A WIND THAT BLOWS WHERE IT WILL

A WIND THAT BLOWS WHERE IT WILL

The hut was stiflingly hot.  It had only a 3 foot high entrance and people kept crowding round it in curiosity. The year was 1880, ten years before the settlers raised their flag in what was to become Salisbury. The three Jesuits had reached Tshamatshama, King Umzila’s capital near Chipinge in SE Zimbabwe. Many favourable reports had reached them while they were still in Bulawayo describing this as a good place to start a mission. The first part of their journey went well but after they crossed the Sabi River there was no road and the people were hostile. They had to cut their way through the bush sometimes travelling at the speed of two miles a day.

Eventually they left their wagon and team of oxen and proceeded on foot. But malaria wore them down and by the time they reached Umzila’s Fr Augustus Law was very ill. Bro Joseph Hedley, also ill, stayed with him with two Matable helpers while the third, Br Frans de Sadeleer, went back to try to bring up the abandoned wagon. Br Frans later wrote, ‘two snakes, a three foot long cobra and a smaller one, lived in their cabin… they fulfilled the role played by our cats in Europe and kept at bay the mice and rats visible everywhere’. As they lay on the floor the two sick men encouraged one another with the memory of the Passion. On 15 October Fr Law said his last Mass held upright by twine tied by Br Hedley. He wrote a note for his companions in Bulawayo, ‘If I die please write a note to my Father; Hon W. T. Law. Hampton Court Palace, London’.  For the next month he lingered between life and death finally slipping away on 25 November. Hedley did not die but lived for another 53 years.

This is how the Zambezi Mission of the Jesuits began in the late nineteenth century: in misery and failure. The story at Umzila’s was repeated among the Tonga and Lozi and even in Bulawayo Lobengula would not allow them to teach, leave alone to preach. Yet ‘failure’ is an imprecise word. Ten men died of malaria or accidents and no permanent mission was founded, except for Empandeni towards the end of the decade. But the seed that dies had been sown and in the decades that followed the gospel found a welcoming ear in all parts of the country.

This Sunday the Church celebrates Pentecost in memory of the fulfilment of Jesus’ words, ‘I will be with you always till the end of time’. He is with us through his creative Spirit, ‘a wind sweeping over the waters of the deep’ (Genesis). We are invited at Pentecost to penetrate deeply to see how this Spirit works in creation. If we could see our ‘failures’ and ‘weakness’ in the light of God we might discover the ‘work’ that God is doing even though to us it may seem failure. The Athenians laughed when they heard of a crucified man rising from the dead (Acts 17:32). But in laughing it off they missed something.       

31 May 2020      Pentecost         Acts 2:1-11              1 Cor 12:3…13           John 20:19-23

OXYGEN WAS ONCE A POISONOUS GAS

OXYGEN WAS ONCE A POISONOUS GAS

A friend wrote to me this week excited by a find he had made in the leisure time granted to us by Covid 19. It was a BBC radio conversation[1] about plants and specifically about photosynthesis.  ‘Did you know’, he wrote, ‘that when life first appeared on earth (perhaps 300 billion years ago), there was no oxygen?  It was plants that learned how to make nourishment for themselves out of water, carbon and sunlight, and oxygen was a toxic waste product which killed off many other kinds of life.  Obviously only plants which also developed an immunity to this new poisonous gas, oxygen, survived; but photosynthesis worked so well that they took over practically the whole of the earth and the seas. Plants transformed the atmosphere, and so almost all the life-forms on earth.  From the point of view of the evolutionary losers, the Oxygen Event was the first and biggest climate-change disaster in the history of the world.  But from those plants developed (virtually) everything that we have now, for all of us depend, directly or indirectly on plants for food and respiration’. 

We pause for thought. Oxygen was once a ‘poisonous gas’, the result of plants struggling, and succeeding, to find food to survive. The process - we learnt in form two but perhaps did not get excited about it - was photosynthesis and it gradually transformed our atmosphere and enabled life as we know it. Phew!

There is a question we read on Ascension Day which must have jarred with Jesus even though he knew how slow witted his disciples were. After all he had said and done and all he had endured and suffered, they returned one more time to what should have been by then a worn out subject: ‘Lord, has the time come? Are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel?’ Patiently, he replies, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods … but … you will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth.’ He said that two thousand years ago and we have made a good deal of progress since. But, like photosynthesis, the transformation takes time - not 300 billion years – but lots of it all the same. Covid 19 reminds us that something toxic can transform our planet but, unlike with photosynthesis, this time round we are in control. This time we are in the driving seat about what kind of transformation we want. There are many poems and reflections swirling round the net about this. One poem begins:

The earth whispered but you did not hear.

