The temptation to save time by multi-tasking is hard to resist normally. Why not have the mobile on the kitchen table during family meals? Why not do emails during some kinds of conversation? When there is a telephone conference call, or even a video conference, if my laptop is below the camera’s reach, do something else as well, it saves time later. And it’s not only multi-tasking. Politicians in long and doubtless boring meetings are regularly caught playing games on a smart phone, or texting or using social media.
Yes, but … It tells everyone that you are not present. It tells the family that the caller at a meal is more important than they are. It tells people they do not have your attention. Above all, it means that you are not listening properly, engaging creatively, exercising the double hearing of listening to the people you are meeting and to the Spirit of God. Love-in-action means being present, and being present is the second of the habits of the Difference Course.
It begins with theology. We should be present to others as a commitment of love because God was, is and always will be present as a commitment of love to us.
God sees and knows everything. The consistent celebration of the Psalms is that God sees, except in a very few psalms of lament and protest where the psalmist calls for him to look. That theme of lament and protest is also picked up in many modern theologians of the Global South. It is a theological theme that emerges from suffering and injustice. Yet the presence of God in the Old Testament and the New is seen as deeply dangerous. Where God is visible it is either in a form of possible incognito (as with Abraham before the condemnation of the cities of the plain, Genesis 18) or as a cause of fear (with Gideon, Judges 6.22; the calming of the storm in the New Testament; the announcement of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds; and many other places). God’s presence is so awesome that it may lead to death. In the New Testament the coming of Jesus is God’s presence in a way foretold through the Old Testament but drawing into God all that is human by taking on the form of a servant, fully human, and in that extraordinary mystery suffering with all human beings. Presence in the incarnation is presence to everything in life, and to death.
In John 14.16, Jesus promises his disciples that he will send the Holy Spirit to be present – a promise fulfilled after the resurrection – and to this day, in the gift of the Spirit of God, to make all alive in Christ and to carry on the creative and sustaining work of God in all the world and all of creation.
The Church – in the sense not of the institution but of the people who are Christians – makes many mistakes about the presence of God through the Spirit.
Too often we try and confine the Spirit to God’s areas of work as we see them, as if God had a job description and we had to monitor it properly. At worst there is in some churches and traditions the sense that though God may be at work everywhere, God is especially at work in ‘our congregation’ or ‘our church or denomination’. It will seldom be put like that, although I have heard it, but it is often implicit in the way certain groups speak. It is often a tool of control by manipulative church leaders, or a sign of a deep arrogance.
Slightly less bad, but still an implied caging of God the Spirit, is the sense that God is only at work in the Church universal and not outside it. There is a feeling that God would not want to be contaminated by dealing with people who are not like God, as if God did not have enough practice. It reveals itself in pietism, where involvement with the things of the world around us is wrong. It sees areas like reconciliation as only the real deal when they involve the Church. I remember being asked when I worked at Coventry Cathedral why I bothered with reconciliation involving people who were not Christians? Should I not be preaching the gospel to them? My answer now would be that I was preaching the gospel and that I worked in those circumstances and places, and still do, because when I get there I find God at work, and I join in to learn.
To put it less informally, the creative and sustaining work of God is revealed in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. In Colossians 1.15-20 St Paul speaks of the cosmic Christ in whom ‘all things hold together’ (17, NRSV) and ‘through Him God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’ (20, NRSV). ‘Everything’, ‘all things’, the piling up of words indicates Paul’s passionate proclamation of the truth of Christ. The human ministry of peacemaking is, consciously or unconsciously, worked out in the day to day, by human beings imperfectly and partly, seeking the glorious reconciliation of all things that is the purpose of God.
The presence of the peacemaking Christ is thus always and everywhere. The pleasure of God in reconciling all things (as in Colossians) is in a cosmic reconciliation, of all of creation, for God is the Creator. It is not just with human beings, or even this planet. Those who are involved in peacemaking, who are seeking or supporting reconciliation, have therefore to be present because God is present. Being present, as I admitted in starting this chapter, is often difficult.
As with being curious, the five sessions of Difference each have some thinking and challenge on the habit of being present.
God’s Call
When I was training for ordination, I had a work placement with the chaplain of the local hospital. His main feedback was that I needed to learn to be more present with those I was visiting. I did not like hospitals. I was unsure of my role and found the process difficult, and it showed. He was quite right, and the lesson stuck in my mind. During the COVID-19 pandemic, during 2020 and 2021 I have had the privilege of supporting the superb senior chaplain at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust in London. This involved regular time spent in the hospital, with the critically ill in COVID-19 wards or others. I have tried to put the lesson of those many years ago into practice in this recent experience.
