Less John, more Joan. How Paris’ secular hymn fell flat

Despite launching a flaming piano of peace, France missed an obvious emissary.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A floating stage bears a flaming piano and singer standing at a mic.

That opening ceremony.

BBC.

Amid the furor around Dionysus and his flesh suit it was another point in the Olympic opening ceremony that got me thinking spiritually. Which is ironic, given the moment’s message. Silence fell after a chaotic, multi-barge disco. An atmospherically lit boat carrying a piano on fire sailed down the Seine, with a beautifully sung Imagine, by John Lennon, drifting from the singer.

Nowhere does secularism like France, with a religion-less public society so entrenched that a French Muslim sprinter, Sounkamba Sylla, had to swap her hijab for a cap at the opening ceremony to abide by its public religiosity laws. Telling a woman what she can and can’t wear is not a great look for a modern democracy. However, choosing Imagine, - a well-known atheistic plea for a world without religious devotion and the dogma, extremism, and warring that comes with it, perhaps tells us what France is going for. Beautiful, modern, peace. The world as one in Godless enlightenment. No hell to scare you. No heaven to inspire you.

Except. Humans have managed to do an excellent job of conceiving, enacting, and justifying extreme violence without religious devotion for much of the last two centuries. Side-by-side with religious acts of aggression were communist oppression, The Great Leap Forward, Gulags, Darwinian race wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Perhaps rather than blaming religion for the constant state of war the global populace finds themselves in, John Lennon would be best investigating our common human instinct.

Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

When God is taken out of the equation, peace is no better found in science, rationality, or self-actualisation, the twentieth century demonstrates that. These things are just as likely to be twisted towards conflict. Without God there is no inspiration to be selfless, moral, or compassionate, the impulses of each which might lead to reconciliation rather than war.

Just a little after the flaming piano, a figure that better points the way to peace came riding down the Seine. Billed as a Gallo-Roman goddess, it was more a recreation of Joan of Arc, the French saint who brought spiritual leadership to her country and defeat to English invaders. She bore the Olympic flag onto dry land. In a very medieval way Joan’s life after hearing from God was of breaking sieges and leading armies. It might seem strange to anoint her the bearer of peace, but she shows the way to the united humanity that John Lennon was striving for.

Christians await with anticipation the Kingdom of God fully coming on Earth which will bring with it peace and perfect justice. Joan, being led by God to challenge the oppression of English invaders, points the way towards it by rising up against injustice. And she points the way back to Jesus, her Lord, who turned the world upside down with his message of peace and his beginning of this Kingdom of God. Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

Rather than seeking a Godless paradise which can never have enough moral force to be anything other than a selfish search for meaning, we must look to Joan’s God. We will find a God who calls any who will follow him to a life of justice and peace. Only in giving up our own desires, to follow the example of Jesus, will we ever have a world as one.

As my wife, Harriet, remarked whilst we watched Lennon’s hymn, it’s only a few words away from being spot on. Rather than taking the modern French approach and keeping God away from the public sphere, we might delve into Joan’s spirituality and find a burning for justice, a desire for peace, and a self-sacrifice which will one day lead to peace under God. Imagine there’s a heaven. It’s easy if you try. And it’s the only place humans will ever find the true and lasting peace of Lennon’s imagination.

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Life & Death

10 September 2024

4 min read

A covering of feathers for the terrors of the night

How to struggle with the burden of other people's suffering.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

Evie S. on Unsplash.

It’s one of the sad facts of life: that many of us at some point will see our parents get old and fade away. Sigh. It doesn’t matter how well prepared you are or how much you’ve thought about it before hand, the reality of a fragile mum or an exhausted dad can break your heart.

I’ve talked to my parents about this for years here and there. We’ve done lots of joking about seeing them off with a pink pill in the sherry, or ‘it’ll be a pillow for you Pa, if you’re too annoying’ – type thing. But when they left after Sunday lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had to clutch my husband. He lost his own mother last year… we’re still fluttering around the gap she’s left in our family. And now there’s my beloved olds too, looking diminished and moth eaten and moving at crepuscular speed. Ask Dad how he is these days, and he says ‘Old, dear’, and won’t elaborate further.

I can cope with this when it’s in short bursts. Visiting them for lunch or taking them out on a trip is OK and manageable, and there is still joy in family occasions. Mum’s birthday was full of love, even though she took all afternoon to open her cards and became hopelessly confused about who’d given her what.

But staying with them… that’s hard. Seeing the dust thick over the spare room; worrying about just how long that bowl of leftovers has been in the fridge. I whip about as unobtrusively as I can, scrubbing the bottom of the washing up bowl or putting their jerseys in a wash. I don’t want to be annoying – they won’t accept help and I’m not going to push – but it makes me sad. In particular I hate that my mum is in constant pain from crumbling bones, and that dementia has stolen her mind. Also, that as a consequence, Dad is irritable with her; he who has always adored her so much.

I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain.

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Since childhood, I have struggled with the burden of other people’s suffering. I sometimes wonder if I’m exaggerating when I think about how much I mind, but I don’t think I am. I can only manage if I’m really ready for it. With my counselling clients that takes the form of very firm boundaries, regular supervision, colleagues to talk to etc… but with family it’s much harder. It’s just your own naked, soft-bodied self-shrinking from all the nettles and thorns – like a hermit crab without a shell.

So when I went down to Mum and Dad’s this time, I felt the need to prepare. ‘Put on the armour of light,’ St Paul says, which sounds just the thing. I hardly slept last time, tossing and wriggling through small-hour horrors with my neck hurting and a feeling of tears not being far away. What to arm myself with though?

The answer came in the form of an ancient poem - Psalm 91. I was listening to a Premier Radio presenter who is a pastor – a big, tattooed fellow with rings in his nose and lip – and he said it was his main defence when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. So, I looked it up, and I loved it. It was all about how the Lord will cover you with his wings and keep you safe from the terrors that visit in the night and the pestilence that stalks by day, or words to that effect.

Malcolm Guite (a poet and priest whose writing I love) says you have to treat Psalm 91 with care: it was the one Satan tempted Christ within the wilderness, challenging him to throw himself from the temple roof and God would send his angels to catch him (as it says in the psalm). It’s not to be taken literally, this psalm: you can’t deliberately put yourself in harm’s way and expect to be immune because you’re a Christian, like some of the vehement anti-vaxxers around the world who think faith alone will protect them from lethal diseases. But the message is that if you put your trust in God, he won’t let you be damaged in any important or lasting way by the evils of the world.

I memorised as much of it as I could. And then when I woke in the night – inevitably – with the dread hovering over me, I kept thinking, ‘The Lord will cover thee with his feathers’. I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain and muddliness and Dad’s frustration and my own fear. They were like malevolent ghosts drifting through the dark, menacing and cruel. But Mum and Dad and I, our actual selves, were curled up safely, warm and hidden with the great wings over us.

And eventually, I was able to go back to sleep.