walking along the pavement as we crept slowly toward Ealing. She was muttering, and, I believe, cursing. Two streets farther along, she was still there, glaring at the driver and talking to herself.
The incident left me with a sick feeling. It had clearly been a case of discrimination, but the driver hadn’t actually done anything improper, according to the rules. But he knew, and she knew, and Gilly and I– sitting embarrassedly near the front– all knew that something ugly had taken place. And it seemed to me, watching the woman’s face, that a small homeopathic dose of poison had been released into the flowing current of the city. The waters in which we all swim had become a little darker, and—it may be—a little more dangerous.
It reminded me of a story one of the members of the Dublin congregation told me, about a black woman arriving late for a bus, burdened with packages, and holding up the coach’s departure by a few minutes. She was politely treated, and when she finally got on board, she was smiling and saying, “I feel blessed. I am blessed.”
It seems to me that this corollary, is exact: if one woman felt blessed, then the other must have felt cursed. In two routine incidents, repeated millions of times each day, the curse or blessing was released into the world. In each case, they were results that spread beyond the confines of the moment. In the latter, I’m sure everyone aboard the bus felt the warmth of the woman’s blessing; on the mean streets of London, I’m sure that others felt the pain of the other woman’s curse. These incidents are minor; they don’t lend themselves to treatment of law and sanctions. And yet, they affect our lives in ways we can’t measure. Like the butterfly’s wing beats in the Amazon, they may create a hurricane in Europe.
It isn’t a giant leap from that incident to another bus 16 years ago, when a fanatical kid from Leeds blew himself and 14 others up in Tavistock Square. Poison collected over time, nursed in alienation and then carefully cultivated by those who can find a use for it, is ultimately capable of grave acts of violence. Anecdote piled on rumour and cooked in isolation becomes a new and deadly form of abstraction. The years of lynching in my native American South, the so-called “peaceful demonstrations” of the right-wing nationalist groups are examples of this. The banner may read “racial purity” or patriotic fervour. It may also be named “jihad.”
Once the anecdotal becomes the abstract, and murder is done under one banner or another, then simple killings become acts of heroism, and mere suicide becomes “martyrdom.” It has ceased to be a personal phenomenon at all. So we hear that certain American congressmen- and major presidential candidates—have promised to give pardons to the violent participants of the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
We have all heard of what is called the law of karma. It basically says that all human experience is a result of cause and effect. A parallel to the Newtonian law of physics that states “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The Californian jargon is a bit more understandable: “What goes around comes around.”
This is a wise half-truth. I call it a half-truth because it doesn’t usually get beyond the transactional concerns of the individual life. At its most basic, it says that if you are violent then you will be the victim of violence. If you are greedy you will be the victim of greed. It is a kind of moral code to keep people in line, a version of the so-called “Golden Rule”: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In philosophy, it is known as ethical reciprocity. Like any moral prescription, it has its selfish undercurrents. You might as well say, “Be nice to people and you will get a nice reward.” That’s different from the idea that being nice to people for its own sake is the way to live.
The Rabbi Jesus and other masters seem to have had a different take on the subject. When being asked about this odd thing called the “kingdom of heaven”, Jesus is reported to have said that it was “at hand.” That means nearby, by the way—I looked it up. It makes me think that he was saying that the kingdom of heaven was where he was already living, that he was, in fact, the first citizen of a new and different kind of world.
In this world he was living in, things seem irrational. You love your enemies. You bless those who curse you. If someone importunes you for your coat, you give him your shirt as well. If he pops you one, you offer up the other cheek for him to hit. He didn’t seem to be saying that this would store up good karma for you, or that, after being hit any number of times that you would, say, win the lottery. He seemed to be saying that the kingdom of heaven works that way. And I get from that that the kingdom of heaven, or the better world we hope for, is acquired just this way—in the foregoing of temporary satisfaction for the sake of something much more important. Something frustratingly hard to define, and invisible. By living according to the rules of this kingdom, it seems to say, you are actually helping to bring it about. It isn’t simply a matter of being “nice”; it is a radical tactic of renewal. Maybe the only one that can respond to our slide into authoritarianism and conspiracy theory.
