This month I have found myself thinking a great deal about complaints and criticism. There have been an increasing number of both formal and informal complaints and grumbles from different people. Some have been entirely justified and predictable, but others have come out of nowhere and have revealed more about cultural, collective or, at times, personal anxieties than about the stated content of the criticism. Some have been resolved quickly whilst others have lingered, rather painfully.
With each new comment or criticism, however well-meaning they are presented, I have found myself becoming increasingly uneasy and weary. It seems that complaint has become the posture of our culture as social media is programmed around monetising it, populism, defined by it and social commentary, increasingly, rewarded for it. Read the comments beneath almost any news article, let alone the news articles themselves, and it is there. Sit in enough meetings, whether in churches, charities or businesses, and before long the conversation drifts towards identifying what has gone wrong, who has failed, what should have happened and why someone ought to have done something differently.
None of this, of course, is entirely new; human beings have always complained. The Psalms are full of lament. Israel argued with God. The prophets denounced injustice. Jesus himself overturned tables and wept over Jerusalem. The Christian tradition has never confused silence with holiness: nor should it! We should complain about abuse and the lack of protection of the vulnerable. We should call institutions to account. These are not only legitimate; they are indispensable. A society without criticism is rarely healthy.
What has unsettled me, however, is something rather different.
Complaint now seems to possess an extraordinary cultural gravity. It gathers attention with remarkable ease, shaping our conversations, consuming organisational energy and, even, defining how whole communities understand themselves. A single grievance can eclipse hundreds of quiet acts of generosity without anyone consciously choosing for that to happen. That, I think, is the thing that has stayed with me.
While hours have been spent reading carefully worded emails, reviewing procedures and trying to understand difficult situations, countless other things have simply continued: children have rehearsed music, volunteers have arranged flowers, someone has quietly unlocked the building each morning and offered to make coffee for colleagues.
None of these things have announced themselves, demanded attention or became the subject of long conversations. So, I have found myself wondering whether our culture has become remarkably good at noticing what has/is broken and surprisingly poor at noticing what quietly continues to work. In addition, and probably more significantly, I have asked myself why this is?
Evolutionary psychologists have long argued that negative experiences command our attention far more powerfully than positive ones. Bad news or critique keeps us up at night far more than praise and gratitude. Do we, therefore, recognise that to give such negative comments to others we will have a greater impact upon them? Add to this the declining trust in institutions, increased social fragmentation and the widespread sense that we may no longer possess any meaningful influence over the decisions that shape their lives; complaint becomes one of the few ways in which people can exercise agency.
Daniel Taub, in his recent book Beyond Dispute, offers a rather more hopeful observation. Drawing upon the Jewish tradition of argument, he reminds us that disagreement need not be destructive but as a sign of strength. Properly held, argument enlarges understanding if we enter into it assuming that neither side possesses the whole truth. The book gave me some hope, yet, reading it alongside the increasing number of complaints I was managing, left me still asking why it so often feel so corrosive? Perhaps the problem is not that we have forgotten how to disagree but what kind of common life makes disagreement fruitful in the first place.
As well as Taub’s book, I have also been (slowly) working my way through the Confessions and in a passage about the creation story of Genesis, he reflects on the nature of darkness. He sees darkness, not as something but as a non-thing. We think of darkness and, indeed things conceptually associated with it, as though they have a presence, weight and/or power. We fear them. We imagine them ‘advancing’ or ‘rising’ but darkness, Augustine insists, possesses no existence of its own; it’s simply the absence of light. The same is true, as I say, of, let’s say ‘evil’.
Evil is not another substance competing with goodness, as though the universe were locked in an eternal struggle between two equal powers. Evil has no independent existence. It is a privation, a lack, a corruption or a diminishing of what ought to be there.
With that in mind, we could ask whether complaint or the spirit of cynicism, resentment and certain forms of populism get their apparent strength not because they are growing stronger but because something else is quietly growing weaker? If we think of it in this way our response to them changes: instead of asking, “why are people so negative?” we could begin by asking, “what has been lacking to create this experience of grievance?”
Let’s be honest: it’s easy to identify what is wrong with our public life. There’s no shortage of commentators willing to do that and, depending upon your political instincts, you can blame globalisation, neoliberalism, identity politics, social media, declining religious participation, consumer capitalism or institutional failure. Each diagnosis might capture and express something important but this insight from Augustine invites us into a stranger possibility: to respond to an absence rather than an opposing force requires not to argue it into submission but to proactively replace or create something to fill it.
So, if complaint has become the dominant languages of our age, and many of them feel like legitimate grievances, then can we talk of it as an absence? I wonder if I’ve been asking the wrong question. Rather than seeing complaint itself as an absence, perhaps it is our attempt to name it. The difficulty is that we are much better at recognising that something is wrong than discerning what that actually is. If that is true, then perhaps the first task is not to answer every complaint but to learn to diagnose it more carefully.
