Busy with love

I’ve been thinking about bullies lately.  Sadly, not many of us escape life without coming up against someone who exhibits ‘bullying’ behaviours and when it does happen, it can be a painful experience.  While we often associate bullying with schools, it can also impact families, parishes and workplaces.

Recently, a friend confided in me about her encounter with workplace bullying.  We were both surprised that these behaviours can both persist, and affect us, even as adults.  In this case, a senior executive colleague had launched a deliberate campaign to undermine them.  Many of us are familiar with these tactics: receiving ‘urgent’ emails outside of work hours, being ambushed at meetings, team members sought out to dig up unresolved matters, the casual comments to other colleagues disguised as concern but in effect serving to raise doubts about the person’s capability.

Families are not immune, unfortunately.  Constant teasing (often disguised as a ‘joke’), exclusion from family activities, turning siblings against each other, belittling the other, shaming, constant criticism – these behaviours can become a pattern, and the family member can feel so under pressure that they just become smaller, retreating further into themselves.

This is the aim of the bullying experience, I think: to humiliate the other in both their eyes and the eyes of their community.  I think we are seeing this being played out in the world context.  And it seems that it is often connected with power – the more powerful the person, the more potentially damaging the impact.

We are deep into our Lenten pilgrimage, unfolding amid the turmoil of wars that are causing relentless violence, suffering and hardship.  At its core, war can feel like bullying on a larger scale – designed to force a nation into surrender through humiliation.

But there is another way.

Ullie‑Kaye is a modern inspirational poet whose work appears mainly online, and she observes:

The fuller your hands are with things like washing people’s feet,

turning the other cheek, worship, kindness and

a genuine desire to listen to others’ stories –

the harder it will be to pick up stones.

Be so busy with love that you run out of room for judgement.

This is the world of Jesus – Jesus was busy with love.

Our Lent gospels consistently provide us with clues about the sort of world Jesus valued.  In this world, the outsiders matter.  We remember that the ancient Mediterranean world was built on a social imagination quite different to ours.  Identity was not something you constructed; it was something you received from your group.  To be human was to belong.  To be without a group was to be vulnerable, suspect, or even invisible – an organisational principle for life.  This helps us to understand why hospitality was so valued for example.  By inviting someone into a home, it temporarily transformed a stranger into a guest, giving them a place within the household’s protective circle.  When we think about hospitality through this lens, the impact of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper becomes even more profound.

To be an insider meant you were claimed by a group.  To be an outsider meant you were unclaimed – and therefore unprotected.  We meet outsiders in the gospels, last weekend the Samaritan woman at the well and this weekend the blind man.  We know the Samaritan woman is an outsider because she comes to the well alone and in the middle of the day.  We know the blind man is an outsider because he is reliant on begging.  On both occasions, Jesus notices them.  He engages the Samaritan woman in conversation, he ‘sees’ the man blind from birth.  Jesus was busy with noticing the ones who society disregarded, and through his noticing, they were brought both to faith and restored to dignity in the eyes of their communities.  Through Jesus’ gentle accompaniment of the woman at the well she comes to see who Jesus is and, for some, becomes a messenger of Good News.  Through the restoration of sight of the blind man, he sees physically, he comes to see and recognise who Jesus is and he is seen by his social group.

In his message for Lent, Pope Leo emphasises the communal connection between listening and fasting.

Let us ask for the grace of a Lent that leads us to greater attentiveness to God and to the least among us.  Let us ask for the strength that comes from the type of fasting that also extends to our use of language, so that hurtful words may diminish and give way to a greater space for the voice of others.  Let us strive to make our communities places where the cry of those who suffer finds welcome, and listening opens paths towards liberation, making us ready and eager to contribute to building a civilization of love.

So, let us be busy with love during these Lent days.  Let us be attentive to the needs of the world and the healing presence we can offer.  Let us be attentive to our own hearts and keep in check our judgements of others.

May our Lenten prayers work to soften the hearts of those who seek war and move them to work for peace.  May the suffering of the wounded and displaced be eased.  May those who grieve the death of a loved one who has died because of war find comfort.  And as for the bullies of the world – may their hearts and hands become so busy with love that they only have room for kindness.

By Cathy Jenkins