On Advent and Being Angry

The New Testament lesson for several months ago now, because it takes me a long time to get round to these things, is James 1, verse 19.

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry…

But I have often been angry, and it wasn’t always clear how to stop. I’ve been angry quite frequently in situations where I had no choice but to listen. The preacher on the big screen. The decision-makers, whose decisions could never be challenged. The proverbial person being wrong on the internet. People sending emails. No particular people, but an organisation, a structure, a procedure, a flaw in the world. No particular thing, but the universe at large. I have been angry in general and then more so on special occasions. I have swapped anger for irritation and irritation for frustration and frustration for a vague sense of wound-up-ness and a vague sense of wound-up-ness for blind rage. I have often been angry with the Bible, very often with the church. No, I don’t suppose it does produce the righteousness that God desires. What’s one to do then?

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Anger is often like the time I had a fight with a tall male evangelist in a prayer ministry time. Well, I didn’t exactly. Let me say first that I usually loved the prayer ministry slot at the end of a wacky fruitcakey-charismatic church meeting. I love prayer ministry because, when done right, it is a gentle, well-boundaried way to honour an individual person as they spend time with God. After a whole evening of worshipping all together, you just stand or sit with one person, just one, with no rush, music playing in the background, and you are only there to pray for and with them; they don’t even have to tell you what they’re thinking about unless they want to. In the kind of meetings I’m thinking of, you often can’t hear each other anyway. It takes the loneliness out of large-scale, loud church. Done wrong, though, prayer ministry times can be weirdly aggressive. Why are all the tall men striding across the carpet with an air of going to battle on them? I don’t mind people falling over: like kneeling, it is something to do with humility in His presence; like sleep, it is something to do with trust; physiologically, I guess, it must be something to do with blood pressure when you stand for too long. But when the tall male evangelist brought his heavy hand whacking down on the head of a slight young woman who I knew was ready and susceptible and eager to encounter the Spirit in some weird and wonderful way, of course she started falling, and I, standing behind, wouldn’t let her drop; so that for a mad moment of mutual shoving it was me against the tall male evangelist. No-one’s getting pushed over on my watch.

Anger is often like that; it comes with the helplessness of being the little person, the less influential person, the uninteresting person, the person without the microphone. I’m angry because I’m smaller and I have to let the poor pushed-over pray-er gently down to the ground. If there was something I could do, I would be less angry. But being uninteresting means I can see through you, all you tall male evangelists and people who put Ministries International after your name. I know you like the sense of power that comes with having the microphone. I know because I would like it, too.

The girls in my Discipleship Group were quietly nonplussed by the tall male evangelist. One said she’d been having a good time by herself talking to God and she thought it was a bit strange when the evangelist came round, ‘laying hands on people’, which can be done in a respectful and consent-based manner, but no, the tall male evangelist laid hands on her face. It was just a bit strange that he grabbed my face. It would only have taken a moderately sized posse of church leaders to take the tall male evangelist aside like, let’s step into the Lower Seminar Room for a minute. Let’s get a coffee in the church office. No, you can’t re-join the meeting. You won’t be invited again. That’s not acceptable.

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Oh come Desire of nations bind

In one the hearts of all mankind

Bid Thou our sad divisions cease

And be Thyself our King of Peace

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Oddly, I am not vividly angry about the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer. More just horrified. If you haven’t yet heard of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, you may want to sit down with a cup of sweet, strong tea for the next bit. The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will be a giant white wall somewhere near Birmingham, twice as high as the Angel of the North and visible from up to six miles away. Each brick will somehow be linked digitally to a testimony of answered prayer, so that you can scan them with an app on your phone, read them and feel guilty for being so resentful about how relentlessly chipper other Christians seem to be all the time. Or something like that.

I’m not going to spell out all the reasons why reading about the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer made me feel giddily like I’d tumbled through a hole in the fabric of space and time into an even more insane dimension than this one. You will probably share my doubts about the usefulness of spending a million pounds on a giant wall. The world is pretty well stocked with walls, some of which are symbols of division or defence, and at least one of which is a holy place, and to throw up another seems like rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but even more offensive. Why not build a church? Why not build houses or plant a forest or do literally anything rather than create a gigantic monument to positive thinking? Does this sound too bitter? It is too bitter.

