Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. On Tuesday the new Prime Minister stood outside 10 Downing Street and, referring to his predecessor’s period in office, said, ‘Some mistakes were made… and I’ve been elected leader of my party and your Prime Minister in part to fix them.’ I’m fascinated by this word ‘fix.’ Rishi Sunak has inherited economic challenges of every kind – energy costs, supply chains, inflation, food prices – and that’s just to start with. How does one ‘fix’ problems like that? Our culture seems captivated by the word ‘fix.’ For me this language conjures up a miles-high glass-clad New York skyscraper with an old-fashioned CEO barking orders to a cowering staff to ‘Go fix it by tomorrow morning.’ But not everything is as easily fixed as a child’s toy. Not all problems have straightforward solutions. Not all troubles can be readily sorted. Not all brokenness is simply mended. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel distinguishes between a problem, which can be resolved with new information and established procedures, and a mystery, which is by definition unique, and requires all one’s previous experience and understanding to address. A problem you can fix from the outside, but a mystery you have to enter. If you treat every form of adversity as a problem to be fixed, you miss its subtlety, texture, uniqueness and interconnectedness. The word ‘fix’ creates unrealistic expectations of how quickly troubles can be addressed and how thoroughly they can be resolved. It plays into the fantasy that a wise, skilful or lucky leader can snap their fingers and make all the bad things go away. Christians risk this same syndrome when offering intercessory prayers. It’s easy to close your eyes and just say to God, ‘Fix this, will you?’ without any assessment of whether this is the kind of situation that can just suddenly be resolved. If we’re not careful, we treat senior politicians as godlike figures, and expect them to do miracles every day. That’s not just a misconception of politicians – it’s a misapprehension of God. The God Christians see in Jesus is not a simplistic ‘fixer’ – but one who deeply shares our human predicament, profoundly embraces our daily struggles, and, through what Christians call the Holy Spirit, empowers us to be part of repairing the world, through a process better described as reconciliation, healing, and even resurrection. Reducing these profound, painful, and invariably complex processes to a simple sudden ‘fix’ can sometimes make things worse rather than better. Real transformation is an organic sequence more resembling the gradual restoration of a river basin than the rapid construction of a dam. Ultimately, God doesn’t see our world as a problem to be fixed – but a mystery to be entered, and comprehended from the inside.