2022: a year of symbolic loss and fatalism

And how the local church can offer symbolic repair to our culture in 2023, writes Shaun Lambert

2022 was a year of symbolic loss and fatalism. As I’ve been walking in the cold to find a warm place to work my mind returned to earlier in the summer of 2022. After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I went on a pilgrimage walk along the Thames Path from Henley-on Thames to Windsor via Marlow. My sister had gone to school in Henley, and we had lived in Pangbourne (also on the Thames) for a while. I had worked in Marlow for a high street bank, and my wife and I spent our wedding night in Windsor and Eton overlooking the river.

My focus of attention was symbolic loss. It is an idea that helped me during the pandemic, lockdown, and other changes. Peter Homans pioneered a theory of symbolic loss based on an insight by Freud that although losing a person triggers grief and mourning, there are other powerful losses.

For example, after the first World War Homans argues that ‘a time of disillusionment and disenchantment with the Christianity of the past set in. This was an extended period of symbolic loss.’[1] This is symbolic loss as referring to ‘the loss of an attachment to a political ideology or religious creed.’[2]

The symbolism of the Christian faith to do with mourning was briefly recovered around the Queen’s death and funeral but has as quickly receded. We may never see that ritual again as so much of it depended on the personal faith of the Queen as monarch. The death of the Queen was a symbolic loss for the nation as well as a real one; she symbolised stability, continuity, and a bridge between the different nations of the Union.

Symbolic loss can lead to disenchantment and disillusionment. Watkins and Shulman, writing from the perspective of liberation psychology, add that ‘One of the profound problems of the current era is that many people do not have any viable visions of what could be different in their lives or communities.’[3] This is they say, ‘a psychological problem sometimes referred to as fatalism, anomie, or symbolic loss.’[4]

One of the realisations for me during the pandemic and lockdown was a sense of the loss of agency, that events like the pandemic and lockdown were too big for me to solve on my own. My sense was that the local church was ill-equipped to navigate the same events. It is a question worth asking for all of us, how have we suffered symbolic loss over the last few years? Especially as symbolic loss can explain why we might have a sense of fatalism, of being stuck, of having no agency.

There are other examples of symbolic loss. Not being a parent and wishing to be a parent can be experienced as a symbolic loss and a real loss. Spending your first year at university stuck in your room because of the Covid pandemic and lockdown, and unable to socialise or attend lectures face-to-face is a symbolic loss as well as a real loss – a loss of autonomy. Leaving pastoral ministry is a symbolic loss as well as a personal one.

As I travelled to King’s Cross last summer to get the train to Henley and begin my walk I was struck by the fatalistic expressions on people’s faces. We seem to have become fatalistic about the lack of truth in public discourse, the deliberate lying amongst politicians, the polarisation caused by Brexit. We seem even to have become fatalistic about the pandemic. Fatalism about the political and economic crisis seems to have affected many. The hate wars on Twitter are an exception to this fatalism but show an inability to imagine better futures or imaginative ways of responding to the difficulties we face.

Ignacio Martin-Baro, martyred Jesuit priest and psychologist who was the founder of liberation psychology, reflected on the war in his native El Salvador in the 1980s. He said that war is characterised by violence, social polarisation, and ‘the lie.’[5] It seems over the last 12 years in politics we have been fighting a proxy war in the UK. There is violence in the public discourse, social polarisation because of Brexit and the pandemic, as well as the North-South divide. There is a lack of moral compass amongst our leaders, and lying seems to be normal and something you can get away within public discourse. As Baro argued in his own context, ‘Almost without realising it, we have become accustomed to institutions becoming exactly the opposite of what they are meant to be.’[6]

We have become oppressed without even realising it. In an application of liberation psychology closer to home, we read, ‘strategies of oppression rely on obfuscation and the shrinking of reflective space so that our otherwise critical awareness is less available to our day-to-day consciousness…’[7]

The media whether social or other do not offer the reflective space we need to become aware of what is being done to us. Yet local churches could offer that reflective space.

Very often in the local church though we preach our own certainties and shut down reflective space. The pandemic and lockdown stopped the best form of reflective space, which is face-to-face. It empowered indirect conflict and the avoidance of dialogue. It took away our agency and we still haven’t reclaimed it. The government seems to be looking for legal ways to restrict our agency in protest. This can lead to more fatalism.

2023 could be a year of symbolic gain and resistance. The local church as a form of community can offer symbolic repair to our culture. This includes speaking out on issues of justice, poverty, and freedom. Liberation is what the gospel embodies.

But first, we need to name the problem.[8] It is as we work together that we can regain, or symbolically repair our sense of agency.

Part of naming the problem is recognising that we might be grieving the symbolic loss. We turn and face the reality of the symbolic loss rather than avoiding it. It is only then we can imagine new futures. It may be that as we start to imagine we begin with fragments. But the birds in spring show us how to build something fragile but whole out of fragments in the making of their nests.

It is in doing the small ordinary human things that we begin to reknit our agency and undermine fatalism. In a world where so many are dehumanised, the offering of recognition and respect to others as persons is a very powerful step. Part of that ordinary human behaviour is telling the truth and seeking to find the truth, without being emotionally manipulated by the rhetoric around us. It is not just noticing the lie; it is cultivating critical awareness and reflective space in our lives. It is also not being diverted by the rhetoric of distraction – that stops us seeing what is important.

The New Year is an opportunity to turn a page, to start a new chapter, to make different resolutions. I will notice symbolic loss, resist fatalism and do the ordinary human things well.


Image | Jessica Knowlden | Unsplash
 

Shaun Lambert is a Baptist minister, psychotherapist and mindfulness researcher and recently completed a doctorate at London School of Theology. He is Honorary Mindfulness Chaplain at Scargill House.

[1] Peter Homans, “Introduction,” in Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning & Memory at Century’s End, ed. Peter Homans (Charlottesville, London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 21.
[2] Homans, 20.
[3] Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2.
[4] Watkins, 2.
[5] Ignacio Martin-Baro, Writings for a Liberation Psychology eds. Adrianne Aron & Shaun Corne (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 112.
[6][6] Baro, 113.
[7] Taiwo Afuape & Shanea Kerry Oldham, “Beyond ‘Solidarity’ with Black Lives Matter: Drawing on liberation psychology and transformative justice to address institutional and community violence in young Black lives,” Journal of Family Therapy 44, no. 1 (2022), 25.
[8] Afuape, 25.
 

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