I would be interested to know how it was that no-one, apparently, in any committee meetings, pointed out that ‘Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer’ roughly repeats the scansion of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, but I would anticipate a certain proportion of visitors to that Birmingham field being momentarily confused by a passing vision of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet lying on a frozen lake in the dark.

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Oh come thou Dayspring come and cheer

Our spirits by Thine advent here

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In ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet try to forget each other, using a new technology that erases all the memories of their relationship from their minds. They think this is what they want and need.

If I could make myself a totally nice person, never angry, never fractious, never sarcastic, never inclined to stick a vicious little fork into the backside of the universe, by attaching myself to wires and screens and having my brain wiped overnight, would I do it?

Anger is always an attack on the brother’s life, for it refuses to let him live and aims at his destruction. Jesus will not accept the common distinction between righteous indignation and unjustifiable anger. The disciple must be entirely innocent of anger, because anger is an offence against both God and his neighbour. Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, read on a cold station platform on the Filevskaya line at Kuntsevoe in Moscow, as colourless as the station Jim Carrey goes to at the beginning of the film.

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I learned of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer via the Bible Society on Twitter. The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will take the form of a Möbius strip, symbolising eternity, they said. But the point of a Möbius strip isn’t that it goes on forever; it’s that it only has one side. Anything can symbolise eternity if you want it to. A straight line could go on forever you happened to protract it infinitely. The good ol’ original Christian symbol, consisting of two straight lines set at right angles, could be understood as two lines reaching out forever around the whole world. An ant marching around the outside of any shape could march on and on for the rest of time. But if he’s marching around the outside of a circular tube, say, he might eventually become aware of a missing aspect of his experience, an inner flip-side that he has never visited, where everything would look quite different. A Möbius strip doesn’t have an ‘other side’; this is part of the point, according to the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer website: ‘a person can never be on the outside or the inside of it. For us, the continuous nature of the band represents how God is always listening and always answering our prayers.’ For me, the continuous nature of the band means that it is shallow. It is the shape that you thought was more solid and multi-dimensional than it is.

I’d like to propose a more economical project: an Eternal Brick of Prayer. Just prayer, neither answered nor unanswered. On a single brick I would write the words: give us this day our daily bread. Because everywhere, always, people are being fed and people are going hungry, and the prayer is always both answered and not, and no sooner does one day end than the next begins and one has to pray the same prayer all over again.

Does this sound bitter?

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The backing track for this post, for some reason, is David Crowder’s version of O Come O Come Emmanuel. It was written on the first Sunday of Advent. Rejoice, rejoice. On Sunday morning at church I could sing the whole hymn, just about, squeakily, apart from the first rejoice which was too high. My vocal chords just can’t get there, like my heart and mind can’t manage to be all that faithful, all that patient.

I don’t want all the little people of the world to spend their lives working on becoming less angry, while the tall male evangelist ministries international go around pushing people over and the confident Christians build giant walls. I don’t want to be angry; I don’t want to take power from the powerful, either. Not really. I just want to have enough authority, with some other little people, together, to push back, to make something right; to say look, we have created our own wall, and it is called Safeguarding. I don’t want to be angry, but if you’re a tall male evangelist proposing to grab a young woman by the face, I want to be angry enough in whatever form and to whatever extent it takes to get you turned out of the building, as soon as possible.

It would only have taken a bit more courage for me, as the Discipleship Group leader, to go to the church elders like: I care about these girls, and I won’t see them pushed around again. If a machine could wipe cowardice out of my brain overnight, I would like that.

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[Squeak]… rejoice…

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I don’t want to be angry, but I need the preachers and teachers and the people with the microphone to hear this: do not give God’s people a Möbius strip when they’re tired and sad. Don’t give us a Möbius strip when you’re the one with the microphone, which means we’re trapped, listening, and if we start to get angry all we can do is sit and internally chunner. You don’t have to make anything arbitrarily complicated. You don’t have to be doomy and gloomy. You don’t have to fake anger, or sadness, or anything. The message can be simple; it just can’t be shallow. Because we’re trying really hard. We’re trying really hard.

It is the first week of Advent, and that seems important.

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(… You know what we’re going to do with the brick don’t you.)