Forgetting the story, losing the plot
‘Forgetting the story, losing the plot’
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Sunday 30 March 2025, The 4th Sunday of Lent, Mothering Sunday
Exodus 2: 1–10
Luke 2: 33–35
‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too’
The story goes that at the end of the tenth century Prince Vladimir of Ukraine, uncertain as to which Christian denomination he should commit his people, sent emissaries around Europe to experience the worship of different nations. In Germany, they reported, they found no glory. But in the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, they were brought to their knees in wonder. ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth’ they reported, ‘we only know that God dwells there among men. We cannot forget that glory’.
I was reminded of that story when I met Maria twelve months ago, at the girls’ school in the occupied West Bank where she is the Headmistress. It’s a Russian Orthodox School and Maria – who is German and was formerly a maths teacher – is a Russian Orthodox nun. How on earth had that happened, I wanted to know. Mother Maria, as she is now known, told me that as a teenager she had longed to meet God and had set out to do so. She had tried the Lutherans. She had tried the Roman Catholics. She had tried various Protestant churches. Nowhere had she met God. She was on the verge of lapsing back into the atheism of her family when a friend invited her to attend the Orthodox Liturgy of Easter. And that was it: ‘God met me’ she said. She was baptized in the Orthodox Church; she became a nun; she tried life in a convent in Greece; and she eventually arrived in Jerusalem. Her plan was to devote her life to prayer and what the Orthodox call hesychia, contemplation. But as the saying goes – if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. A vacancy emerged for the Headship of her community’s school. With her teaching background she was the obvious candidate to fill it.
The stories we tell about ourselves are important, whether they are stories of a nation (how Ukraine became Orthodox) or stories of an individual (how Maria became an Orthodox nun). Stories connect with our hearts, making them leap with joy or grow heavy with despair. They communicate truths of human longing and divine discovery. And they do all this in ways that will always elude the concise prose of reports and analyses. Stories have power.
The Arabic-speaking world celebrates Mother’s Day rather than Mothering Sunday, and I met Mother Maria when I was invited to attend her kindergarten’s celebratory performance. It was tear-jerkingly wonderful: little Palestinian girls singing, dancing, waving to their mothers, and addressing their audience in Russian, Arabic, and English. ‘They are so confident’ I said to Maria. ‘They need to be,’ she said, ‘living where they live and facing what they have to face, they need to be confident’. She had introduced critical thinking and problem solving to the school curriculum; she had raised the profile of STEM subjects; and was determined to undergird what was now a largely Palestinian Muslim school with Christian compassion. Maria was trying consciously to rewrite her girls’ national story of occupation, dispossession, exile and war with a new story of courage, resilience, and hope.
‘What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this’. Omar El Akkad, the Egyptian-born author, has written a searing new book about the national story to which many of us probably subscribe, which many of us probably tell, and of which many of us are probably proud. It’s the story of the liberal, democratic order of Europe and North America; the story of its free press, and its independent institutions; the story of Magna Carta, representative governments, and personal liberty. It’s the order in which he has lived since leaving the Middle East with his family as a young man.
And it’s the order which he believes has perished in the slaughter of Gaza.
El Akkad contends that the West cannot possibly be what it claims to be because its leaders and its institutions have comprehensively failed to end what he unhesitatingly describes as genocide . ‘One day,’ he writes ‘when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this’. Liberal democracy professes regret that – for example – Mother Maria’s girls will grow up facing armed soldiers, checkpoints and arbitrary detention. But the regret will not translate into a concerted effort to end the panoply of occupation. Liberal democracy professes its commitment to the sanctity of loving relationships – of motherhood – and its entrepreneurs invent a thousand ways to part us from our cash to prove it. As of this month up to twenty per cent of pregnant or breastfeeding women in Gaza are malnourished. But the commitment will not translate into the West using its influence to secure a just peace for them.
‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too’. Simeon’s words articulate the story upon which liberal Western democracy was built. It’s the story of God who created humanity in love, and the story of God who redeemed humanity in love. It’s the story of the sacred character of this precious Earth. It’s the story of the child Moses, plucked from among the bulrushes and cared for in the palace of the oppressor. It’s the story of God making Godself vulnerable in Jesus. It’s the story that cannot endure the loss of even one mother’s child – and certainly not the 14,000 children who have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war.
And the tragedy is that it’s a story that our leaders and our institutions are forgetting. ‘Mainstream European culture is hurtling forward’ writes the public theologian Rupert Shortt ‘largely without the fuel that Christianity has historically supplied’. Largely without the story. And this matters: when there is no story to teach that every mother’s child is born in the image and likeness of God then the assertion that all children are born equal is just that – it’s an assertion that the evidence doesn’t appear to support, and an assertion that can easily be contested. What is the public square of the Western world without the story of Jesus Christ? At best, a framework of laws upheld by the well-meaning; ultimately, a contested arena in which those with deep pockets, loud voices, and well-equipped armies hold sway. We’ve forgotten the story – and lost the plot.
We’re on the brink of Passiontide, when we will tell the story again: the story of who we are and why we are; the story of where we’re from and where we’re going. The world needs desperately to hear it. For we are more than that which we are at risk of becoming.