The earth spoke but you did not listen

The earth screamed but you turned her off ...

You can imagine how it continues but it makes it clear it is in our hands – both the problem and the solution.

The Ascension is essentially a feast of the rising of humanity, a rising so that we reach the fulfilment of all that is deepest within us. 

24 May 2020      Ascension Day         Acts 1:1-11     Eph. 1:17-23               Matt 28:16-20

 

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[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0435jyv  

THE SLUM OF MY HEART

THE SLUM OF MY HEART

I made a garden for God.

No, do not misunderstand me,

it was not in some lovely estate

or even in a pretty suburb,

I made a garden for God

in the slum of my heart:

a sunless space between grimy walls

the reek of cabbage water in the air

refuse strewn on the cracked asphalt-

the ground of my garden!

These are the opening lines of a poem by Ruth Burrows written for the sisters at Mariachiedza near Chegutu in Zimbabwe. Ruth is a Carmelite nun (Sr Rachel) who lives near Norfolk in England and she has been writing for years about the mystical life, which she insists is open to everyone. Many of us have, I suspect, given little thought to the teachings about the interior life given to us by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. We have heard about them and said, ‘no, not for me!’

Ruth Burrows has studied and lived the way of these and other teachers over the years and has written short books to explain directly and simply what these mystics taught.  She believes there is a profound and life giving message accessible here to all but it is a message which goes in the opposite direction to what our culture urges on us. The few lines quoted above give a taste of this. God is to be found ‘in a pretty place’, in beautiful surroundings, in music and art and all the good things of creation. But, she says, this is not the place where most people live. Most live in ‘sunless spaces between grimy walls with the reek of cabbage water in the air’. In other words, they live in poverty and destitution and this is reflected in their hearts.  They find their heart too is a slum but it can be a slum that opens them to God. Blessed are the poor in spirit! This is not to say we should not struggle to end actual poverty in our countries. But it is to say the ‘slum, the sunless space’ in our heart can be the very place where we can welcome God and ‘make a garden for him’. Perhaps the ‘pretty places’ are there just to console us as we journey to this authentic place.   

Covid 19 has shut our churches and, as it were, driven God out of them. He is the only one who no longer ‘stays at home’, who is not ‘locked down’. Ruth is not writing about our present crisis but her message does help us to understand, not just the crisis of the moment, but the opportunity too.  The spiritual life we have had in the past is now questioned by the new reality. We can no longer sing ‘alleluia’ and go home satisfied that we are alright with God and the world. We are thoroughly shaken, uncertain of the future, unsure we will be alive a month from now, a year from now. We are suddenly aware of the superficiality we inhabit.  We want to admit the mess around us, that we have got some things terribly wrong. We have discovered clean air again, that we don’t need all the things we thought were essential; we can live more simply.  And most of all we have discovered each other.  We need each other, whether we are rich or poor.

If we could accept we live in this slum and that, as for those who live in real physical slums, it is hard to get out, perhaps we can notice God dwells in this slum and we can make him welcome.

17 May 2020   Easter Sunday 6 A      Acts 8:5…17   1 Peter 3:15-18                        John 14:15-21

‘I LIVED IN THREE PLACES’

‘I LIVED IN THREE PLACES’

Elizabeth Musodzi Ayema used to correct her children by saying, ‘It may be acceptable there, but not here. I know all this because I lived in three places: the village, Chishawasha and town’.   Other names for these three places would be African culture, Christianity and city life. Musodzi died in 1952, greatly mourned. A victim of the first Chimurenga (the rising of the Shona people against the early colonialists), she was educated at Chishawasha after which she married Frank Ayema and lived in Chizhanje (Mabvuku, Harare). In 1937 the family moved to Salisbury (Harare) and settled in the suburb of Harare (Mbare) where she used her leadership gifts to the fullest in struggling for improvements in the lives of urban women.

