Still Point of the Turning World

April 14, 2019

Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

I think it’s fair to say that, standing on either side of the Atlantic, the world in Holy Week 2019 does not look like a very reassuring place. That’s a bit of English understatement for you.

Whatever our political viewpoints, we can all agree that we are facing serious global challenges at some very fundamental levels – the functioning of our democracies, the cohesion of our societies, the sustainability of our very way of life.

And these challenges aren’t just something going on at a macro level that we can choose to engage with or ignore as we see fit. These challenges arise out of the transformations of our world that are shaping our daily lives. Mass migration has transformed our communities. Technology has changed the way we interact and polarized our everyday debates. Climate change is reshaping our ecosystem, our weather and increasingly the geography of the globe.

The circumstances of human life itself are changing, as they have always done, but in our era more rapidly and alarmingly than ever before. How human beings respond to these changing circumstances vary. But what I see most of all is a significant increase in anger, in mental strain and, most concerning of all, in despair.

First Century Jerusalem was a very different setting. But it too was a time of political turbulence, of volatility, of polarization. A restless occupied people sought a populist leader to embody their aspirations to renew their nation. Zealots advocated violent resistance and social order was itself maintained by violent repression.

And into this chaotic, volatile arena, rides a man on a donkey. He is subject to the myriad expectations and projections of others. They want him to be a new prophet-king who, like Moses, will lead the Israelites out of pagan oppression. They chant and wave palm branches like a populist political rally.

But he does not play to the crowd. He is calm. He is focused. He knows what he is there to do and it is in fact very far from the imagination of the crowd. This is a man who knows what he is about. He knows his mission is and it weighs heavy on him as we will see in the Garden of Gethsemane. But he is resolute, quietly determined. He inhabits what T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.” Indeed he is the still point of the turning world.

To understand Jesus as the model of our humanity is to understand his perfect communion with the Father. His full inhabiting of the extensity of human life is perfectly married to his full inhabiting of the intensity of the life of God. The world turns, humanity turns, but God is still.

So when we reflect on the age in which we live and when we ask ourselves what kind of people Christians need to be in our world today, we must look at this man. We do not need Christians who embrace the chaos of the world, frantically taking up every cause and trying to shout louder than the crowd. We don’t need Christians who hide away in a holy huddle, pretending that none of this affects them and defending their purity. We need Christians who ride calmly into the crowd on a donkey, that is to say, with humility. We need Christians who can inhabit the still centre of the turning world. In other words, we need Christians who pray.

Being a person who prays is more countercultural than ever before in today’s world because ours is a world that neglects the interior life. Young people are growing up with an expectation that they will externalize all their thoughts and emotions on social media. Virtue becomes virtue signaling. Ethics is not about being good but being seen to be good. Little attention is given to the cultivation of inner life, the tending of the garden of the heart that we share with God alone.

In fairness to young people, we seem to have forgotten to teach them how to pray. In a recent survey in the Church of England, only 29% of parents said they believed it was their duty to teach habits of prayer to their children. And maybe part of that is a loss of confidence in prayer ourselves. In a world of such extraordinary challenges and global forces, a world where we do not look for supernatural explanations of events, what possible difference does prayer make? We might well feel that with all the pressing issues of our time and the perfectly explicable, though complex, causes of them, spending time in prayer is just a waste of time.

But prayer has always been difficult. “We do not know how we ought to pray” says St Paul to the Christians in Rome. And by that he does not mean, we haven’t yet mastered it, or we need to try harder. He means that finding the still point in this turning world, finding the intensity of God in the extensity of our lives and the extensity of our culture: that is hard and always will be.

That is why God sent his Son to teach us how to pray, and why God sent the Spirit to pray within us in groanings too deep for words, so that we find the still point within us, not through our own endeavors, but through our growing receptivity to the gift of God.

Holy Week is always a good time to reflect on how we pray. So throughout this week I’m going to be exploring what the Passion story has to tell us about how each of us can connect more deeply with God in prayer. But I particularly feel that the times in which we live make this spiritual renewal more urgent. Religion today is everywhere: in identity politics, geo-politics, populist politics. But where is the spirituality? Where are the people whose hearts are broken and remade by God in carefully cultivated habits of prayer?

The world needs such people. People who can look at the challenges of the world and not despair, just as Jesus rode into the city where he would die, with dignity, holiness and a profound sense of purpose. So let us be on this journey together this week. A familiar journey to through the events of Holy Week to the cross and beyond. But let it also be the unsettling, recreative and strange journey into God, into a life laid open to the purposes of the God whose character is most clearly revealed this week. The God who listens to our prayers and transforms the world through them.