Uninspired by tonight’s readings I want to talk instead about a new opera, Innocence, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, which I saw at Covent Garden last week. It has a grim theme, but ultimately an albeit ambiguous, optimistic message.
The music is beautiful and the production and sets clever and convincing. They represent first a rather sparse wedding in a hotel alternating with an international school. The place is Finland and the time is now. The wedding appears at first, to be almost a cliché of conventional happiness but cracks soon appear as the scene changes to spotlight a teacher and students of the school. Some of the characters have survived an atrocity and some, it transpires, are the ghosts of children killed in it. Ten years ago one of the pupils had shot the teacher and several of his fellow pupils. We learn too that a waitress at the wedding is mother of a dead pupil and she recognises the bridegroom as the brother of the perpetrator of the murders. Gradually a fuller story evolves as we learn more clearly what happened and all the characters’ involvement and complicity, direct and indirect, in the crime.
At the same time, we witness them gradually coming to terms with their feelings of loss and guilt. The bride only learns the story of her new family late in the plot and must decide whether love can overcome the deception the family thought it would practice on her. Their only family friend at the wedding, a basso profondo pastor/priest promotes love and honesty; some characters find or start to find, resolution and peace through self-examination. We are left uncertain as to whether others including the bride- the only completely innocent party- find it or not.
It’s a story about victims and survivors and as such a story for our time. As a society we have almost an obsession with victims and survivors. It is quite right that we should be concerned to alleviate the suffering and to encourage healing; victims and survivors deserve our sympathy because they are fellow human beings –and for the Christian, fellow creatures. Victims do not however have rights as victims. Popular opinion- and practice- would give them the right to confront those that have harmed them and to see them punished. Victims it is thought have a right to retribution- to revenge in plainer language.
Revenge, however, does not bring resolution; it will not allow the victim or survivor to find peace. This is not an opinion shared by the writers of headlines or by those politicians who call for more severe punishment of heinous crimes. It is not an opinion that will sell newspapers and win elections but it is lazy moral thinking. The truth, as I believe taught and shown in the Gospels is much harder, but also more truly satisfying.
In the opera resolution and peace are found through honesty and love.
Honesty is perhaps the harder to achieve; it is painful confronting one’s own feelings and thoroughly examining and analysing them. It will involve accepting pain and not fighting it, not avoiding it or diverting it onto others or other things. It may involve turning the other cheek. But Jesus’ life achieves it and, however hopeless it may seem, that is the example we should aspire to follow. Jesus achieves the ultimate resolution of resurrection and life beyond death, but does so by accepting crucifixion. Death on a cross is a fate we must hope we are not drawn to, but we might care to note that is not far from what Mohammad and Bahram, asylum seekers, newly baptised this morning as members of our congregation risk in their home country, Iran.
Honesty and love come together in forgiveness. Some Christians believe that God’s grace is such that one can be forgiven even for sins which are unknown, let alone acknowledged. I believe that God’s grace is enormous and available to all that seek it, but it will not mean anything unless accompanied by repentance. It is the feeling of release that matters and that cannot be achieved without awareness and regret for what one has done. It is in coming to that awareness that honesty is vital.
Love, however, is equally vital as it is love which will drive our forgiveness of others. When Jesus tells us to pray that we may be forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us, that “as” is working hard; it means more than that we forgive others in the same way that God forgives us (although that alone, is a formidable challenge us, in imitating God!); but it really means that we can only hope to be forgiven ourselves, by which I mean be fully aware of our need for forgiveness and therefore open to God’s grace, if we can ourselves match God’s insight, understanding and sympathy in dealing with others who have offended us. This forgiveness is, needless to say, the opposite of the desire for revenge. That desire will not only fail to achieve resolution for injury suffered but leave us unable to receive God’s healing grace for our own failings.
These are the ideas that the characters in Innocence, the opera work through. The do not all achieve their potential but we are left feeling that even the effort of trying to understand, love and forgive will give a sort of peace which vengeance and retribution never will. And that must be comfort enough. Amen.