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Creed

Easter

6 April 2023

5 min read

Faith, chaos and carnage

Remembered rituals comforted many who mourn. As Easter comes around again, Graham Tomlin examines the underlying hope found when all is carnage and chaos.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A photographer, standing next to a tripod, atop a pile of rubble is a destroyed factory.

Chaos.

Peter Herrmann on Unsplash.

One afternoon in that week after the Queen died back in September, I spent a short while watching the live video footage from Westminster Hall of people filing past the Queen’s coffin as it lay in state. Ordinary members of the public, after their nine hour wait in the queue, stopped for their precious few seconds in front of the coffin before being ushered on to allow others to have their moment. It was clear that many of them were not quite sure what to do. Some just stood silently, but most felt they needed to do something. Some bowed or curtsied, others seemed to utter a quiet prayer, others crossed themselves in a slightly awkward fashion as if it was something they weren't really used to doing.

It was clear that people needed some kind of gesture of respect, and it was significant how many turned to some kind of religious action to do that, whether bowing a head, signing the cross or muttering a few words of prayer.

Throughout that week, at every turn, from the ceremony to recognise the new king, to the lying in state, to the funeral itself, everything seemed to happen in a context of Christian prayer. They were all deeply religious ceremonies and came in for surprising little resistance, despite our increasingly secular frame of mind as a nation. It was as if at that moment, in that difficult week, it felt as if the Christian faith held the nation’s grief for a short while.

Having taken many funerals in my time, I recognise the same dynamic in more ordinary circumstances. Many people who maybe have a dim recollection of Christian faith from their background find the rituals and ceremonies of the church - a hymn vaguely remembered from school, a vicar saying prayers, the rich and hopeful words of resurrection in the presence of death - a valuable handrail to hold onto at a time of deep instability and profound change.

It might seem that this outbreak of religious observance at the death of the monarch was just a temporary thing before life returned to normal, but perhaps it pointed to something much more significant.

It always feels a little odd with the beginnings of spring, daffodils and sprouting flowers in the garden, but Good Friday is the bleakest moment of the Christian year. It is the moment when we remember how, for Christians at least, the most complete human being who ever walked the planet, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed in a huge miscarriage of justice. If this really was the day we killed God, it was the darkest moment in human history.

And maybe that is part of the genius of Christianity – its ability to hold people in moments of grief and pain, when there aren’t easy answers to be found.

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Good Friday is followed by Holy Saturday, the day when Jesus’ body lay still and decaying in a cold grave, and everything seemed to be at an end. Of course, we know that Resurrection and the joy of it was just around the corner, but they didn’t know that on the first Good Friday, and you have to go through Good Friday and even sit with the devastation of it all through Holy Saturday before you get to the joy. And maybe that is part of the genius of Christianity – its ability to hold people in moments of grief and pain, when there aren’t easy answers to be found.

Nick Cave’s recent book, co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, has as its title, not the traditional trio of Faith, Hope and Love, but Faith, Hope and Carnage. The book explores Cave’s re-discovery of faith in part through the tragic death of his 15-year old son Arthur, and the capacity of faith to hold and sustain him in the middle of carnage, despair and tragedy. As Rowan Williams put it in his recent interview with Nick Cave: “The book reveals the way in which faith, without ever giving a plain, comforting answer, offers resources to look at what is terrible without despair or evasion.”

The Christian understanding of evil is not that is it good dressed up in dowdy clothing. It does not tell us to believe that somehow premature death, cancer, or childhood leukaemia are somehow good for us. It says that they have no point because that is the nature of evil – that it is pointless. It has no meaning because it is the absence of meaning. It has no purpose because it is the absence of purpose.

That is why Christians gladly say they have no neat answer to the problem of evil. Because evil is the absence of answers. It is nonsense because it makes no sense. Instead, we believe, not because we have found an answer to the problem of suffering, but despite that fact that we haven’t. We believe because we have heard a more compelling story that does make sense of everything else - the unlikely and sometimes scarcely believable hope of Resurrection, which makes sense of so much else – even the mysterious rebirth of nature that emerges from the seeming death of winter into new life in the Spring. Only unlike pagans, Christians see the natural rhythms of the world as an echo of the central story of the Resurrection of Jesus, rather than the other way round.

Christians see in the events of the first Easter the turning point of history. That when we tried to kill God on the first Good Friday, he did not stay dead, but rose again, bringing with him the promise that those who face death or tragedy hand in hand with Christ, will somehow come through the carnage and the chaos with a life and a future.

When you’re in agony you don’t need an explanation, you just need someone to hold you.

Of course, when you’re in the middle of pain, it’s hard to see that. When you’re in agony you don’t need an explanation, you just need someone to hold you. And that’s exactly what Christianity offers – someone to hold you. Someone who has been through the worst that life and history can throw at him and knows the worst that can happen. It offers the presence of God in the Jesus who is no stranger to pain – as it says over and over again in the Bible “I will never leave you or forsake you.” It is, as Sian Brookes explains in her excellent review of the film Allelujah! on Seen & Unseen, what we will all need at the end of our lives - someone to be with us.

Christian faith still holds out the hope of Resurrection. Easter Sunday does come around after Good Friday. But even when you’re stuck on Saturday, waiting for a Sunday that never seems to come, when Resurrection is hard to believe in, when all around you is carnage and chaos, you are invited to hold tightly and determinedly to that mysterious presence that stands with you in the darkness, whether you feel it or you don’t, while you wait for the light to dawn.

