AND NOW IT IS HERE

AND NOW IT IS HERE

There is that moment when a crisis moves from ‘them’ to ‘us’. I sense it is happening this week in Zimbabwe. For weeks we have seen the reports about China (far way), Europe (a little nearer) and now South Africa and Zambia (next door).  Now it is here. We are waking up to what we have known for so long. What happens ‘there’ is bound sooner or later to happen ‘here’. Those far places have been taking ‘unprecedented’ – how much that word is being used – steps to contain and treat the virus. And they are able to do so because their economies can stretch to ‘unprecedented’ measures that will strain their resources for a while but, as they say, ‘we will bounce back’ and they will.

But now it is here. And we have none of those resources. In the emergency they have built hospitals in a week, provided face masks, ventilators and all the equipment – and they have been stretched to the limit to do so. They have been told to work from home, shop on line, avoid bars, clubs, concerts, football games, – even walks in the park unless they keep a good distance from others. They are organising their communities to deliver food to the housebound and the ‘locked downs’.

These instructions grate on us. The concept of ‘working from home’ or ‘shopping on line’ can only apply to a small fraction of our people. The vast majority have to congregate to survive. They have to go to work on crowded commuters, work and live in close proximity to others. Water, soap and paper disposable towels are a challenge to find. Face masks and all the other equipment are not widely available.

If we cannot contain this virus it will cut a swathe of death through our people and heaven knows where it will end. In China the government can make a decision and it is obeyed immediately throughout society.  In Europe the governments can make the same decision but people have to be persuaded to obey. Forcing them is always a last resort. What will happen here?

As so often in a crisis, people ask where God is in this. Well, God did not send this to teach us a lesson. He does not work that way. We brought it on ourselves by our own choice in a way we do not yet understand.  But God is with us in this as in every crisis. He always accompanies us, at times in compassion and at other times in delight. He is certainly with us now in compassion, suffering with us.  And he is working in this, in ways we do not understand, to bring new life out of this catastrophe. 

Today it happens that the readings open with the words; ‘Now I create… a new earth’ (Isaiah 65:17).  What are we to make of such words in the midst of the corona virus? Our response is twofold; first we are to believe that God really means what he says even if we see no signs at the moment; and second we have to do everything we can to push back against the virus in every imaginative way we can.  It is an invitation to reach out to others in ways that perhaps we have not done hitherto.     

     

A SILVER LINING

Cyclones, tsunamis, floods, droughts, fires and plagues! They have always been there but now, with worldwide communications, we know immediately what is happening where.  Mostly we can say, ‘it affects them’ and we contribute our resources and our prayers. But with this latest plague – the corona virus – it affects us, wherever we are. It cannot be contained locally despite the best efforts of the most advanced nations in Asia, Europe and North America.   In fact these are the continents most affected. They are the places most traveled to and from.

Globalisation has brought many benefits but we are realising that it has also brought many costs. America gets much attention in the media and it is noticeable that this virus has really knocked them off course.  Their president has his eyes on his ‘approval ratings’ but he also has his eyes on the stock markets. This virus is making them plunge.  This is awkward for him and distracting from his re-election bid. It is exposing the vulnerability of a country that preens itself on being ‘great’. They cannot even provide health care for their citizens or sick pay.

So Corona – the word means ‘crown’ – is a shock to the system of the most powerful nation.  In the long run it might help them become a more caring society.  Politicians, nearly everywhere, are urging people to ‘think of others’. Don’t visit your old folk in homes.  You may carry the virus unknowingly. Wash your hands lest, in greeting others or doing anything for others, you may transmit the virus. Don’t, as we do, put your hand to your mouth or nose when you sneeze or cough.  Your hand may become a carrier. And we are told many such ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ so as to show our care for others.

I do not think I have heard politicians speak so emphatically about ‘caring for others’ before this plague, or pandemic, hit us.  This is something we would like to see become contagious! Every culture must have its equivalent to the English proverb, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’. It conveys the fact that women and men in every age have proved their worth by struggling against obstacles in their path.

The Corona virus is, to my thinking, the first truly global challenge in history – even more intrusive to our lives than climate change.  Suddenly the daily bulletins coming out of an office in Geneva, Switzerland, which most of us have never heard of, is top of the news every day. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia, Secretary General of the World Health Organisation, is the most listened to person on the planet. This has to be a ‘silver lining’.

15 March 2020                      Lent Sunday 3 A

Exodus 17:3-7                        Romans 5:1…8                      John 4:5-42

COME AND DIE

COME AND DIE

‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship). Bonhoeffer was one of those who realised the rise of  Adolf Hitler meant Germany was entering a time when law, culture, tradition, religion – every area of life – would be subject to an all-embracing power, pursued for its own sake.  The Nazis followed no rules, were guided by no moral code, were restrained by no beliefs – beyond their own lust to dominate and create a reich, a kingdom, which glorified their own twisted satisfaction.

