I have not posted anything for a week or two because I unexpectedly found myself in hospital for a week following an accident. In the realisation that suddenly, from ‘I don’t do being ill’ to having little choice about being kept in hospital I had moved from being in control of my life (so far as one balances free will with God’s engagement with our lives) to being at the mercy of others’ decisions, I was reminded of WH Vanstone’s book ‘The Stature of Waiting’ (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982 and 2004).
I first came across this book in trying to make sense of the struggles I faced when my older son was critically ill in hospital. However, I don’t want to focus on medical illness, but rather to think about what Vanstone has to say that might help in making sense of those other times when we feel at a loss, like being made redundant; being unemployed, when all we want is for someone to ‘give us a job’, as one of the characters in ‘Boys from the Black Stuff’ would say; or perhaps being retired when we don’t want to be, and so on. And I write this also as a reminder to those of us who are used to being ‘in control’ who may find it hard to understand how others feel when at the mercy of events or powers beyond their control.
In Chapter 3, ‘The Status of Patient’, Vanstone makes the point about the change, in similar circumstances to my accident, when someone who might be ordering and arranging their own affairs and perhaps those of others, creating their own immediate future and in control of their immediate destiny, suddenly passes into the hands of others and becomes dependant on their decisions and actions. What happens, happens to them, what is done is done to them and hardly depends at all on their own efforts or decisions.
The person has become a patient, a word which is derived via the Latin from the Greek pascho. This is significant in Vanstone’s thinking because the rest of the book is about the significance as he sees it of Christ’s Passion – it is as important as what follows in the Biblical account. Christ hands himself over, he is passive, not in the negative sense of that word in today’s interpretation, but in the sense that he allows others to direct his destiny. It is in exploring the meaning of this ‘waiting’ from which the title of the book derives.
Vanstone goes on to make the point about the many situations in which we feel less and less in control of our lives and destiny in our modern world. He makes the point about retired people, particularly at the time when the book was written of those being offered early retirement, possibly at a time when they still had much to offer the working world. He also identified the many that with increasing life expectancy might go on living lives of variable quality over which they had limited control for possibly a long time.
In our present situation, though, it happens frequently that someone who is in a job with responsibility, or simply one that gives their life meaning and purpose and allows them to provide for themselves, can suddenly find all of that undermined by the threat of redundancy. And whilst I have recently received a booklet on the power of positive thinking and how to transform one’s situation when faced with redundancy, not everyone is in a situation where they are able to find new work simply by their own efforts. The discouragement and sense of being at the mercy of others or of events can be only too real, and those of us who are used to being in control need to recognise where positive thinking can work and where circumstances would overcome even the most positive person. Vanstone makes the point about longer term unemployment that (even if one were reasonably provided for materially) there is a difference to the sense of worth and being of a person who is dependant and receiving as compared with someone whose role in life is productive and who is thereby giving.
But, Vanstone says, even if much of life more widely is now such that we are carried along by forces beyond our control, there is a sense in which we must not be seen to acquiesce to this. The disabled person is not offered help but ‘re-ablement’, the retired person is busier than ever, and the unemployed person must look for work and fill their time with activities that will enhance their CV. In this he is raising the question of ‘whether the public and professed attitudes of today do not necessarily express the final truth about human worth and dignity or about the proper role and status of man in the world.’ (2004:50).
So as well as reminding those of us used to being ‘in control’ to be aware of what it is like for those who have lost that condition in life, he is also questioning whether control and activity are the only or the best way of being. What Vanstone is doing in the rest of the book is pointing up that in his Passion Jesus accepts, receives, what is done to him and that this is not wholly negative as we might be inclined to view it today. For that acceptance of waiting on what would happen is not without purpose or meaning. It is a conscious act in which there is awareness of the world around and of what is happening. The world, which bears the image of God, exists to supply our needs and offers the possibility and power of meaning. So it may be that the values of control and independence and activity are part of God’s creativity in which we participate but might also be rooted more in the needs of the comparatively recent capitalist system, and that in fact the ‘special dignity of ‘man’ lies in the presence in him, marred but not effaced, of the image of God’ (2004:111). If this is so, then receptivity and openness, even suffering in the older sense of the word, become as important as activity.
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