ii.Completion: tyranny or promise?

Jesus said…’It is finished’ (John 19: 30)

Universities are places that encourage the notion that we live our lives along a path of linear progression. Undergraduate students move from level 4, through level 5, to level 6. At the end of the process there are ‘finals’ to suggest one has reached the summit of completion. The hierarchically configured career structures for staff afford a parallel sense of development. From Lecturer to Professor, from Cleaner to Buildings Facility Manager titles of posts generate a notion of life as forward advance, all backed by a meticulously delineated 51 point pay scale. Universities as a whole are not immune from the notion of linear progression. ‘Student Satisfaction’ results should also trace an upward curve so that together with research results that improve audit by audit, the university can trace its progress (or not) in the league tables conveniently provided by national newspapers. Wherever one looks, demonstrable progress is what is required.

A notion of linear progress is not necessarily false. A level 6 student ordinarily does possess a more penetrating grasp of their subject than one at level 4. But its veracity, I will argue, is limited to particular dimensions of life and even then requires careful qualification. To take linear progression as a model of human life as a whole is both misleading and dangerous. It is misleading because life is not, in fact, a series of successfully completed tasks built one upon another. And it is dangerous because it leads to unrealisable expectations of what is possible. Worse, it falsely implies that there is an agreed, shared measure by which the value of a life can be judged.

Progress seems to require completion. In the model of education which leads from one level to the next, each level is meant to build upon the successful completion of the previous one. Yet does not actual experience suggests that the notion of completion employed is in fact something of a necessary fiction? And is this necessary fiction not often extended into other areas of university life, indeed into life in general?

How frequently does one ear the complaint that ‘there is never enough time to do anything properly’? Students do not have time to produce the essay they would wish. Research must be limited to what will fit a six year repeating cycle of assessment. New administrative tasks are initiated before previous ones are completed.

Chaplains too share this frustration. When has a chaplain finished helping someone grow into the Christian faith, or another to face difficult personal circumstances? When is the preparation for a sermon or for a lecture fully accomplished? When will an evening arrive that brings with it the sense that all that might have been done has been done? According to these experiences, then, life is less about the serial completion of one task that builds upon another and more about the continual beginning of tasks which seem destined never to be properly finished.

To be sure, some tasks do appear capable of completion. And in recent years I have grown fonder of these. Washing the car brings the reward of admiring the finished product. So too does mowing the lawn. But, of course, these tasks are never finished in the sense that once done they do not need to be performed again. Some activities are more obviously never complete. The quest for knowledge is self-perpetuating: new insight brings new questions.   Personal relationships, if they are genuinely open to the mystery of the other, are an endless journey of discovery. We thus appear to be faced with either talks that are capable of completion yet belong to a never-to-be- completed series, or tasks which are inherently never finished.

Not even death can be said to constitute the completion of life. It is more like its arbitrary end. A person’s life comprises an array of projects in varying states of incompletion. I doubt that any life could accurately be characterised by a single trajectory of purpose brought to a cumulative climax of consummation.

A fundamental reason for our difficulty lies in our experience of the transience of time. Time flows in one irreversible direction: future possibility becomes realised as present actuality before it is fixed and frozen as unalterable past. The very flow of time that seduces us into thinking in terms of linear progress, by supplying, as it were, the ‘X axis’ of an imagined graph of improvement, is precisely that which prevents our return to a previous time to complete what was left undone. More, it is as if in ‘moving’ through time, we do not take all of ourselves with us. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the experience of bereavement when that part of us that lived in dynamic relationship with the one who has died also dies with them. Thus, as the fluidity of the present freezes and sets hard, part of ourselves becomes trapped in the past also.

Into this life where nothing can be properly finished come Jesus’ impossible words from the cross: ‘It is finished’. In a world like ours how can they be understood? One possibility would be to fit them into our experience of progression, to compare them to the same words uttered in relief by a final year student on leaving their last exam. But this would be to domesticate and tame them. And, in the light of our foregoing reflections, would mean rendering Jesus’ work no more complete than our own. Instead I think we are meant to take their audacious claim to perfect completion seriously and, rather than attempting to fir them into our experience, do the precise opposite: come to understand our experience in the perspective they create.

Jesus’ words ‘It is finished’ are words of promise that disclose a consummation we seek but cannot of our own ability attain. They are words of salvation spoken in the key of eternity, not of time, words that assume the transcendent possibilities of God rather than the immanent possibilities of the world. It is their very incongruence with our experience that demonstrates that here Jesus’ speaks of a different order of things. Completion then, in its full sense, is what might be hoped for as the gift of God’s kingdom. Measured against this expectation, our present experience of life must be rightly characterised as unfinished and provisional. What might this mean for university life?

The promise of true completion which the Kingdom extends makes it possible, I suggest, to live more hopefully with our current experience of the fragmentation of life. Life, we can accept, is not one smooth upward flowing line on a graph of progress. Life is more like a number of dotted and broken lines moving in a variety of directions on a whole series of different graphs. Understanding and accepting the provisional nature of our experience affords a sense of realism about the possible. Seeing ourselves as living between beginning and completion makes sense of our experience. Within this perspective those dimensions of life in which genuine progress can be seen, and where some form of completion is possible, are freed from becoming tyrannous indicators of the way all things should be. Instead they can become tokens of our promised future of consummation in God. In this way graduation ceremonies and promotion parties can be experienced as signs that point in anticipation towards God’s kingdom of consummation, not as finger-wagging judgements on life’s unfinished tasks.

Understanding that completion ultimately belongs to God thus frees us from perfection’s imprisoning claim. Nothing that we seek to achieve in this present life can be accomplished in such a way that it is not open to further improvement and refinement. So there must properly come a time when it is necessary accept what can be done and to let go what remains unfinished. Such letting go need not be dominated by a sense of reluctant resignation; it can also be a gesture of hope. For God’s gift of salvation concerns, in part, God’s own gathering up of our unfinished fragments to fashion them into a creative whole.

There are, however, some areas of life which are not susceptible to being categorised within the notion of progress. One of the most significant of these is play, or put more theologically ‘Sabbath’. The very purposelessness of play sets it free from the demand for completion. Rather play is more like direct entry into a state of completion. For where there is no goal, where there is just pleasure in being, completion becomes a present gift. Within this life, of course, play cannot become a permanent state. In this sense, then, it too still requires consummation. But it is, I suggest, a genuine fragment of the greater whole for which we await in God. It thus has sacramental importance. In a University where so much emphasis is placed on measurable progress, chaplaincy as a site of play has considerable value. Circular walks, eating ice cream, good conversation, games, humour: these elements of play, far from being merely the trivial accompaniment to university life should, as a foretaste of God’s future, be allowed to call other scales of value into question. Similarly chaplaincy needs to be a supporter of tea breaks and common rooms, Wednesday afternoon sports and other forms of shared recreational time. Chaplains should also be champions of vacations: not as the taking of rest to improve efficiency, but for the intrinsic value of their different quality of time.

In a world where it seems impossible to fully finish anything, Jesus cries out: ‘It is finished!’ In a world where completion eludes us, God speaks his word of consummation. In a university where the demand for successful completion is seemingly inescapable, our role as chaplains is to enable people to hear not the tyranny of unattainable demand but the promise of God’s gift of consummation. Completion as tyranny occurs when the provisional is called to bear the weight of the absolute. The promise of completion is heard when God as absolute is revealed as bearing the weight of the provisional.