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Occupy St Paul's: no church should insulate itself from raw human need
The Occupy movement is a moment of God-given opportunity to rediscover Christian holiness: not in rich temples, but justice
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Giles Fraser guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 November 2011 21.30 GMT
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An eviction notice hangs on an Occupy tent outside St Paul's Cathedral. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
"This is the place where Jesus Christ was born," whispers a guide in an affected and well practised baritone. Bells jingle and incense fills the church. And thousands queue up for the experience with hushed reverence. Buses from plush Jerusalem hotels make their way through the Israeli checkpoint and disgorge their passengers just a few paces from the narrow entrance to this most holy of Christian shrines.
Crusaders lowered the once grand entrance so as to stop pilgrims entering the church on horseback. Nothing so profane as a horse, and its inevitable waste products, must go anywhere near so sacred a place. Leviticus 10.10 puts it thus: "You are to put a difference between the holy and the unholy, between the clean and the unclean." In other words, the church must be protected from the world.
Sitting on the far side of Manger Square, I find myself getting more and more angry with this deeply rooted understanding of holiness. Bethlehem is a place of such vast injustice and social deprivation. The Israeli separation barrier has severed the whole town from its traditional sources of social and economic vitality. Farmers can no longer reach their olive trees. Families who live just a few miles apart can no longer visit each other. Graffiti on the vast concrete wall offers a slender message of hope: "Nothing lasts for ever."
But it seems that for many of the pilgrims to Bethlehem, this complex political reality is something to be passed by on the other side. They have come to find a sacred space that is as protected from politics as the holy is from the unholy. Yet there is a terrible irony in all this. For the birth of Jesus Christ, in a smelly cow shed, and threatened by the forces of occupation, represents a wholesale rejection of precisely this idea of holiness. God is no longer to be set in some pristine otherness. The sacred is no longer to be protected from the profane. Which is why Jesus makes such an ostentatious show of fraternising with those who were traditionally debarred from holy space – the lame and blind, sinners, lepers, menstruating women.
In the life of Jesus, holiness is redefined as justice. Like the prophets before him, he is at best indifferent and at worst downright hostile to traditional forms of protection against defilement – washing, ringfencing the Sabbath from work, and so on. The task of religious professionals is not to keep God clean, as one might defend a brand new exercise book from inky fingers. "I have come to give good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, sight to the blind."
Which is why the relationship between the Occupy camp and St Paul's Cathedral is theologically so fundamental. For those with a traditional understanding of holiness, the camp is a threat, just as the impure is seen to be a threat to the pure. The camp is messy and chaotic, the politics raw and visceral. The smell of stale sweat and urine hangs heavy in the air. Inside the cathedral, the choir sings of the majesty and otherness of God.
Christopher Wren's magnificent temple is the perfect stage for a contemplation of the ordered universe and the transcendent beauty of traditional holiness. It is a place of dignified worship and religious serenity. From this perspective, the camp can feel like an existential invasion, an overwhelming threat to holiness. But that is exactly what the birth and ministry of Jesus must have felt like too. And why he had such an uncomfortable relationship with the religious authorities of his day.
What is interesting, of course, is that holiness as separation is often an expensive business. For both the secular and the religious, money is the best way we have of insulating ourselves from the vulnerability and emotional maelstrom of encountering the raw humanity of need and anger. This is just as true of the millionaire's minimalist penthouse as it is of the otherworldliness of a cathedral precinct.
Indeed, one of the reasons why, throughout its life, the church has gone through periods when it has felt the need to give up its wealth is not because it regards money as intrinsically bad, but because money can easily become a way of protecting oneself against reality, and thus (in the Christian imagination) protecting oneself against God. St Francis didn't call the church to a life of poverty out of some life-denying puritanism. On the contrary, he wanted it to suck up a great deal of what it means to be fully and completely alive.
The Occupy movement is thus a moment of God-given opportunity for the church. Not only does holiness as justice demand that the Christian community never set itself apart from the sort of political and economic realities that have been raised by the Occupy movement. After all, financial justice is the number one moral issue of the Bible. It also affords the church once again an occasion for reformation – which, like Trotsky's perpetual revolution, is a continual and never-ending process – for the church to reclaim its own intrinsic vulnerability to the other. Of course this is a frightening prospect. But as St Paul himself put it so clearly, our strength is made manifest in our weakness. Which is why a cathedral that bears his name ought never to use the law or the police to protect itself from the supposed threat of peaceful protest.
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