‘HOW ARE THINGS IN ZIMBABWE?’

 

‘HOW ARE THINGS IN ZIMBABWE?’

A visitor from South Africa posed this much asked question this week. How does one respond? It is so easy to say something brief and dismissive and move on to other more interesting topics. Because, really, what does one say that has not been said repeatedly these past twenty, forty or even one hundred years? The list of woes is long and hardly needs stating here but three convictions do arise.

First, there is relentless disappointment that independence brought no lasting improvement in the living standards of most people. ZANU’s manifesto in 1980 talked about the ‘interests of the people being paramount’ but looking back over the decades since what evidence is there that this was really meant? There were great strides in providing schools and clinics in the first decade but they were not maintained. Water and electricity, basic providable services people would expect to be part of their lives, simply are not there for huge swathes of the population. What resources there were were diverted to other things or persons.

Along with this, there is another conviction. Those in positions where they could have made a difference simply did not know how to. They had had no preparation in running an economy that was brimming with possibilities but also with opportunities for corruption. They simply did not know how to manage the resources, whether in terms of maintaining facilities or of developing them.

Another country, another time. Ireland, most of it, gained independence in 1922, but those who ran the country took decades to lift it out of the poverty in which they found it. In the 1950s one man, whose name will surely be unfamiliar, had the vision to propose ways to remedy the situation. We could put on his lips the saying found in a 19^th-century Italian novel, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ TK Whitaker found an Ireland passionately proud of itself but unable to give its citizens a living. ‘By 1961,’ Fintan O Toole wrote, ‘not much more than half of all those born in Ireland in the 1930s were still living on the island.’ 2% of the population were emigrating annually. Whitaker’s proposal was, as I understand it, simple: open up the country to international relations and abide by all the obligations these connections imply.

Zimbabwe, like many countries, is intent on its ‘sovereignty’ and that is understood. But, to adapt the Italian novel quoted above, if we want to preserve our sovereignty, we have to lose it. We have to be open to the message of the economic prophets, the Whitakers in our midst, and really listen to them.

This brings me to my third conviction. Nothing will change until those in power want them to. But, again, if they want things to remain as they are, they will have to change. Whitaker succeeded because those in power in Ireland had the vision to listen to him. We need a quiet revolution.

2 May 2021       Easter Sunday 5B         Acts 9:26-32   1 John 3:18-24     John 15:1-8

 

 

 

 

 

A LOSS OF ROOTS

 

A LOSS OF ROOTS

The burning of the Jagger Library on the main campus of the university of Cape Town last week may not sound like one of the catastrophes we so often hear of; disasters where lives are lost and homes demolished. Yet it is a catastrophe of another kind because the material lost is irrecoverable. Here is how it was reported:

While some priceless archives survived due to modern fire screens, much of the African Studies collection has been lost including early monographs on traditional cultures and a collection of films from across the continent which had been lovingly collected over the past 30 years by an archivist who is due to retire soon.  The building had housed 85,000 books and 3,000 films

One mourns with the archivist as one would at a funeral. It is his or her loss but it is also Africa’s loss because it removes material forever that might have illuminated aspects of the early cultures of the continent.

If we do not know where we come from it is that much more difficult to know where we are going. Intellectual property is normally seen as technical know-how or personal research. There can be piracy on the waves of the world wide web. But here we are talking of cultural property owned by the descendants of early communities. When this is lost it is like a person becoming stateless.

This type of loss is not unusual. In 2001, the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up statues of the Buddhas carved into a hillside in antiquity with great care and reverence. They said they were idols. It was an outrage against the culture of the Buddhists for whom statues played a similar role as they do for us – to remind us of a holy or famous person.

And counrties forged in the Christian mould are also guilty of such iconoclasm. Oliver Cromwell’s troops deliberately destroyed the statues of the churches in the seventeenth century in their Puritan enthusiasm.

These were not natural disasters, like the fire in Cape Town, but deliberate acts of intolerance against people who were different.

The common feature is the loss of roots and this is a tragedy that perhaps we do not pay attention to. Pope Francis writes of a ‘growing loss of the sense of history … a kind of “deconstructionism” whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero’ (Fratelli Tutti #13). Francis goes on to say ignoring history and rejecting the experiences of our elders makes us ‘shallow, uprooted and distrustful.’ He calls it a new form of ‘cultural colonisation’. We get rid of our oppressors only to become oppressors in our turn.

In this Sunday’s readings Jesus says, ‘I know my own and they know me.’ There is a bond pf love and commitment built on knowledge; knowledge of our scriptures, our traditions, our culture, Natsa kwamunobva, kwamunoenda usiku.

