Facing our Demons

Better the devil you know, the saying goes, than the devil you don’t.

So thought Edward Alleyn, the leading Elizabethan actor and star performer of the Admiral’s Men, who is buried in my parish in South London.  Alleyn was also a successful entrepreneur with questionable business interests in what we might loosely call the leisure sector, owning several profitable playhouses, bear-pits and pubs. And it is said that one night playing Marlowe’s Dr Faustus at the Rose Theatre, in the temptation scene where the Devil shows Faustus the Seven Deadly Sins, Alleyn saw an extra devil take the stage. Terrified, he fled the theatre, ran to a nearby church, and confessed his manifold wickedness. He decided thereafter on a life of piety, founding the College of God’s Gift for twelve poor scholars, which we now know as Dulwich College.  On his death, he was laid to rest in Christ’s Chapel in Dulwich, where I regularly sing for weddings and from the gallery watch happy couples forget the requirement to walk round him, tripping over his grave in their newly wedded bliss. If only Adam and Eve’s first error as a couple had been even half as benign.

Adam and Eve needed to remember only two things – till and keep the garden, don’t touch the apple tree. And still it was too much for them.  The devil appearing as a serpent beguiles them with a promise that the apple will give them God-like qualities and notwithstanding that Adam and Eve are already  in actual paradise, they fall for it – the lifetime subscription to the outer darkness, free fig leaves included, click ‘add to cart’.

In our passage from Matthew, Jesus shows how it should be done.  The Devil visits when you’re exhausted, thirsty, famished.  You get the tempting offer to turn stones into bread, you say no.  You get the offer to throw yourself off the mountain and be caught by friendly angels, you say no.  You are offered all powers, wealth, and dominions, in exchange for a little bit of devil worship, you just say no.  Why do we, like Faustus, find it so difficult?

Lent is a time for facing our demons – but in Oxford in 2020, how do they present themselves?  To know our own demons is to emerge from the searing self-examination that is an essential element of a good Lent and I encourage you over the coming weeks to reflect on the demons with a special relevance for you. But today I suggest that we should be on the lookout especially for three.

The first is the demon who tempts us, whenever something goes wrong, to find someone else to blame.  Adam gives us an early lesson in how to go about it, by pointing the finger immediately at Eve for his own decision to eat the apple.  But evolution has played its part and the quality of our othering is really quite breathtaking these days. As our collective misdemeanours have multiplied and mutated, we seem to have lost the art of courteous yet robust discussion about responsibility and rectification, the friendly argument in the pub. We seem to prefer a violent and binary discourse where the plank is always waiting for someone else to walk along it.  Patriots versus the Liberal Elite, us and them, right and wrong. All so much easier in the poorly-lit back-room bars of our less-than-social media, where we don’t even know if we are shouting at a man, a woman or even a robot.

I know myself to be guilty of succumbing to this first demon. Only the other day, some way into a small rant about how they didn’t understand, they wanted this and they always believed that, my bemused listener stopped me to ask, who are they for this purpose? And I found myself genuinely struggling to put names to my aggressors. It was far easier to luxuriate in the ambiguity of a pronoun than to attribute fault to any identifiable person or persons.

The second demon to look out for is the one who tempts us to feel if not blameless then powerless – that is to say there may be a problem, we may accept some fault, but we are tempted to feel that we just don’t have the wherewithal to do anything about it. To illustrate how these two demons operate, let’s imagine them approaching us in relation to God’s instruction to Adam and Eve to ‘till and keep’ the garden, an instruction which seemed to escape their minds as soon as the serpent made an appearance.

Humankind has abjectly failed to till and keep the garden. Given to us on trust, the world is not ours to squander but for us to steward for present generations and generations to come. And yet all around us are signs of planetary overheating and environmental exhaustion. We are in the grip of a climate emergency.

As Chief Executive of Christian Aid until 2017, I travelled to many of the world’s poorest places and saw the havoc wreaked by the extreme weather events that man-made climate change makes more frequent and more intense, with floods and droughts claiming lives, property, livelihoods, peace of mind. But we cannot emigrate to another world; we cannot negotiate with the weather. We need real world, practical change to cut carbon emissions dramatically. 