To a greater or lesser degree that has been the way of malign dictatorships from the beginning. To stand up before such a power and protest, as Bonhoeffer and others in Germany at the time did, took and – even today – takes the kind of moral courage that I, and many of us, do not have. If the season of Lent is to have any bite with us we can at least lament its absence in a world that needs people like Bonhoeffer.

He did eventually pay the ultimate price when he was hanged as the war was ending but it was the climax of a long period of preparation. Bonhoeffer prayed and reflected and wrote over many years.  The words quoted at the beginning of this piece were not those of a man trotting out platitudes he had just thought up. He knew the words could well apply to him. He struggled with what his Christian faith might mean when faced with a political regime that is only motivated by its own power and preservation.

If we ‘are doing something for Lent’ at the moment it could well include some prayer and reflection on the theme of moral courage.  When we look at examples of it – Martin Luther King or the Dr Li Wenliang who, despite opposition, alerted China about the corona virus – we know these men did not get up in the morning and say, ‘I will make a stand today’. They were able to do what they did because they had prepared themselves by the choices they had made over many years.   

Still, the words of Bonhoeffer stop us in our tracks.  We read that Jesus said, ‘Come, follow me’ but the extra bit, ‘and die’, we do not include even though Jesus implied it when he talked of ‘losing your life’. Still, we hesitate.  Surely he meant, ‘Come follow me and you will be happy’.  Yes we will be happy, but first we must die. Not in the death that is inevitable when we part this life but in the death we are called to each day.  If we are faithful to these ‘little’ deaths we will be ready when the big one comes – the one where I find I have the moral courage to protest.

I often hear people say, ‘can’t the Church do something about our situation?’ The short answer is the Church will never do anything unless the members of the Church – you and I – want it to.  This ‘wanting’ is not just a woolly wish but the hard determined ‘wanting’ of which the people who have their eyes fixed on the benefits of this world give us such a focused example. This Sunday we have that ‘high’ moment in the life of Jesus when he allows his friends to have a glimpse of him in glory on the mountain. When they get carried away by the experience he tells them to ‘tell no one until the Son of Man has risen for the dead.’  Death is the way to life here on earth.

8 March 2020              Lent Sunday 2 A          Gen 12 1-4         2 Tim 1:8-10 Matt 17 !-9

       

JEAN VANIER – MOURNING A REPUTATION

JEAN VANIER – MOURNING A REPUTATION

Around Easter last year Jean Vanier, the founder of the l’Arche communities for people living with intellectual disabilities, died, aged 90, and I wrote in this column: “Jean defined his vocation as ‘revealing the beauty of people who are wounded’. It is the sort of sentence you will not find even in the best meaning of our laws.  In fact, many people will not even know what you are talking about.  Yet there it is: the cornerstone of l’Arche.  It is about helping people who are living with disabilities to discover their gifts and rejoice in them and share them with the world”.

This vision inspired me and many others and there are now 154 communities of l’Arche around the world. Those of us who knew Jean came to revere him as a great witness of the gospel and an inspiration in revealing what lay hidden in the lives of handicapped people.

But now, less than twelve months later, another picture has emerged, one that destroys the one we lived with for so long. After a painstaking process of investigation by outside professionals the present leaders of the International Federation of l’Arche have released a report which reveals that over a period of thirty years Jean had relations with women each of who ‘report that he initiated sexual behaviours with them, usually in the context of spiritual accompaniment. Some of these women have been deeply wounded by these experiences’.

If we mourned last year over the death of a great and holy man, we now mourn over the death of his reputation. His achievements were colossal but now they have to stand with this revision of the man himself.  How could this have happened? How could someone who was so sensitive to the sufferings of the poor and the disabled himself inflict suffering on people who were vulnerable? There are no grounds for saying he took advantage of disabled people. The women were not in l’Arche and they were adults so it could perhaps be said the relationship was consensual. This is not the view of the women who, courageously and individually, answered the questions the investigators put to them. They each felt manipulated by the spiritual context of their encounters with Jean.

Only today, by chance, I came across a letter of Jean to me in 1989. He was taking time out in a monastery in Belgium and he wrote, ‘Tonight I feel the joy of Jesus and want so much to give Him thanks for everything and I feel a great desire that we may know His goodness and love.’ When I first read those words thirty years ago I am sure I felt encouraged and shared his joy. Now, rereading them, I feel confused and deeply sad. I cannot begin to understand what has happened. Someone we looked up to had this secret life where he was hurting others.  The report commissioned by l’Arche concludes, ‘It will take more time and work, with help from outside L'Arche, to try and understand this part of our history and the roots of such behaviours’. Is it possible for a person to be imaginative, generous and devoted to others while at the same time be deviant and manipulative? What a question to try to answer.

