The Responsible Adult: on being grown-up in religion

Two unconnected stories have hit the headlines and made me stop and think.

The first is the sentencing of a teacher who had sex with a 16 year-old pupil of his. The trial judge gave him a suspended sentence, saying that the girl had 'groomed' him.  In other words, his culpability was mitigated by himself being a victim of her manipulative behaviour. This sentence has met with a strong and, in my view, entirely understandable, reaction. The teacher was the 'responsible adult' in this relationship. And as everyone who works in caring professions knows, whether in education, the church, medicine, social work or mental health, the practitioner holds the power in this unequal relationship. To have a sexual relationship with someone for whom you are professionally responsible is regarded as abusive, unambiguously so when that person is legally a minor. It is 'sex in the forbidden zone'.

The other story is the defiant publication of 3 million copies of the post-attack edition of Charlie Hebdo. Its cover shows the weeping Prophet carrying the slogan of solidarity with the victims, 'Je suis Charlie'. Underneath is the statement 'All is forgiven'. This too has met with a mixed reaction from Muslims and other people of faith. Some have said that to publish a cartoon like this a week after this terrible slaughter is a calculated and provocative act that simply pours fuel on the already fiercely burning fires of religious hatred. Pope Francis seems to underline this in what he said today: if you utter a curse against his mother, you can expect a punch. 'It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.' Though others have referred to the Prophet's non-violence in the face of abuse and commented wryly that Charlie has captured precisely that.

What's the connection between these stories?

The link for me is how we respond when we are provoked. It's implied by the judge that the school teacher was provoked into having sex by an irresponsible schoolgirl. It's implied by some people of faith that the jihadists were provoked into committing atrocity by irresponsible journalists and cartoonists. So their reactions were understandable even if they were not defensible.... But the truth is that in both, a provocation has been met by behaviour that is utterly destructive. The question is not whether schoolgirls should incite their teachers, or whether satirical journals should pour scorn on religious faith. Many of us don't find much to admire in those behaviours. But in a liberal democracy, religion can't and shouldn't be privileged from being ridiculed. The key question is, when we are provoked, what is the right way to respond?

I find the phrase 'responsible adult' helpful here. It's the well-known way of referring to the person who holds the caring role in unequal professional relationships, like that between teacher and student. As I've said, that role confers power over another person. But we can transfer it to how we think about Charlie Hebdo. What do you do when your faith, your prophet or your saviour is mocked and insulted? It's a question of who holds power and therefore responsibility. I don't much care for words and images that under the rubric of free speech are calculated to provoke and hurt. It's a kind of grooming, a provocation to react. As I blogged last time, even when I am hurt or offended, I hope I shall defend the right of others to offend me within the law. But in this exchange I believe I am required to be the 'responsible adult'. I must not collude with the offence others give by brandishing a gun any more than I should collude with seductive behaviour by producing a condom. If I give in and play by the rules of the child, I cease to be an adult myself.

So my plea to all of us who are people of faith is that we stay grown-up and don't revert to infantile reactions, however much our instincts drive us to. This is what both the Jesus modelled in the way he handled abuse. The passion narrative makes much of how he did not retaliate and thereby endorse the behaviour of those who mocked, insulted and murdered him. He remained the 'responsible adult' toward his abusers, just as he did in his relations towards the weak, the vulnerable and the young. I quoted a New Testament letter in my last blog: 'when he was abused, he did not return abuse'. 

It is worrying that a lot of religion reacts very primitively in its handling of both sex and conflict. Faith communities, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, often find it hard to respond to the challenges of contemporary life intelligently and wisely. But in a world where abuse is rife and people go on damaging one another, religion has the opportunity to break abusive cycles by showing a more excellent way. The Fourth Gospel spoke to us over Christmas about how grace and truth have come into the world. This is faith's answer to provocation, wherever it comes from, whoever perpetrates it. 

It's what being a 'responsible adult' means. 