The late Japanese scholar, Tsuneo Yoshikuni, studied the lives of African urban dwellers in the early twentieth century and took a particular interest in Musodzi. He shows us a woman who inhabited these three worlds and was able to draw on all three in an extraordinarily fruitful way.  Deeply rooted in her own culture from growing up among Chief Hwata’s people NE of present day Harare, she did not give way to barren bitterness when her parents were killed and her aunt (Mbuya Nehanda, the spirit medium) was executed. In fact she turned her pain into compassion from others. ‘She was more Christian and more dedicated to the welfare of others than anybody’, her grandson, Leonard Chakuka told Yoshikuni in 2002. And she also quickly grasped the realities of urban life for Africans in Salisbury. She pushed hard and continuously at the restrictive and confining measures of the ‘Director of Native Administration’, sometimes getting arrested though on the whole she earned the respect of the authorities.

I suspect few people in the early part of the last century were as sensitive as Mai Musodzi to the ‘places’ they inhabited and even fewer were able to exploit this awareness to direct all their energies to the service of others. She stands as a role model for us and calls us to transcend our narrow perceptions of our ‘place’ which is our cultural setting as we perceive it, and employ the forces that lie ready at our disposal for creating a better world.

How the nations of the world today long to get back to ‘where we were before COVID-19’! Secretly and unreflectively, we hope we can return to our old ways and life will go on as before. But we know it can’t be so. We are called to new thinking, a new imagination and courage to grasp the new opportunities before us; to turn this pain that we are living into energy for a new world of caring for one another and caring for our planet.

When the threat of the virus has gone will we live the lesson we have learnt that our health depends on all of us and not just each of us for him or herself? When the noise of traffic restarts and the sky is filled with planes again will we remember the joy of clean air in our cities and the temporary halt we have made to climate warming? And will we be able to commit ourselves to live a in a new way which implants these realities in our daily life?    

10 May 2020               Easter Sunday 5A

Acts 6:1-7                   1 Peter 2:4-9                John 14:1-12

‘ENOUGH! HE TOO HAD A MOTHER’.

‘ENOUGH! HE TOO HAD A MOTHER’.

If I invite you to read this:

‘And that thy love we weighing worthily,

May likewise love thee for the same again;

And for thy sake that all like dear didst buy,

With love may one another entertain.

So let us love, dear love, like as we ought.

Love is the lesson which the Lord has taught’.

And then this:

‘He wished devoutly that the Irish language should be eradicated, writing that if children learn Irish before English, "So that the speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish; for out of the abundance of the heart, the tongue speaks". He pressed for a scorched earth policy in Ireland, noting that the destruction of crops and animals had been successful in crushing the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83)’.

And if I tell you that these two pieces are by the same person (Edmund Spencer), what will you think? You may say, ‘Hypocrite!’ The man writes beautiful poems about the love of God and then urges the destruction of the people’s livelihood and their cultural heritage.

Ah well! That was the sixteenth century.  We have moved on. Have we? Even as we ask this question we know we haven’t. Hypocrisy is alive and well and dwelling among us. It is a huge pitfall for Christians – not so much because we promote ‘scorched earth policies’ or doubt we should love others - but because we neglect to do what is actually within our power to do for others. That is why religion has a bad name. It is full of beautiful words and sentiments but is often short of engagement with the poor. An American theologian, Fleming Rutledge, talks about ‘full parking lots outside our churches’.  But no one in the church wants to hear the preacher talking about the cross.

Only this week in Zimbabwe, the stalls people built for informal trading have been destroyed. ‘They are a breeding ground for Covid 19’. That may well be so but what are we putting in their place? We are destroying their livelihood so that they do not kill us. Pope Francis recently referred to Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, ‘where the employees of a prison hospital had become so inured they treated their poor prisoners like things. And seeing how they treated a man who had just died, the one in the next bed says to them: "Enough! He too had a mother!" We need to tell ourselves this often’, Francis tells us, ‘that poor person had a mother who raised him lovingly’.

The cross is where we ache to join our words and our actions. We see the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and say we would never be like them. But then we find there is quite a bit of the Pharisee in us.  Covid 19 is telling us the health of each of us depends on the health of all of us.  We cannot say this is someone else’s problem. It is everyone’s problem – and opportunity. ‘Hearing all this they were cut to the heart.’ When the young Church began its mission, Peter was powered up to touch the raw point in the people’s self-understanding. He had an instant effect. That is a hard point to reach but maybe Covid 19 is moving us there.    

3 May 2020     Easter Sunday 4 A      Acts 2:14,36-41    1 Pet 2:20-25         John 10:1-10