DANCING HIGHWAYS

 

DANCING HIGHWAYS

A tangle of dancing highways greets the visitor to Gqeberha. There is no orderly clover leaf intersection but roads rising and falling in seemingly random fashion. Urban architecture can have a beauty hidden unknowingly in the designer’s plan which only emerges afterwards.  Art is always beyond even the artist who created it.

I have spent a lifetime in Zimbabwe but only four weeks in South Africa. What astonishes the visitor is the beauty of the mix. Besides the obvious difference of colour ranging from black to white with every variety in between, there is the difference of speech. Again, beside the difference of languages there is the difference between those comfortable in one of the common languages, English, and those who labour in it as something strange and foreign. And yet again there is the way people draw on rich cultural heritages on how they relate to you that defy description.

Then the visitor steps back into history; the early people of this mostly dry sub-continent, the disturbing arrival of settlers from Europe with their differences and rivalries, the wars and politics that disrupted the lives of the people and shifted them from place to lace and finally the climax towards the end of the last century when the long struggle for freedom was finally resolved and the people agreed to work together for a common future.

But the way to that future keeps dancing before our eyes like conflicting roads swirling around one another. One struggle has been resolved but another is now underway. And this one is not unique to South Africa but common across the earth. How do we make all these roads converge and build something just and good for all people?

Driving in the Eastern Cape this week, we met a man, a dog and a flock of sheep. We were astonished to see the man instruct the dog to nudge the sheep to open a way for us. The harmony between all three built on a shared knowledge and confidence, however different, touched us for a moment. There is always a Sunday after Easter when we celebrate the image in John, chapter ten, of Jesus as the shepherd. From earliest times the Church has loved this image. It is so simple - and grounded in our experience. The shepherd knows his sheep, each one; he cares for them and opens a way for them. He will do anything for them – even to losing his life. The sheep know his voice and follow him.

It is a simple image. God know us, each one of us, and offers life ‘to the full’. He calls us to take up the task because it is not just given. It calls for our response. Our journey goes up and down and may seem to go nowhere. But in the tangle, there is a purpose.

21 April 2024        Easter Sunday 4B    Ac 4:8-12    1 Jn 3:1-2    Jn 10:11-18    

ISRAEL’S SONG

 

ISRAEL’S SONG

 

Many bulls have surrounded me,

fierce bulls of Bashan close me in.

Against me they open wide their jaws,

like lions, rending and roaring.

 

Like water I am poured out,

disjoined are all my bones.

My heart has become like wax,

it is melted within my breast.

 

Parched as burnt clay is my throat,

my tongue cleaves to my jaws.

 

Psalm 22 describes Israel in her anguish and Jesus in his suffering. It is Good Friday. But reading it, thoughts may go to Gaza and how appropriate the words are on the lips of the Palestinians. Day after day we read of and see their sufferings on our screens and most recently the malnourished and starving children. Do these pictures reach Israeli screens? The reverse of fortune, where the Jews who suffered so much now inflict suffering on others, is painful, even unbearable, for a watching world. How is it possible we ask for a people who themselves faced persecution, incarceration, starvation and death, to perpetrate these same things on others, especially if those others are the very people with whom they have lived – with a degree of mutual toleration - for two thousand years?

 

The answer does not lie with the events of October 7^th last year. It began long ago but more specifically when the reasonable desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland was so badly handled by the British, the Palestinians and Israelis. Modern Israel was born of war as ancient Israel was. The language of the bible about the conquest of the promised land is vicious. But that was then. Now is now. We live in an age where slowly, painfully and even grudgingly, we are discovering that we are one human family and we have to learn to get along together. The United Nations, with all its weaknesses, is a majestic lighthouse, showing us the way. But we ignore its ideals so often and prefer to founder on the rocks of competition, hatred and distrust.

 

The vulnerable are simply crushed. The Tablet this week, reminds us of the words of Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century philosopher, who wrote that without a sovereign authority to administer a social contract - something the UN stands for today but is not yet empowered to be - life proceeds with ‘continual fear and danger of violent death; (for men, women and children it is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. The Tablet is talking about Haiti where all government has collapsed, but it could just as well apply to Palestine/Israel where no social contract has ever existed since the day the Israelis came in force in 1948.

 

Huge efforts are being made to establish a ceasefire. It is in the interests of everyone. Peace in Ireland grew out of a Good Friday accord. We pray that this Easter, some progress can be made towards a lasting peace in the land where Jesus walked and talked and became a light to the nations.

 

Good Friday, 2024

   

THE DEATH OF HOPE

 

THE DEATH OF HOPE

We simply cannot separate the paschal events from what is happening now in our world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was executed by Hitler, criticised his fellow Christians for worshipping God on Sunday and killing Jews in the camps on Monday. They separated their faith from their relationship with others. ‘It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what they are’, he wrote from prison (July 18, 1944), ‘but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.’

‘Participation in the suffering of God.’ If we ever thought of God as standing outside the world and observing what is going on from a distance, we can surely be disabused of that now. God is in the world standing alongside all who are in agony. God was not an onlooker when South Africa went through its most traumatic years. He was there in the cells of the prisoners and on the streets of townships where life could end at any moment. And eventually after decades in prison and a whole human process of struggle was complete, Nelson Mandela stepped out into Freedom one January morning in 1991.