We all have encounters we do not like. For many people they involve confrontation, or difficult conversations. Most of us will be familiar with the sinking feeling of waking in the morning, thinking through the day, and knowing that there will be an event or a meeting that we dread. It may not happen often, but we avoid it.
It is always easier to be with people you like and get on with naturally. One of the lessons that both my wife Caroline and I have had to learn in my role as Archbishop of Canterbury is how to work a room. That is, when there is a reception or gathering, to ensure that time is spent with everybody. It is a discipline because you always come across people with whom you want to chat. They may be old friends, and it is just easier. They may be complete strangers, but utterly fascinating.
Being present is a habit. It needs self-awareness like all habits. God’s call is to be present across the range of people, to be not only present but a presence that people know and trust. Difference encourages us all to see who we choose not to mix with; how we use the opportunities to be present.
It is worth breaking down your time into those different aspects of life, like leisure, work, family, church, friends. You may be part of a club or sports group of some kind, or of an association that does things together. Who is avoided and who is easy to be with?
How we are present can be a very important sign of the health of significant relationships. Sometimes people will spend more time at the office or more time outside the home because their marriage is difficult. An audit of what we do and what we avoid doing will show us where the lights are flashing a warning. Absence is often not a way of making the heart grow fonder but of avoiding the reality of a heart that has grown less fond. Reconciliation requires being present.
Crossing Divides
Every year there is a service in a cathedral or major church for police officers who have died in service, whether in the line of duty or any other reason. The service rotates around the different nations and regions of the UK. One year it was at Liverpool Cathedral and the Prince of Wales attended, as he always does. After the service there was a reception for him with the families of officers who had died within twelve months. There were around a hundred and twenty present, with the most recently bereaved having lost a partner about three weeks earlier.
It was a deeply moving occasion. I was struck that the Prince was ‘present’ to each family he met as if they were the only ones there. I learned a great deal just watching. The impact of his interest, focus and compassion was healing for all.
It was not just because he is the Prince of Wales, although that was very significant. Added to that was the way in which he engaged. Being present is much more than physical. It means engaging the whole of oneself.
As was written earlier, ‘remember the body’. In a hospital, where it is appropriate for the person, touch, holding a hand, matters greatly. The body’s sense of touch is very significant both positively and negatively. Some people dislike personal space being invaded in that way, some who are isolated find it comforting and full of meaning.
Eyes are important. A person at St Thomas’ was gravely ill in critical care. I remember above all their eyes. They had COVID-19, could not speak, were exhausted and quite possibly not far from the end of their life. But their eyes held mine and spoke volumes. Not only in those very extreme circumstances or those of someone bereaved, but also in mediation, the engagement of look and attention is significant of presence.
Of course, everything needs calibrating. When we meet someone for the first time, normally we do not want a deeply intense encounter. There are people I have met who fix me with their eyes and say, ‘How are you really?’ My normal answer is ‘Fine, thank you’, although sometimes I want to say (but never do), ‘That’s my affair.’
Being present can be just as simple as showing up. Look around at your neighbourhood, at other churches, at different religious communities. Find out what can be done together by going to be with them. Go to places and meet people you normally are distant from. Cross boundaries.
Disagreeing Well
Being present when bored in long meetings requires discipline. Being present when having a disagreement is another thing altogether; it requires courage.
There are many ways in which we seek to avoid being present in such circumstances. One is to be physically absent. I am aware of one colleague with whom I worked who always had a reason for being somewhere else when it was clear that there was going to be disagreement. It was always polite, always reasonable, and always happened. The result was too often that the can got kicked down the road and the disagreement, when it was properly faced, was much more difficult to deal with and often led to disagreeing badly.
The skills of facilitators and of mediators – they are not exactly the same thing – have an overlap in that they involve enabling those disagreeing to be present to each other and for the deepest reasons for the disagreement to be faced. As a result of these skills, the use of facilitation and mediation is growing so that some organizations almost never have a meeting without an outside leader.
That in its turn leads to another way of not being present: hiding behind the process of disagreeing well. To be truly present means to develop the skills of disagreeing and to do so without being defensive. We are all aware of having heard defensive answers to interviewers on current affairs programmes. A public figure leading an organization has acted badly themselves or the organization for which they are responsible has done so. Their answers to probing questions begin with explanation or with a negative. ‘You don’t understand’ or similar phrases abound.
It is the same in disagreeing. We may be present physically, we may be curious, but our presence needs to be undefended. We are truly present when we listen and reflect on what is being said, when we enquire (being curious) to understand better.
