For those of us who appreciate traditional church music, Ash Wednesday is something of a highlight.  My wife and I ‘attended’ the broadcast Sung Eucharist from Durham Cathedral where, as part of the service, we listened to the glories of Tallis’ Lamentations and the Miserere by Allegri.  It is an extraordinary paradox that, at the moment in the Church’s year when we are remembering the depravity of human beings, we should also be hearing music that is at the pinnacle of human genius. 

‘Remember that you are but dust and unto dust you shall return.’   These words lie haunting over the entire Lenten liturgy for Ash Wednesday.  Somehow, we need to make sense of them.  The sublimity of the music may lead us away from considering ourselves like mere dust when fellow members of our kind can produce works of such quality. Will beauty like this ever die if there are human beings to sing it and listen to it?  But the Lenten emphasis on humankind burdened by sin and moving towards the dust of death must still be thought about.  We need to take these words and ideas seriously as part of our Lenten work as Christians.   Even though we might want to push such apparently gloomy notions away, the pervasive nature of evil in our lives, and in humankind generally, has to be something we look at calmly and fearlessly.

In previous posts I have often tried to grapple with the problem of evil.  Of course, discussion on this topic is never exhausted.  A particular challenge to our current understanding of good and evil, are the reports of the shelling of civilian areas in Ukraine and the insane firing of tank shells at a nuclear power station.  The Ukrainian war is in all our minds and is one example of how far human beings can sink in depravity, towards an evil that is beyond imagining. 

In my simple way, I have discovered one uncomplicated idea that I find helpful in trying to fathom the nature of evil.  Any evil action by a human being can nearly always be laid at the door of somebody’s craving for power and for the gratifications that seem to be promised through having it.  To have this single word, power, appearing in almost every example of human evil that we can think of, helps us to have a better handle on the phenomenon.  In summary we might claim that human evil nearly always involves the abuse of power of some kind.  Such an overarching idea also helps us to see how evil is so difficult to eliminate in one’s own life.  No one is ever completely clear of power abuse which is behind every example of human evil.  Thankfully, most of us avoid the severe manifestations of power abuse, like theft, rape, violence, selfish greed, and cruelty.  But many lesser kinds may well clutter up our lives.  These need to be dealt with in some sort of act of confession.  The important thing in making any such act of confession is the acknowledgement of how easily we can harm or neglect others.  It is so easy to hide this evil, even from ourselves. Being convinced of our rectitude, like the Pharisee in the Temple, is a form of hypocrisy that Jesus did not much care for.  Abuse of power, whether serious or minor is part of an endemic human disease in society.  Its toxicity is far more dangerous when it is not acknowledged.  There is also such a thing as ‘respectable’ evil.  By this term I refer to a way of undermining another person using the tools of an institution with which to do it.  A great deal of bullying and power abuse uses outwardly legitimate methods.  It is sometimes difficult, consequently, to spot what is really going on.  Even in the church, some evil situations can occur which are entirely hidden from sight.  The ‘innocence’ of the perpetrators is protected from coming into awareness because the ‘regulations are being followed’.  An illegitimate and immoral exercise of power towards an individual in an institutional context can still be evil even if, on paper, the correct procedures are in operation.  The person or people who have the potential to fully recognise the nature of the evil are the perpetrators.  All too often they are well-versed at the art of self-deceit.

If we are to do a good job at attempting to come to terms with our own personal temptation to do evil, a good starting place is to consider our personal relationship with power in the various contexts in which we live our lives.  Do we hanker after it?  Do we find that we resent not having it or, worse still, is there some pathological resentment from our pasts that makes us chase after it with an unusual and unhealthy determination?  There are two words in our vocabulary that look similar but help to describe perspectives on power and its possession.  One is humiliation and other humility.

 Many people in various ways have suffered humiliation in childhood or subsequently.  Some have overcome the effects of this traumatic experience in a healthy way and have gone on to discover self-esteem and live lives that do not beat others down.  Humiliation by parents and others, as we all know, can also have a variety of damaging and lasting effects on the way we approach life.  It can lead to a fiercely competitive approach when approaching other people.  Among the many defensive stances found in an individual who is haunted by memories of parental humiliation are the self-inflation techniques we associate with severe cases of narcissism.  In previous posts, we have noted how commonly this personality distortion is found among the clergy.  More serious a concern is the fact that clergy with high degrees of narcissism and with a longing and a need for power, are the ones that are often chosen to exercise it within the institution.  Within the Church we allow some individuals to take roles of power where they are no longer under any sort of challenge or supervision.  Such possession of unsupervised power, coupled with the disorder associated with narcissism, is an extreme danger to those under them and destructive to the wider Church.

The other word we identified, humility, can be translated by the words having your feet on the ground.  A bishop or leader with a hierarchical position, who also possesses humility, is one that consults, listens to counsel and above all has done the inner work of constantly challenging their personal relationship with power.  The humble prelate is one who listens.  Such people listen to the people who come to them; they listen to God in their quiet times of prayer.  Intellectually and spiritually, they are known for their flexibility.  This blog takes a strong stand against systems of theology or biblical interpretation that pronounce that one single version of truth or opinion is correct or sound with all others being in error.  We find such rigidity and failure of flexibility in the systems of management and teaching which, for example, we have come to associate with the Iwerne network and the ReNew cluster of churches.  These are examples of places where there is likely to be precious little in the way of challenging of personal or institutional power.  The statements that emerged from these conservative networks in response to the Living in Love and Faith material were totally lacking in humility or nuance.  President Putin, in the current war in Ukraine, is impossible to deal with because he has, like many conservative Christian leaders, only a single version of truth – his own truth.  Christian leaders who fail to have a measure of flexibility, humility, or the ability to see things from another’s point of view, will always be stumbling blocks for the churches. Christian individuals under their leadership will find that their guidance is not a path to Christian freedom but one to spiritual enslavement.  Such enslavement, linked with the lust for power among their leaders, is close to being a truly dark place.

In this reflection I have identified evil as being strongly linked to an inappropriate human lust for power.  Of course, this is an incomplete account of evil, but space and the patience of my readers puts a limit on what I can say further here.  I want to finish by suggesting how the quality of humility can change a desire for power over another into something humane and resembling what Christians mean by love.  English gives us three words which are the heart of humility and humble service, and they are impossible to have in any power game that might be being played.  The words are empower, empathise and encourage.  It is striking that each word has the prefix em or en.  Without doing a lexicon search on these words, I am going to assume that each verb has the prefix which is the Greek for ‘in’.  Each word is about giving something to another person, putting in power, courage or getting close to them by a readiness to feel their suffering.  The process of giving to another person, through one of the actions implied by these words, means automatically that no power is being wielded over them by us.  The words imply, in fact, that we are giving power away, and thus neutralising any evil that there might exist in the relationship.  To give power away is a strong indication that we are not trying to keep it for ourselves. 

As children, some of us were taught the moral teaching on how to talk to another.  ‘Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary?’  Perhaps another way of keeping ourselves from evil is to ask a similar question about our dealings with others in word or deed.   Does it empower, does it encourage, and does it show true empathy?   If what we do or say does one or more of these things, it is likely that we are avoiding the deadly trap of playing power games with others.  These are in different degrees and different intensities the source of much evil in the world.