Not so in Russia. No one took Mandela’s life away while he was in prison but Russia’s equivalent, Alexei Navalny, was not allowed to serve out his long years in prison. He was killed one day in February this year. And now Russian people are saying, it was not just Navalny who was killed. Hope was too.

The death of hope is one of the most gut-wrenching images of what hell must be like. Dante wrote over the entrance of the gates of his Inferno: ‘Abandon hope all you who enter here.’ This is the inferno which the Russian people are experiencing. It is horrible. A variation on the words could be, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Easter tells us that he hasn’t abandoned us. he is still there with us. No matter how dreadful our experience is, God is there at our side. It may not seem like it. It may not feel like it. But God is suffering when he sees his people suffering. He cannot stop the suffering. He cannot remove the tyrants of this world. That would be interfering with our freedom. We have to work it out – as the South Africans did, as the Russians will do. No one can stamp out freedom. In the 1940s the South African government tried to control the influx of Africans to the cities but there was almost a note of humour in Oriel Monongoaha’s account of the result: ‘The Government was like a man who has a cornfield which is invaded by birds. He chases the birds from one part of the field and they alight in another part … we squatters are the birds. The Government sends in its policemen to chase us away and we move off and occupy another spot.’

The same is happening in Russia. For ever Navalny who is killed, a hundred Navalnys are born. Hope cannot be killed. That is the message of Easter.  

30 March 2024     Easter night           Ex 14:15ff   Rm 6:3-11   Mk 16:1-8

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR LIVES ARE HIDDEN

 

YOUR LIVES ARE HIDDEN

Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian migrant to America, has written a book about her experience of pursuing her passion in medical science research. She had a hard time getting to America and an even harder time keeping her place in the university which accepted her. She wasn’t earning her keep, they said, she was not writing scientific papers. Eventually she turned up one day at her place of work to find all her papers and files dumped outside her laboratory and her place taken.

But there were those who knew what she was doing and her book, Breakthrough, describes her eventually joining a team which discovered the vaccine for COVID. She went from rejection to acclamation. Her hidden solitary struggle was recognised and tears came to her eyes when she was one of the first to receive the vaccine, she herself had done so much to find. Her life was hidden but then it was revealed.

She was a migrant, one of those the rich world wants to bar from entry. When the Irish migrants made their way to America 150 years ago, they were not all desperate and starving. Recent research into their bank accounts in New York by Tyler Anbinder led to him too writing a book, Plentiful Country, in which he shows many of them had money and were enterprising people who soon found their way in America and became examples of the ‘American Dream.’ Among them were the ancestors of four American presidents.

When Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem and embraced his terrible destiny, no one, not even his closest companions, had any idea what he was doing. It was hidden from them. It took them time before they could begin to grasp what he did and then their hearts ‘burned within them’. We can be blind to what is going on around us. People have their hidden lives. These will be revealed one day for even the littlest of our brothers and sisters. Despite all the evil we know too well, our faith and our cultures tell us to reverence others and recognise that, even if in a hidden way, most people do the best they can and contribute to the progress of our human family. ‘Their lives are hidden’; the words from Colossians 3:3 tell us and they conclude, ‘with Christ in God.’

What happened in what we call ‘Holy Week’ is hidden from the eyes of many today. And even those who remember it can blunt the story so that it no longer has an edge. It is the drama of the climax of Jesus’ life but it is also the light that shines in the darkness of each of us. It is our story.

24 March 2024     Palm Sunday        Is 50:4-7     Ph 2:6-11    Mk 14:1-15:47

‘IT WILL DO HIM NO GOOD’

 

‘IT WILL DO HIM NO GOOD’

Growing up in Ireland and hearing of a man who stole some cattle or made a quick pound by dubious means, I remember my father used to say, ‘It will do him no good.’ It was a definitive judgement with no blurred edges and I often think of it when I observe people doing something that is obviously against the common good.

For months now we have observed the unremitting bombing and killing in Gaza. Do the people who are responsible for the death of thousands of innocent children and helpless adults really think all this will ‘do them some good’? Do the overwhelmingly powerful perpetrators of this killing and destruction not realise – what must surely be obvious – that they are condemning themselves to living perpetually in a prison with armed guards everywhere. I was in Israel in 1972 and even then, there were signs of security everywhere. That was more than fifty years ago and I believe the situation has steadily got worse. People like to go to Israel to study Scripture but they have to take care wherever they go. What is this policy doing? Is it doing anyone any good?

It is baffling when we think these are the very people who inherited the covenants, the ancient scriptures especially the psalms:

          The Lord is kind and full of compassion,

Slow to anger, abiding in love.

How good is the Lord to all,

compassionate to all his creatures.      (Ps 145:8)

 

Compassion! Where has it gone to in our world? The inheritors of these words seem full of revenge and hate. Will it do them any good? What are they achieving?