Nigeria’s terror survivors share their stories

This violence is not gruesome fiction, it’s reality.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A Nigerian man looks up towards the camera, behind him is dusty ground

Manga survived an attempted beheading.

Open Doors.

This article contains distressing content.

Something is happening. And nobody is talking about it.

Nigeria, the big and beautiful ‘Giant of Africa’, is becoming a place of increasing terror for the hundred million Christians who call it home. Since 2000, 62,000 people have been killed for having a Christian faith. Eight-thousand people were killed in 2023 alone. These staggering numbers mean that more Christians are being killed in Nigeria than in every other country combined.

The violence is as extreme as it gets. And yet, very few of us know that it’s happening.

When it comes to the Nigerian government and media, the relentlessly brutal attacks are seemingly hidden in plain sight; undeniable and yet somehow unstoppable. While, in the UK, we appear to be entirely unaware. This violence is out of sight, and therefore largely out of mind. The reasons why are admittedly complex, as outlined by Chris Wadibia. Nevertheless, the violence being carried out toward the Nigerian people, particularly those living in the Northern states, surely deserves our attention.

Earlier this year, I took a trip to Northern Nigeria. While I was there, I got to know a group of people who had endured unimaginable trauma, largely because of their Christian faith. Every day, they would bravely tell their stories – who they were and what they had experienced. Every day, I looked into the faces of children who had lost parents, parents who had lost children, husbands who had lost wives, and wives who had lost husbands. All of a sudden, the bewildering statistics were people before me – people who were having to live with the images of their loved ones being ‘butchered’ before their very eyes. Their villages being burnt down. Their lives being turned upside down by militants with assault rifles and machetes.

The only reference I had for stories such as the ones I was hearing were apocalyptic movies. But these things happened. They happened to the people sitting across from me. This violence is not the stuff of gruesome fiction, it’s the stuff of reality.

As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety...

I met one woman, she was incredibly gentle and kind, and told her story with a composure that’s hard to fathom. She was working on her land along with her husband and mother-in-law, a totally run-of-the-mill day. They were so engrossed with the task at hand, they didn’t notice that their village was being attacked by armed ‘Fulani’ militants (the majority of the violence being carried out in Northern Nigeria is at the hands of Islamic extremist groups such as Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP - Islamic State in West African Province). She looked up to find herself face-to-face with two attackers and despite their command for her to surrender to them, she ran, as did her husband and mother-in-law. While she was running, she could hear bullets flying past her head and the screams of her mother-in-law. Making it to a neighbouring village, she gathered help and eventually went back to find her husband and mother-in-law. Both of whom were stabbed and killed that day.

The Fulani militants now have control over her village, and she told us how she’s been praying that she would be able to forgive these men for what they’d done, as she is now forced to live alongside them. And so, she felt proud because she had recently been able to respond to one of the men as they greeted her.

There was another woman, she was strong and defiantly compassionate. Her story is laced with horror. She studied at a university – the discrimination she experienced there meant that a course that was supposed to be four years long, took her eight years to complete. In 2014, Boko Haram attacked the university – while she was trying to escape, her friend was shot and ‘hacked at’ while he refused to deny his Christian faith. She recalls how his last words were ‘I’m happy. I’ve saved lives today. And I have Jesus’.

He died and she continued to run. As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety, as she did so, she heard the mother being shot behind her.

She ran those twins to Cameroon, leaving them in safety, and now lives in a rural Nigerian village where she teaches the local children. Her Christian identity is no secret, and so faces continual danger. Her crops were burnt to the ground and destroyed, twice. And the villagers have tried, repeatedly, to get her to leave. One night, she came face to face with young men with bats and machetes who threatened her life – she told them – ‘you can’t scare me. I have seen the Lord’.

And they left. Remarkably, that village is still her home.

One heart-wrenchingly-young girl told us how, while she sleeping – she was awoken by her father who told her that they needed to run, they were under attack. She ran, hand in hand with her father, while her mother carried her younger brother. While they were fleeing, her dad was shot and killed. Her mother pried her hand out of her father’s and buried both her and her brother in sand, instructing them to stay hidden. The next day, they found that their house, their crops, their entire village had been burnt down.

This is what is happening. This is what we are not seeing.

While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

Since my return, I have met with a man who bears the physical scars of his trauma. He thought his house was being pillaged by armed robbers - it was only when they led him, his brother and his father outside, made them kneel with their hands tied behind their backs, and demanded that they denounce their Christian faith that he realised he was being attacked by Boko Haram. It was a regular evening, he was putting together a lesson plan for his class the following day, and now he was kneeling before an executioner. His father refused their demand, and they beheaded him. His brother also refused, and they took a blade to him, too. Then it was his turn, and while his mind was filled with thoughts of death and how much this was about to hurt, he also prayed that these men would be forgiven for what they were doing. Taking after Jesus, who forgave his executioners mid-execution, this man continued to pray as he felt the blade in his neck.

Left to bleed to death, miraculously, both him and his brother survived. Now, his scar tells an astonishing story.

This epidemic of violence seems to reside under our radar. It’s not quite catching our eye, is it? And, as a result, is not quite receiving the force of our outrage nor benefiting from the depths of our compassion. So many of the people that I met expressed a feeling of being neglected – like they’re suffering in deafening silence. While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

What’s happening in Nigeria is a crisis, one that we must acknowledge.