Some things are viewed better upside down. An example: one of my favourite album covers (one of my favourite albums), pictured here. Two handstands on a beach when inverted appear as people touching the sky, even being pulled up there.
Inverting things is sometimes attempted by force. The Gunpowder Plot, for example. Picture Guy Fawkes and his friends, crouched beneath Parliament’s chamber: “Oh, yes!” we hear him proclaim, “how we’ll invert things to their rightful way! These Protestant usurpers cast down, our kingdom raised again to the power and glory of a Catholic king!”
Halloween has been inverted more subtly. Once a symbolic door from darkness to liberating light (All Saints Day follows – who celebrates that these days!), the marketeers have sneaked in the back door. They’ve flipped it into a money-making machine, piles of merchandise a must, whatever a parent’s pockets. The power and glory of profit.
In the world’s conflicts of power, inversion is rarely the right goal. Wherever the current tragedy in
Israel and Gaza has reached (I’m writing two weeks before November), not only peace is needed
but justice, for both communities who claim the same land. Thankfully many there actively seek
this, even if we hear rather less of that than of violence.
‘The power and the glory’. How men throughout history (and it’s usually men) have craved these.
Ambition has many clothes, including religion. Those words from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘thine be the
kingdom, the power and the glory’, have sometimes even been read as endorsing this, understanding misplaced and motives sadly mixed. The words were probably not even part of Jesus’ original teaching, but a later editorial addition.
If any words are best viewed upside down, it is these. As Jesus says elsewhere, ‘the greatest among you will be your servant’… ‘the last shall be first, and the first last’… ‘the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.’ Hallelujah for wherever the power and the glory of love are seen. There we glimpse the Kingdom of God – an upside down kingdom.