 

As we approach Holy Week, we approach a mirror in which we see ourselves. We look into that mirror and see the bitterness, pain and suffering we, human beings, inflict on one another. We see the hardness of heart of the High Priest and the elders representing the Jewish people; the incomprehension, indifference and unwillingness to seek understanding of Pilate representing the gentiles. Jesus can make no headway with any of these people. All they can say is, ‘Away with him! Crucify him!’ And Pilate washes his hands, turning away from the choice he could have made to bring justice. So Jesus goes on his way, carrying his cross. His ultimate and definitive offering of himself mysteriously breaks open a way to a new world. His death is not the end. It is more like a beginning. But a beginning we have to welcome with head and heart.

 

17 March 2024            Lent Sunday 5B          Jer 31:31-4        Heb 5:7-9      John 12:20-23

  

AND NOW THE GOOD NEWS

 

AND NOW THE GOOD NEWS

‘Bad news is good news, good news is no news, and no news is bad news.’ I do not know who said this but it pops up on Google. I suppose it is a reflection on what ‘sells’ on the media. Bad news sells. Good news doesn’t. Maybe we can take a leaf from Google and apply it to Lent. The emphasis is on the coming struggle in Holy Week. Jesus is in the heart of it to his death. Bad news.

We can also see the struggle in Zimbabwe where bad news is our daily fare. Or we can focus on Gaza where a whole people are being slowly killed by man-made starvation. Or we can again recall the killing of Navalny in Russia where again a whole people’s hopes were dashed by a single act.

It is half-time in Lent and we stop for a moment to draw breath and reflect on the first half. It was dominated by the failures of people, ancient and modern, to live up to their calling though an under current of hope was never absent. Now we have a chance to look at our progress and the Church suggests to us that we look at the good news.

The first word of the Mass today is ‘Rejoice!’ What is there to rejoice about? The first reading tells us ‘our ancestors ridiculed God’s messengers, despised his words, laughed at his prophets.’ But it ends on a high note: a pagan king is roused to restore the temple in Jerusalem. The second reading tells us we are ‘God’s work of art’ and in another place God is likened to a potter who keeps deleting his work when it doesn’t satisfy him. What does satisfy him is ‘the one who lives by the truth and comes into the light.’

I know a man who used to carry a copy of the psalms in his pocket as people now carry their cell phone everywhere. He grasped the message of the psalms with their different moods, often gloomy to mirror our own, but often full of tender love:

          Truly I have set my soul

In silence and peace.

As a child has rest in its mother’s arms

even so my soul.  (Ps 131)

 

We cannot visualise the future of Zimbabwe or Gaza or Russia. But we can be sure that the time is coming when he can ‘rebuild our temple’ and, in our case, it will at last have the marks missing from the 1980 version. So it will be with Gaza and Russia. There is nothing more powerful than human beings once they set their mind to something. It may take time but it will happen. Lent assures us.

 

10 March 2024    Lent Sunday 4B                   2 Chr 36:14…23                 Eph 2:4-10                            Jn 3:14-21

 

 

CLEANING THE TEMPLE

 

CLEANING THE TEMPLE

After the comforting scene of multiplying the wine at the marriage celebration at Cana we suddenly have the violent spectacle of Jesus chasing the traders from the temple. ‘Zeal for your house devours me’, as the psalmist put it. Jesus is provoking the people to realise ‘there is something new here’ as Mark had written in his first chapter. Religion had been tamed, degraded, into something ‘we can live with’, something we can bend to our purposes. The sting of its demands had been drawn, made harmless.

The people are shocked and the leaders outraged. ‘By what authority have you done this?’ Jesus isn’t going to get into an argument with them. He raises the level of the confrontation by referring to the new temple. ‘Destroy this one and I will raise another in three days.’ They don’t understand and neither do the disciples. They had to wait until Jesus rose from the dead.

It’s a dramatic moment, thrown at us in the midst of Lent. It expresses the extreme nature of the call to women and men to realise what they can be. There is a story on You Tube by the Russian writer, Tolstoy, about a poor cobbler who had one son left after his wife and all his children had died. He is in despair and sick with loneliness when this child too dies and he blames God for his misery. One day a man comes and the two talk and the cobbler shares his troubles. His visitor listens for a while and then invites him to believe God has a purpose for him.

The cobbler is touched and asks how he can discover that purpose. Ponder the book, says the visitor. The cobbler understands him to mean the New Testament and he starts to read – and ponder. Gradually he is touched by what he reads and he begins to look through the window of his little shop and notices the people outside. He sees an old man shivering from the cold and invites him in to sit by his stove and he gives him tea. He sees an old woman and her child with few clothes to keep out the cold and finds an old coat for her. He sees a child steal an apple and the fury of the vendor who wants the child chastised. He makes peace between them. The old cobbler ends his days a happy man.

Lent is that time when we invite Jesus into our shop. We ponder his coming to us, born as one of us, cold, hungry and lonely as we can be. We see how open he was to the poor and how he transformed their lives. He did not promise them riches or power or status. But he promised them deep joy and peace in their hearts, ‘a peace the world cannot give.’       

3 March 2023       Lent Sunday 3B    Ex 20:1-17  1 Cor 1:22-25     Jn 2:13-25