Ten Years Ago: Durham, Iraq and a New Dean

This Wednesday, 20 March, is St Cuthbert's Day. The day before, Pope Francis will have inaugurated his public ministry. The day after it will be Archbishop Justin Welby's turn. In between comes Cuthbert, also a bishop though a reluctant one. We know that Justin Welby was deeply influenced by Cuthbert's example while Bishop of Durham. I don't know about the Pope, though I sometimes call St Francis of Assisi ‘Italy's St Cuthbert’, so similar are the two saints, not least in their simplicity and humility.

St Cuthbert's Day marks an important anniversary for me too. Ten years ago, I was installed on his day as dean of Durham. I could not have asked for a more auspicious day.  It was an unforgettable experience to kneel in his shrine while a Northumbrian piper played in the nave. I felt the saint’s companionship and the promise of his protection, as if he were an old friend I had met for the first time.  Our North East ‘welcome back’ could not have been more heartfelt.  All our hopes were high.

But for one thing. 20 March 2003 was the day that the Iraq war broke out.  (Some say it was the day before, and that may be correct technically, but it was St Cuthbert’s Day when the first missiles were launched against Saddam.)  All day long I was listening to updates on the news and rewriting my evening sermon in the light of events as they happened. Half an hour before the service, I decided that enough was enough and switched off.  Here is how I began my sermon.

We shall all remember St Cuthbert’s Day 2003 as the day the war began. It is a sombre moment in our history.  We have prayed that this cup might pass from us.  Now we are compelled to drink it, and its taste is very bitter.  We gather here with sadness that it has come to this, and with fear for a future we cannot know. Many have pleaded not to go to war without United Nations backing, but we are where we are. We must pray that the conflict will be brief with as little loss of life as possible. We must pray for relations between the faith communities both in the middle east and here, for this war will ratchet up tensions that are already strained. We must pray for our leaders and the armed forces. We must pray for the Iraqi people. We must love our enemies, for this conflict will make many more of them. And because war erodes truth and brutalises people, we must pray in the words of tonight’s gospel that the darkness may not overtake us.
 
That was said with some trepidation. It is not the stuff of most installations where deans have to preach themselves in by setting out their stall. But re-reading it ten years on, I believe I was right to trust my instincts. The legacy of the Iraq war has been a terrible alchemy of death, injury, bereavement on all sides but especially among Iraqis; fraught internal relationships between different Iraqi factions resulting in at best a fragile political stasis; a deeper mistrust on the part of global Islam towards the Christian west; the irretrievable loss of heritage belonging to some of the most ancient sites in the world; and the dramatically worsened plight of indigenous Christian communities in their historic homeland whose members are fleeing the country in large numbers to escape persecution. It was a bitter cup then, and it still is.

Some will say that despite the huge cost, it was worth embarking on this adventure in the pursuit of a kinder and more just world. Others will argue that it’s simply too soon to tell what the lasting effects of the war will be. And yet others will assert that it was a disastrous mistake and the last state has turned out to be much worse than the first. I am not qualified to make such judgments.  But my misgivings of ten years ago have not gone away.

For me, St Cuthbert’s Day will be an opportunity for personal thanksgiving for the privilege of living and working in such a beautiful, privileged and holy place for the past decade (more about that in a future blog, maybe).  But for many others, it will be a more ambiguous commemoration.  I am thinking especially of those who lost loved ones in the conflict or who have been permanently scarred by it.  So along with my thanksgivings for the past decade will come renewed prayers for Iraq and its afflicted people; prayers for those who died, not least among our own armed forces; prayers for all leaders and politicians as they face the intractable complexities of living together on our planet, and prayers for good men and women of all the world faiths who look for ways of deepening understanding and working for reconciliation in a broken world, like Archbishop Justin Welby and Pope Francis.

And I am sure that St Cuthbert will want us to pray on his day that our world may know the peace and simplicity of which his own life was such a luminous example.