In our living and in our dying

The name Kayla Mueller has not yet fully emerged into our consciousness as the face of  martyrdom, but it will. Or should. She was the victim of Daesh brutality, presumably execute but certainly killed in their custody, last month.  There is much ink at the moment serving both to remind us of her bravery and to suggest that she was deeply foolhardy, but youth (which most of us have long left behind) was ever thus, and the sheer bravery of this young woman should not ever be forgotten.

More recent even than news of Kayla’s death has been news of the cynical execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. I personally have elected not to see Daesh’s videos of the execution or these martyrs, believing that to do so both plays into Daesh’s propaganda programme and risks that peculiarly Western voyeuristic sin of merging tragedy and entertainment. That sin, for me first highlighted in a 1985 book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a tragically western sin. It has come to mean that, en masse, we can no longer differentiate between the blood spattered screens of Hollywood and the blood spattered screens of television news. (Judging by debates raging even on my own Facebook page about Fifty Shades of Grey, which I abhor, we are confused about questions of violence and sexual entertainment, too). On the other hand it is a valid argument that sometimes we should witness brutal realities of human barbarism, to remind ourselves that we are not quarantined from humanity’s propensity for evil.

Humanity’s propensity for evil? I shall be emphasising during Lent that it is my and your, not some abstract “humanity’s” propensity for evil that we must address, as we, in the words of the Ash Wednesday rite, “turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.’

I elected not to watch the execution of the Egyptian Coptic martyrs, but have been moved to the core of reports that speak of many of them praying as they met their death. At one level this is a deeply visceral response to brutal and imminent death. But it is also a deeply profound response, a deeply profound witness to resurrection hope, to the Easter message towards which we will travel through a few light privations these next six weeks. In an aggressively rabid atheistic world those simple and terrified mutterings of prayer are a powerful message. God was whispering even in that deepest horror of human inhumanity.

On Ash Wednesday Bishop Andrew Hedge spoke of Lent as practising penitence, practising readiness to encounter the powerful and no longer invisible presence of God in our own death. We are unlikely to encounter the horrors encountered by Kayla Mueller or the 21 Coptic Christians, but many of our sisters and brothers face that daily.  May we embrace them in our Lenten praying. May we pray also that our lives be decreased in clutter and increased in God, so that we may embody those simple hymn words of Roberto Escamilla, and revisited by John Bell, “in our living and in our dying we belong to God.”