It is a severe test. No one likes to say that they are wrong. Yet we will not disagree well unless the whole of us, including our vulnerabilities, is present.
Practising Forgiveness
My own experience of forgiveness, forgiving and being forgiven is mixed and human. A severe wound from someone almost always leads to a desire to be away from them. The nature of relationship breakdown – whether with a friend, a lover, a spouse, child or parent – is above all one of absence. In my own childhood, like so many children I had the experience of a family where parents were not together and there was, in one household, much anger. The means of dealing with that complicated relationship as very much the weaker party was to withdraw emotionally, even when present.
So many of us do that. Cut our losses, sever the relationship, don’t speak about the person any more.
Yet that understandable way of dealing with emotional pain as a child needs to be grown out of if we are to become whole adults. Forgiveness is a necessity for a functional society, however much it is a challenge for individuals. We must recognize – I have already discussed this but it bears repetition – that when encountering one person or a group that have been the victims of cruelty, sometimes on a vast scale, the imposition of an obligation to forgive can easily become more abuse.
Yet at a societal level there needs to be institutional presence. The habit for the powerful of being present to those who have suffered from their power is one essential component of developing into a society that is capable of forgiveness. The importance of being present and risking pain is an essential to arrive at a place that is honest about forgiveness and that gets past manipulation. Even more powerful is the presence of those who have suffered, who are so often not asked for permission for the powerful to be there, or the terms on which the powerful are there.
That sort of institutional presence is a severely endangered species. Presence may be very rare, for example, between police and groups like young Black people that want to challenge with a sense of victimization or between different groups who hold clashing views on the nature of the rights of transgender people. The lack of presence may be fear of confrontation, often based on past experience; it may even be the arrogance of power. Whatever the causes of not wanting to be present, those meetings, if presence is genuine, will have to take the chance of including space to ask for and to offer forgiveness for past wrongs. The alternative to presence is to remain in trenches lobbing social media grenades at each other to little or no effect.
Risking Hope
Being present is a huge risk. To be present implies hope, above all hope that progress can be made amid difficulty in relationships or in conflict. In Part II, Chapter 7 looked in some depth at the whole issue of risk, and especially the risks involved in meeting. To take those risks and then be physically but not properly present is a certain route to failure.
Yet to be present feels like betting everything on a very uncertain outcome. In John’s Gospel, chapter 6, Jesus – among many other things – deals with being present. In the chapter there are two miracles, or signs in John’s language: the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water. Jesus makes himself present to the crowd when the disciples want to avoid presence by sending them away to get food. He then absents himself from the crowd and his disciples when they seek to use their numbers to make him a king. Instead of being with them, he, like Moses on Sinai, goes up a mountain and is present with his Father, God. He comes to the disciples on the waters of the windy lake and remains with them (a key concept in John is remaining, staying). The crowd are seeking him, another key word, linked to presence. When he challenges them as to what they seek – are they genuinely present to him because he is the bread of life, or only as a high-value grocer with miraculous logistics? – they leave. They will not be present on Jesus’ terms but only on their own. Presence goes with curiosity, and as we will see, with reimagination. The crowd’s presence is quite unlike that of Jesus’ disciples. The crowd know what they want, and will only be present for what they want. Presence in that way avoids the risks of disappointment. It is not making oneself vulnerable, which true presence does.
Then Jesus turns to his disciples and asks them (vv. 67-69, NRSV): ‘“Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”’
Jesus is challenging them to be present. Peter’s response is to say, plaintively, that in Jesus is hope. They must be present with him because that is the risk to be taken for that hope to be fulfilled. They do not know what is going on, but they know that in Jesus is hope. In that way their presence is genuine; it commits to mutual relationships amid the fog of not knowing.
Summary
• Being present is an obvious habit to develop because no relationship can be built without it.
• To be genuinely present, especially with those with whom we disagree, is very difficult. We long to run away from the challenge.
• Being present at a shallow level is insufficient to build unity in diversity.
• Being present is something that happens with groups and institutions as well as individuals. It enables systemic reconciliation.
• The culture of avoiding those with whom we disagree is one that leads to more and more fracturing and less and less of an abundant life for everyone.
• Jesus was not afraid of being present, including to God. To be hopeful requires us to be present at greater depth, especially when our hope is in God.
Points to Ponder
• In prayer are you present to God entirely, or only those bits of you that you think God will like?
• Are there a few simple rules you can set for yourself to be more present to family, friends and work colleagues or others? How does your use of electronic gadgets affect you being present?
• Are there people from whom you have drifted? What are the options to renew a mutual presence?
• Are you good or bad at difficult conversations? Can you decide to have them AND decide not to be defensive but to be present?