Enter stage left Demon Number 1.  ‘What a terrible thing is this climate change!  Caused by 200 years of industrialisation on the back of fossil fuels, before most of us even realised climate change was a thing.  The culprits are the fossil fuel companies themselves, they are the evil ones.  We must stop investing in these companies straightaway.’ 

But then what happens to them? Do other investors take our place who don’t care about climate change? Or do the companies simply fail? Our lifestyles were and are the products of these sectors – the way we heat our homes, and fuel our cars and buses, the way we produce so many of the materials we depend on day to day, how we package and transport the things we buy, what we wear, eat and drink.  And across the world these companies produce the primary energy sources for many countries which have not had the benefit of 200 years of industrialisation.  Some of these companies can’t change fast enough, but many of them can. And where these companies can change, we don’t need them to fail, but do we need them to feel under pressure to change as a matter of urgency. 

That is why at the Church Commissioners, where my task is to chair the investment committee for the Church’s endowment fund, whilst we have already divested from the very worst emitters, those who make more than 10% of their income from coal and tar sands, we have resisted othering the major fossil fuel companies as a whole. For the most part we are still invested in them and are heavily engaging with them to press them to deliver the change in their business models that is necessary to align them with the Paris Climate Agreement. And we’ve set out concrete requirements and a clear timeline to give them a proper chance to change. Later this year we will start to divest from those who don’t show a verifiable commitment to Paris alignment but some will get more of a chance to change, with assessments going on between now and 2023. So much for Demon No 1.  

Meanwhile, Demon No 2 has been having some success. Demon No 2 tempts us to believe that where there are problems, even ones in which we know ourselves to bear some fault, there is nothing at a personal level we can really do, that we are powerless in the face of such enormous problems.  This can feel like a safe place to be. If there is nothing I CAN do, there is nothing I MUST do. I can simply give up and say, ‘Climate change is the most complex and important social, economic, environmental and moral issue of our time. Not for little old me to turn the tide, not for me to change the weather.’  

But to borrow a phrase from  Greta Thunberg, ‘giving up can never ever be an option.’ And it’s obvious that there are massive changes to our lifestyles that we ourselves need to make. Yes the fossil fuel companies have to change but we have to change with them. And that is why we at the Church Commissioners have joined the Net Zero Alliance of investors committed to decarbonising our entire investment portfolios by 2050 and why along with the rest of the Church of England we now have an ambitious target to decarbonise all our other activities by 2030.  At the individual as well as the institutional level, we will all need to play our part.

But whether you’re talking about climate change or anything else, the most powerful and pernicious Demon for some people is perhaps Demon No 3.  Demon No 3 doesn’t tempt us to blame others, Demon No 3 doesn’t say there’s nothing we can do.  Demon No 3 goes one step beyond – to tempt us to believe that, whatever we do, we are simply unworthy of love and belonging.  That given who we are, where we’ve been and what we’ve done, nothing can make us worthy again. 

Demon No 3 is the Demon of our country’s mental health crisis, the hardest one to face because such a Demon can make us feel beyond redemption.  He is the one who shames us, who has us reaching for the fig leaves to cover ourselves, so that we cannot be seen. Is he the one that Edward Alleyn saw that night at the Rose?

Lent is about facing down all our demons in an honest way that looks our own shortcomings and failures in the eye.  We need the discipline of Lent to shake us into this tremendously challenging reflection. As Rowan Willliams once put it - acknowledging who you are is both ‘the truest heroism and the hardest’.  

But only then can we grasp the enormity of the sacrifice made once upon the Cross and acknowledge the extraordinary gracious gift that in God’s eyes, we were always good enough. We do not need to cover ourselves because we are fully known, fully seen and fully and unconditionally loved.   Whoever we are.  Just as we are.  And safe in that knowledge, we do not need fig leaves, nor are we tempted by all the kingdoms of the world or their splendour.  

We are free to take responsibility, free to take action, free to love. And when the Demons take the stage, we can look them in the eye, stand our ground and wait for them to flee the theatre.

I wish you all a blessed Lent.

Amen.