by Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University, authorised lay preacher, member of General Synod and vice-chair of its Gender & Sexuality Group
Last week I saw the current Royal Shakespeare Company production of Julius Caesar. I hated it. In the first half I tried hard to find some positives, but by the interval I was convinced that this was an incoherent production which had managed to lose everything that really mattered. There were empty seats when the second half resumed, so it wasn’t just me and my friends who were unhappy. At the end, however, while most of us politely clapped – after all, the cast did their best in a production that failed to fly – several groups of under-20s enthusiastically stood and cheered. Part of the explanation for that was that some of them were Americans, and I know from seeing plays in America that standing ovation is the default setting rather than the exception. Part of it may just be that seeing a play in Shakespeare’s town is a very special experience. But it’s also likely that they saw something in this production which spoke to them, even though it alienated others. I’m not going to follow that thought any further here, into the context of different ways of ‘doing church’; maybe another day.
One of the many ideas in the production which I thought didn’t really work was the projection of the word ‘PAUSE’ on the screen at the back after the assassination of Caesar. There followed a counted second-by-second two-minute pause in the action. I took that as a way of emphasising that one era had ended, and another was about to begin, but also as stressing that the assassins – the self-styled ‘liberators’ of the Republic – hadn’t worked out what to do next. Actually the pause lasted for longer than the timer stated, so it seemed rather pointless.
Pauses are complicated. For most of us, the LLF process is currently in pause mode, although not for the bishops and others tasked with examining the implications of what was passed in February’s General Synod with a 57% vote in favour. And it’s certainly not in pause mode for those who were in the 43%. I’ve been criticised for continuing to ask of conservative evangelicals “In what would unity consist if your ‘settlement’ went ahead?” Rather than pausing to see what the bishops come up with, they are producing all sorts of ways to object, most recently the very sweet idea of a breakaway deanery chapter. This one seems to have been an own goal, leading to peak Anglican comments including “Were the biscuits mostly leftover custard creams?” and “Did they have the green cups and saucers?” but also raising serious questions around safeguarding.
In a similar burst of words, there have been more comments than usual on a couple of recent posts on this site. Such discussions tend to happen in various Facebook groups or on Twitter, but since February that has changed. After a recent post, I decided to let those commenting have free reign, just to see what happened. Very quickly, the content of the comments became detached from the original post: people preached at each other, shouted at each other, expressed how injured and misunderstood they felt, and so on. I realised all I was doing was providing a place in which people could find targets for their anger. That didn’t feel helpful and it didn’t feel right. So I stopped my formal ‘approving’ of posts, and instead several of them tried to post to tell me I was biased (very funny, when I was blocking those of all views, and where the person had no idea what I was dealing with) or that I should be allowing ‘academic freedom’ (also funny, when nobody was offering any academic support for their views).
Should I have stopped, or simply paused? Maybe I should have offered a ‘pause for reflection’ or a pause for thinking seriously about what a settlement would mean. I’m not convinced, though, that such a pause would have made a difference. And maybe that was the point of the Julius Caesar PAUSE – that, after it, things got worse, not better.
Today we enter a week in which this blog will press ‘PAUSE’, not for two minutes, but for seven days. When I was being taught prose reading as a schoolgirl, I learned ‘the use of the pause’; knowing when a moment of silence before or after a word helped the listener to enter the meaning more deeply. Pausing can be powerful. In this Holy Week, however we mark it, can we all concentrate on the story we all share, and all tell: of a week two millennia ago which changed what it is to be human; of God who became one of us, who taught us how to live, who experienced the anger of those who did not share God’s vision of love and mercy, who was crucified and who rose again? PAUSE.
Any thoughts?