BBC Radio 4 2016-04-05

BBC Radio 4 2016-04-05

Good morning. When Kim Philby gave a seminar to the East German Stasi on how to be a spy, he explained how he got away with his espionage for so long. The governing classes couldn’t accept that one of their own was a spy, and many in MI6 had much to lose if it was proven.

We act in the world that we see. Many of us are reluctant to see the world as it really is. It’s too painful, too complicated, too demanding. So we select different facts from the world in front of us and frame our vision around them. People become so tied to their respective visions that they practically live in different worlds. For the writer Iris Murdoch, virtue is perceiving the world as it really is, divested of selfishness and self-interest.

A lot of people have been in a situation like those at MI6 where someone close to them was up to no good but they simply wouldn’t see it. For Murdoch, we’re so absorbed in fantasy or convention that we just can’t recognise what’s really going on. Whole institutions can become subject to a culture of not seeing certain things. We think we’re free when life goes well. But in fact our freedom depends on our willingness and ability to see and adapt to what doesn’t fit our vision – people who are different, and challenging, or information that’s uncomfortable and sometimes distressing.

When a counsellor sits down with a client, they’re gently helping the client set their version of events alongside what’s really happening. It can be hard to align the two. It’s not just MI6: all of us have strong resistances to seeing things that damage our good opinion of those we trust.
The Christian hope in a final judgement has often been portrayed as a guilt-inducing chamber of horrors. But it’s actually liberating. It means that one day all the secrets we hold so tight will be laid bare. And we’ll be embraced in all our complex reality by a God who sees truth through the eyes of mercy.

Such a hope means we can stop constructing artificial fantasies and conventions and start living in the forever world of unsentimental reality. It gives us confidence to see the fallibility in one another, without lapsing into a cynicism that everyone is up to no good all the time. When a colleague turns out to be a spy we’re surprised, but not shocked; sad, but not devastated.

For Christians, God unflinchingly sees the reality of us, knows all our secrets, and yet doesn’t give up on us. Hope means our doing the same.

First broadcast 5 April 2016