To put it another way, complaints often eloquently express absence and they tell us that something has been lost but what they rarely do (and this is just as true of my own complaints as anyone else’s) is identify accurately what that loss actually is. The presenting grievance is often real; the diagnosis is often incomplete. For example, someone complains about a decision; what has really become absent is trust. I guess I’m trying to say that the presenting issue is rarely the whole story.
Good doctors know that symptoms are useful only to point beyond themselves. Treating the symptom while missing the underlying condition/s brings temporary relief but rarely full healing. This is also true of our common life. Our problem is we have become increasingly good at responding to the presenting grievance whilst becoming less confident in asking what deeper absence that grievance might be revealing.
This is not to dismiss complaints (quite the opposite). As Taub argues persuasively, disagreement can become one way a community discovers the truth. I suspect Augustine would quietly add that disagreement also becomes the way a community discerns what it has lost. Note that argument through this lens is not working out who is right and who is wrong but discerning, together, what we have lost.
This train of thought feels strangely unfamiliar in our current culture. We’re more accustomed to asking who should take responsibility, who should apologise and, unfortunately, who should pay the price. Those might be important questions at times and, certainly, there are times when justice demands clear answers but they are not always the deepest questions that would lead to a fuller healing.
In fact, repeated misdiagnosis can even deepen illness. Every unsuccessful treatment reinforces the feeling that nothing works and I wonder whether that is what is happening culturally. We seek to respond to the complaint that has been voiced, only to discover another complaint quickly takes its place. This experience leads us to think that some people are impossible to satisfy when in reality we have relieved their stated symptom but left the deeper absence untouched.
What I’m trying to say is that when facing the experience of disappointment, anger, frustration, etc. that leads to complaint and grievance, a deeper, more wholesome question might be: what has quietly diminished between us that has made this disagreement possible? That seems to me a much more uncomfortable question because it refuses easy villains as well as refusing easy heroes.
This all leads me to another thought: the Eucharist.
I have, perhaps, celebrated the Eucharist thousands of times. I have preached about it, prepared others for it and stood alongside people receiving bread and wine in moments of extraordinary joy and profound grief. This month, as I pondered this issue around ‘complaint’, I have found myself wondering whether I have become so familiar with the liturgical shape of the Eucharist that I’ve stopped noticing how quietly radical it is.
The word ‘Eucharist’ simply means thanksgiving. At its heart, therefore, is the act of receiving; not achieving or giving. Receiving. Bread is brought and wine is poured but neither of these, however, should be viewed as a possession. We talk about them both, first, as gifts: they are offered, blessed, broken and then shared, in order that they might be received once more. It is such a familiar rhythm that it is easy to miss what it is teaching us.
The Eucharist is not simply an occasion for giving thanks either. It should be a school where we learn how to inhabit a different reality: that life itself begins as gift. Only then does the opening chapter of Romans where St Paul describes humanity’s gradual turning away from God, strikingly, show us where that story begins. We notice, through this Eucharistic lens, that it doesn’t begin with spectacular wickedness but with,
…they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.
Romans 1:21
Notice where Paul begins. Humanity does not first become violent, idolatrous or corrupt. It first ceases to give thanks and that lack of gratitude is not presented as merely poor manners but as a failure to perceive reality truthfully. That’s an astonishing theological claim and, perhaps, something similar is happening when complaint becomes our dominant posture. We begin with a real experience of absence and we might recognise that something is wrong but, because we no longer instinctively receive our common life as gift, we then struggle to recognise what has actually been lost. We name the symptom but miss the deeper good.
I’m hesitating, however, to merely offer gratitude as the solution. Gratitude, detached from the Eucharist, can become little more than spiritual optimism. What I mean is that there’s a version of gratitude that simply asks people to count their blessings and stop complaining. That’s too sentimental and, in situations of genuine injustice, deeply offensive. The Psalms would have no patience with it and nor would Jesus! The thanksgiving of the Eucharist is something altogether different.
It does not deny suffering nor pretend our wounds are not real or as painful. Instead, it insists that even in the midst of suffering, reality itself remains fundamentally gift before it becomes problem. That is a profoundly different way of inhabiting the world and, I suggest, is one of the Church’s most neglected callings.
I am not proposing we silence complaint or, even, to strive to resolve every disagreement, but to become communities capable of discerning what good has become absent before rushing to argue about who is to blame.
That is slower work and requires patience, deeper friendship and (here I return heavily to a common theme for me) institutions willing to ask questions that cannot be answered by a robust complaints’ procedure alone. Most of all, it requires communities who keep rehearsing, week by week, another way of seeing the world.
Every time bread is taken, blessed, broken and shared, Christians practise receiving before possessing, thanking before demanding and offering before withholding. We rehearse a pattern of life that is becoming increasingly difficult to recognise elsewhere.
So if Augustine is right, the darkness of the shadows should never become our primary concern. Sure, they matter, but only because they tell us something about the light that we might be losing sight of. In much the same way, then, our current age of complaint should asking us to look again, not first at the grievances themselves, but at the common goods whose absence they are revealing.
The challenge for the Church is to shape ourselves to be people not who are better at winning arguments but better at helping our communities to recognise, receive and restore the gifts without which no common life can endure.