God loves me

Thought for the Day, 16 March 2011

The Rev. Dr Giles Fraser



The Hollywood actor Charlie Sheen has been much in the news of late. His drugs and partying. Being sacked from his TV show. His failed marriages. It's a sad catalogue of self-destruction which some have attributed to mental breakdown or even bipolar disorder.



So why are we all so interested? And before you say it: yes, millions of us are. Since the beginning of this month Sheen has clocked up nearly three million twitter followers, getting him into the Guinness book of World Records for being the fastest person to reach a million followers. This week twitter celebrates its fifth birthday. In that time, over one billion tweets have been sent.



A couple of months ago the celebrated author AS Byatt gave a remarkable interview to the Guardian about her views on new social media - the significance of which she believes has something to do with the decline of religious belief. "Religion has gone away," she said, "and all we are left with is ourselves."



Her thought is that religious belief provided human beings with a picture of their place in the world. And that now that this picture has faded from view, it's become increasingly hard for us to say who we really are. This is where social media comes in. For instead of the religious picture, we now use other people as a mirror through which to establish our own identity. "I'm sure it's a religious matter," she said. "You only exist if you tell people you are there."



Perhaps it's this philosophy that's so tragically exemplified by Charlie Sheen: you only exist if you are being noticed. And the more you are being noticed, the more you exist.



The task of discovering who we really are is one of the great spiritual practices of Lent. And at its heart is self-denial - which involves stripping away our superficial props and burrowing down to the deeper sources of what makes us who we are.



Perhaps it's a task that we have to perform on our own without the reflected opinions of friends or foes. Antonia Byatt describes self-discovery as reading Shakespeare with a torch under the bedcovers. Jesus finds his solitude in the wilderness of the desert. And what we're often left with in these moments of being creatively alone is a sense that we are fundamentally reliant upon forces that are outside our control and beyond our emotional jurisdiction. AS Byatt quotes Wallace Stephens: "From this the poem springs. That we live in a place that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves."



For me this deeper reality is understood as God. And to put it in the unashamed language of the Christian tradition: I exist because God loves me. For people undergoing periods of emotional crisis, this can sometimes be the only thought that holds them together. When all is stripped away, a reliance on God alone is the terrifying wisdom of the desert and the spiritual purpose of Lent. "And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days."