12 April 2021     Easter Sunday 4B    Acts 4:8-12      1 John 3:1-2    John 10:11-18

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THEY STOOD THERE DUMBFOUNDED

 

THEY STOOD THERE DUMBFOUNDED

It is said there is only one thing harder to take than bad news, and that is good news! When a mother is reunited with her son after she thought he was dead, or a wife with her husband, the news can be overwhelming. When the friends of Jesus saw him standing there in the upper room, they could not believe it; ‘they stood there dumfounded.’ Why is good news so hard to take? We long for it and yet when it comes it shocks us. We know all about suffering and pain. But happiness? Real ecstatic happiness? ‘The mind cannot visualize what God has in store for those who love him’ (1 Cor 2:9).

This is the message of the resurrection. It is everything the passion is not. We know a lot about the passion, especially our own passion which comes in different ways. But the resurrection? Do we know what it is? Have we experienced the gift of deep happiness, something we cannot arrange or buy?

And yet that is what we are made for: deep fulfilling lasting happiness. We only get glimpses and snippets of it: when our team wins or we listen to great music. C. S. Lewis in, Surprised by Joy, ‘describes his joy as so intense it could not be explained with words. He is struck with "stabs of joy" throughout his life. "Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing."’ (Wikipedia).

‘Stab’, ‘pang’ and ‘inconsolable’ are words that remind us of the passion and we quickly see the inextricable link between Passion and Resurrection. Your son, Simeon tells Mary, ‘is destined for the fall and rise of many … and a sword will pierce your own soul’ (Luke 2:34).

Today is Zimbabwe Independence Day. It is 41 years since we celebrated the event in Rufaro Stadium at midnight on 17 April 1980. And yet, within the first hour of freedom people, pushed their way out to the exits threatening the lives of others. It tarnished the first moments of independence and the tarnishing has continued ever since. More than 40 years later, most people in the country are still waiting to enter the promised land. Perhaps the very mention of 40 recalls that first journey to the land of ‘milk and honey’ because the Israelites’ problems were only beginning once they did arrive.

The bedrock of every human endeavour is the same for us as it was for Jesus: ‘He opened their minds to understand … that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise form the dead.’ They seemed to have got the point because the Acts of the Apostles is full of their own sufferings – and joys. ‘Can anything,’ Paul asks, ‘separate us from the love of Christ – can hardship or distress or persecution …?’ (Rom 8:35). Our freedom may be tarnished by the painful events of the past 40 years but we were starry eyed if we thought Independence would be a ‘bed of roses’. Our faith calls us to continue the struggle in the sure hope that little by little, as people find their voice and their courage, the blessings of being a free human being, ‘fully alive’, will be ours.

18 April 2021   Independence and Easter Sunday 3B   Acts 3:13-19    1 Jn 2:1-5      Lk 24:35-48     

‘GET THEE TO THY TYPEWRITER’

 

‘GET THEE TO THY TYPEWRITER’

I could not sleep last night and read Doris Lessing’s autobiography instead. She spent her formative years in Zimbabwe while it was still a colony and her alert mind was always seeking to understand. She puzzled out her thoughts by writing and the title of this piece come from advice to a friend of hers who droned on in conversation about politics in Britain where Doris was then living. Borrowing from Shakespeare (‘get thee to a nunnery’), she is advising him to ‘get yourself in front of a typewriter (laptop) and ask yourself what you think.’ The implication is you do not know what you really think or believe until you put it down on paper for the world to read.

The message of Easter is of ‘opening eyes’ and ‘raising minds.’ The people of Athens ‘burst out laughing’ when Paul mentioned the Resurrection (Acts 17:32) and people of every generation have followed their lead. The resurrection is just something we have learnt along the way but it makes no sense and has little impact on our lives. Even Jesus’ own closest followers couldn’t take it. Thomas said, ‘Unless I can see … I will not believe’ (John 20:25). A sensible chap. ‘Seeing is believing’ we say. Show me the evidence.

Easter comes and goes and we can miss its message. Doris wanted her friend to write so that he would clarify his own thoughts. She herself felt ‘a sort of complicated gigantic flow of movement of which I am a part, and it gives me profound satisfaction to be in it.’ She felt she was moving towards a fuller and truer understanding of her own life and the world around her and she wanted her friend to discover this too. Easter is like that. Jesus wants us to do the same: to have true understanding of the reality which God is revealing. The resurrection was the gigantic step forward in the unfolding of this revelation but each one of us is called to be ‘in it.’ So the resurrection is happening at every moment if we can ‘open our eyes’ and ‘raise our minds’.

Yet we know, there is no resurrection without the passion. That is our life. The Passion is everywhere: Burma, Yemen, the Uyghers in China, Capo Delgado in Mozambique and all the little tragedies that we know. We move deeper and look into our own lives. We find the passion there. We struggle, search for answers, take wrong turnings and, we hope, eventually find solutions.

Thomas was lucky. It was made crystal clear to him. ‘You believe because you have seen.’ But it is not always so clear and Thomas wasn’t blessed for seeing something that was obvious.  ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Easter calls us to stretch our little narrow comfortable hearts and be open to the ‘gigantic flow of movement’ of which we are part and believe that I can rise in my own life and help others rise in theirs.