But surely we can’t actually live as Jesus seemed to be suggesting! We have to look after our own interests. Everything in creation follows that pattern. The lion doesn’t avoid eating an impala calf out of pity any more than a big business lion avoids the sad necessity of asset-stripping a small family business. The trees themselves struggle to gain the mostlight and leave the others in shadow, so of course we compete for jobs and money, sometimes doing things that maybe we shouldn’t in order to gain the sunlight of success. It is our biological mandate, that nouveau-Darwinian idea that so excites the prophets of meaninglessness like some of the so-called “new atheists”, who are content to identify—and even celebrate– the selfish gene.
And yet the stories of the great souls are there to disturb our merry competing. The man who sacrifices his life to save a drowning boy. The leader of a liberation struggle making himself a target for assassins. The hedge fund manager, like my friend, a former member at our church in Kensington, who has given over a billion pounds to a charity to help children in Africa. Like sacrificing mothers and grandfathers in all ages, like St Francis of Assisi the leper kisser, and like the unknown millions who have let slide their own advantages in order to bring about something that feels right. So we have this inbuilt value too, and the tug-of-war between these two poles of our natures could be said to define us.
My feeling is that there are things for which we have no name, perhaps things inscribed in our genes, that have kept an invisible medium of good will within reach. These are root ideas and feelings, so deep that they could hardly even be observed, that made up the field in which we humans have our being. Some things simply are not done. Some things are sacred. Some things will cause pain even in the shrivelled conscience of a sociopath. These are the ideas that seem now to be at risk.
People often ask—I do myself—what a purely individual act has to do with the greater sum of human experience. One late summer day, while riding on a train, a wasp landed on my wrist. Automatically, I flung it to the floor, and—just as automatically—raised my foot to crush it. Just then a man—homeless, by the look of him, unshaven and rumpled, grabbed my arm and said, “No—don’t kill him.” I can’t explain why that happened, or even less, why it affected me as it did. All I can say is that something changed in me. I watched as the insect struggled a bit, then seemed to recover and flew away. The guy, whoever he was, was exhibiting one of these mysterious hidden ideas that bind us together. And whatever he was feeling, I caught it from him.
During the 1980s I worked in several countries of what we used to call the Third World. I had some training in small-scale agriculture and so-called “appropriate” technology. I’ll spare you a long story, but after three tours of frustrating results, I came back to England convinced that the only thing that would actually help save the world and is people was a massive change of heart.
This is called metanoia in Greek, but what it means is a sea change in human thinking and relating. I trained for the ministry, thinking that if I couldn’t affect change directly, I could at least preach about it. I suppose I was imagining that a large, world-wide movement might emerge that would promote change—environmental, economic and political. I didn’t know where this miracle would come from, but just assumed that it was inevitable if we were going to get out of here alive.
When the pandemic struck, I had a moment of optimism. I wondered if the “new normal” would bring positive changes. It’s still early days, but I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I’m turning back to what that homeless guy taught me on the train. It brought me back to some words from the spiritual teacher Meher Baba: “Real love is contagious. Those who do not have it catch it from those who do.”
I think I’m talking about a new kind of pandemic, spreading the way the malign ones do—person to person. I believe that this tide of renewal I have been waiting for lives in the micro-world of everyday behaviour. That is solely and exclusively where it has its existence. No laws, government programmes, miracle insights can help this. Every one of us, in a very real sense, is responsible for the well-being of the world. That’s what that young rabbi was talking about 2,000 years ago. If we can find a way to bless when everything screams at us to curse, we are moving partway into this invisible kingdom. If we can swallow our bile and frustration and acquit an individual person of another race, an immigrant, a political opponent, a prostitute, from disdain for the whole of their class, we are slopping a little mortar onto a new set of foundations. The foundations of someplace where we all can live together.
If love is a pandemic, then everyone in this room is patient zero. So, go ahead—take off your face mask and let love catch you.
AMEN