THE POLITICS OF TENDERNESS
These two
nouns do not sit well together: politics and tenderness. Politics is a competitive business where the
one in leadership constantly has an eye on any threat to their position. Voters
appear to like someone who is tough and resolute and not easily deflected from
their goal. We saw a leader crumble yesterday because she dared to use the word
‘compromise’. Yet, courageously, she insisted on it and in her farewell speech
she gave honour to the man who first inspired her with it.
We seem to
like toughness. As kids – at least of my generation – we liked cowboys who
burst through swing doors with both ‘six-guns’ blazing. Churchill saved, not
just Britain, but arguably the world, from tyranny but his toughness. Yes, there is a place for it. But it is like a stone we find wedded to the
ground: when you stop and turn it over you see softness and, even in the
desert, life.
I am often
astonished by parents of young children. A child, securely loved and with all
they need available to them, will go into a tantrum and scatter their food,
plate and all, to the four corners of the room. I expect, maybe from long
forgotten experience, a harsh response.
But no, the parent says nothing and, after a time, quietly clears up the
mess. She or he knows that this is some chaotic bursting forth of energy, some
misstructured assertion of identity. The child is simply saying, ‘I exist! Take
note!’ But I am touched by the tenderness of the parents’ response.
Jean Vanier,
who died earlier this month, discovered tenderness was a royal road to healing.
He lived for 56 years with people who had intellectual disabilities, people who
could not express themselves in ways that most people could understand. Jean
set out to help them live in conditions that resembled a home but he soon
discovered that they, like the child referred to, used their new found security,
to let out their pent up frustrations. Jean was confused, at first, and even
felt anger rise within him. But he reflected and, like the good parent, he
realised that this was their way of saying, ‘thank you, we have arrived, we are
accepted and now we can be ourselves’.
Jean went on
to develop the lessons he learnt in those early days and he wrote and spoke about
them often. Eventually a model came to him and he would use it constantly to announce
the good news he had learnt. The model was Jesus washing the feet of his
friends. And Jean himself, giant of a man that he was, would get down on his
knees and wash the feet of the handicapped people he lived with. People called
him ‘an apostle of tenderness’ and so he was and he would extend his message to
relations with other Christian communities (denominations, if you like) and
other religions. And his message could
build peace even among nations.
Booting up
the search engine in my head I look for examples in the world of politics and three
examples appear. One was Angela Merkel inviting a million migrants, four years
ago, to settle in Germany at the very moment such a welcome was urgently
needed. A second example was the rock solid peace negotiated between France and
Germany around 1949 after three bitter and devastating wars. And the third was President Kennedy of the
United States, the morning after the failed invasion of Cuba around 1961,
saying on TV, ‘I made a mistake.’
Tenderness
and compromise are the legacy of our religious traditions but they are often unwelcome
attitudes in the tough world
we now inhabit.
26 May 2019 Easter
Sunday 6 C
Acts 15:1-2, 22-29 Revelations 21:10-14, 22-23 John 14:23-29