11 April 2021               Easter Sunday 2 B        Acts 4:32-35    1 John 5:1-6     John 20:19-31

 

Day 47 Easter DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME

 

DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME

 

It was Sunday. Rumours began to circulate that he was alive. It seemed ‘sheer nonsense’. Just women’s talk (Luke 24:11). But slowly the realisation dawned. There were too many reports. And now here he was ‘standing in the midst of them’ (Luke 24:36). They stood there ‘dumfounded’. ‘Their joy was so great they could not believe it.’

When they calmed down. they asked what it could all mean. This is going to change everything. This meant a new perspective, a new way of seeing. He had often cured those who could not see, most memorably the man born blind. That man had been a poor beggar but he had ended up a courageous witness before the Jews.

So they were convinced. Things don’t have to be the way they are. They can be changed, transformed. Life can be different, full of meaning, full of hope. There is nothing we cannot do. The only problem was, will we remember? Will this news wear off and we will return to our old ways? We will end up just like everyone else. The pressure to do what others are doing, to follow the trend, to go with the flow, will be too great. I am not strong enough to live this new life, to follow this new way.

Jesus knew that. Just as the crowds left him in the desert so there would be many among his followers who would slip back into the crowd and do what everyone else is doing. It was a challenge to hold on to the mystery. So he left them a memorial, a way not just of remembering him like an old photo, but something that would be his living presence among them, something that would be their daily food, that would sustain them when they feel crushed by the pressures of life. It would be a force within them that would give them strength each day, strength to endure the obstacles that would always be there. And not just to endure but to triumph, to come out smiling, to know a deep joy breaking into their lives. Not just at Easter but every day of the year and every year of their lives.

So he said, ‘Do this in memory of me’, meaning that whenever we do this, he becomes present among us, giving us life, hope, joy, patience, peace – all the things we need, not just to survive but to blossom. The Eucharist holds together the force of sacrifice and victory, of death and resurrection. As we visit the site of this mystery in our annual celebration, we want to hold together in our own life the experience we have of struggle and sacrifice with the joy of breaking through to victory.

Easter          4 April 2021          Acts 10:34-43       Col 3:1-4     Jn 20:1-9

 

Day 46, Holy Saturday, 3 April Waiting

 

RETREAT IN LENT 2021

Day 46, Holy Saturday, 3 April

Waiting

‘At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden and in it there was a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried. Since it was the Jewish Day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they aid Jesus there’ (John). ‘Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Joset, took note of where he was laid’ (Mark): ‘they were sitting opposite the sepulchre’ (Matthew) and ‘they took note of the tomb and how the body hade been laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. And on the Sabbath day they rested, as the Law required’ (Luke).

They waited. On that first Holy Saturday they did not know what they were waiting for. Many today also wait, without knowing. But Paul is clear; ‘for the whole of creation is waiting with eagerness for the children of God to be revealed’ (Romans 8:19).

Easter night

‘Early in the morning while it was still dark’ (John 20:1) that revealing took place. Everything happens so quietly and so few people are involved. But those few women and men represent us – people of every generation and every place in the world. And we have come to celebrate that night. We light a fire representing the greatest human discovery. And from that fire we light a candle representing the coming of Jesus the Christ and his rising, the greatest divine event that has touched the world. We sing and we dance and we read the ancient prophesies. Genesis 1, Exodus 14, Isaiah 55, and then Romans 6:3-11 and Mark 16:1-18. We welcome new members through the rite of Baptism and we celebrate the Eucharist, the greatest act of thanks we are capable of, for the first time since Jesus entered his passion on Thursday night.

Day 45, Good Friday, 2 April What is truth?

 

RETREAT IN LENT 2021

Day 45, Good Friday, 2 April

What is truth?

The three passages we read on ‘good’ Friday speak to the heart of the matter. ‘He was rejected and despised yet he carried our sorrows, was crushed for our sins’ (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). In his musical arrangement of The Messiah, George Handel lingers over these words in moving sad repetition, particularly pausing on the words ‘rejected’, ‘despis-ed’. He matches the ‘ed’ of rejected with the ‘ed’ of despised.  We are invited to soak up this searing description of the fate of Jesus.

The letter to the Hebrews too, in 4:14-16 and 5: 7-9 tells us of his ‘weakness’ and his ‘silent tears’. We are introduced to the agony, pain and desolation of Jesus in his final hours.

These readings prepare us for John’s account of the Passion (18:1-19:42). Why do we always read John on Good Friday and not one of the others? Maybe because he gives so much room to Pilate and the judgement. Pilate makes feeble attempts to be just and do what is right. But the pressure of public opinion and of politics obstructs his vision and he gives in. ‘What is truth?’ he asks dismissively. But Jesus had said earlier in John’s gospel (8:32), ‘the truth will make you free.’ Pilate preferred the comfort of compromise and we have continued to do the same ever since. We cannot face the truth and so Jesus goes to his death again and again, all over the world.