1 March 2020              Lent Sunday 1

Gen 2:7-9; 3:1-7          Rom 5:12-19               Matt 4:1-11

IN SEARCH OF THE AMAZON

IN SEARCH OF THE AMAZON

On the 2^nd of this month Pope Francis issued his much anticipated letter, Querida Amazonia, the Beloved Amazon.  The BBC ignored the thrust of the letter and reported only on one aspect which, it knew, would interest people who would be unmoved by the sweep of the letter. That aspect was the ordination of married men, a question which, Francis knew, would distract people from his message. 

We are not searching for the Amazon as explorers from Europe once searched for the source of the Nile.  We are searching to understand the gift of this vast rain forest and river system that stretches across nine countries and whose health or otherwise has a vital effect on the people who live there and on us who live far away. It affects world climate.

The pope begins; ‘The beloved Amazon region stands before the world in all its splendour, drama and mystery’. Using vivid descriptions, arguments and poetry Francis shares with us his four dreams

1.      For an Amazon region that fights for the poor, the original people; this is a cry of the earth and a cry of the poor. He goes on to describe the indiscriminate and irresponsible plunder that affects the people.

2.      That the people of the Amazon can preserve their distinctive cultural riches

3.      And that the region preserves its overwhelming natural beauty, its superabundant life teeming in its forests and rivers

4.      And finally, that Christian communities in the region become capable of generous commitment in incarnating the faith in the Amazon region.

Pope Francis develops each of these points at length often, as mentioned, using the words of poets;

                        Many are the tress

where torture dwelt

and vast are the forests

purchased with a thousand deaths

The people, driven from their forests migrate to the cities where they find worse enslavement, subjugation and poverty. They are a dispensable obstacle to the exploitation of the Amazon and can be eliminated.  They are not human beings. Francis says we need to feel outrage, as Amos, ‘They turn justice into wormwood and throw uprightness to the ground’ (5:7-12).

The letter runs to many pages.  It is a celebration and a warning.  And it affects us in Africa because the Amazon is not just a river system in South America; it is a vital part of us.  Today we need a universal mind and a universal heart.  Otherwise we will perish.

23 February 2020        Sunday 7 A

Lev 19:1…18              1 Cor. 3:16-23                         Matt 5:38-48

BUT I SAY THIS TO YOU

BUT I SAY THIS TO YOU

There is a power in words and we have few orators today. We watch in alarm as the Speaker of the South African Parliament, gathered in Cape Town to listen to the President of the Republic, searches for words to respond to Mr Malema’s obstructive tactics.  Another person could have disarmed him with a few words but the Speaker could not find those words.

Jesus was the perfect speaker. He is the Word and ‘no one could think of anything to say in reply, and from that day no one dared to ask him any further questions’ (Matt 22:46).  Words are one of God’s great gifts to us. We use them all the time in daily life to express our needs, joys and pains.  But words are not limited to immediate descriptions.

‘Primordial words are always as though filled with the soft music of infinity.  No matter what it is they speak of, they always whisper something about everything.  If one tries to pace out their boundary, one always becomes lost in the infinite.  They are the children of God, who possess something of the luminous darkness of their Father.

Words like ‘blossom, night, star and day, root and source, wind and laughter, rose, blood and earth’ and so on are words in which a piece of reality is signified, a door is opened into the depths of true reality in general. ‘They are words of an endless crossing of borders, therefore words on which in some way our salvation depends’ (Karl Rahner). Through the word, spoken in powerful concentration, all realities are brought into the light of man, and redeemed from the imprisonment of their dumbness of reference to God’ (Michael Kirwan SJ, Letters and Notices 455, a Jesuit house journal).

The Sermon on the Mount is where Jesus ‘completes’ the message of the old dispensation.  He raises the bar on human behaviour, calling humanity to choose wisdom. If we are still haunted by the self-interest and fears of the old ways it is time now to become free and reach out for the new. Humanity can do better. ‘If you wish, you can keep the commandments’, Ben Sira told his hearers a century or so before the coming of the Messiah.  Jesus built on that and at the end of his sermon, Matthew tells us, ‘his teaching made a deep impression on the people because he taught them with authority’.

How much we need people who speak with authority!

16 February 2020                                Sunday 6 A

Ben Sir 15:15-20                 1 Cor. 2:6-10                        Matt 5:17-37  

    

YOUR LIGHT WILL SHINE

YOUR LIGHT WILL SHINE

The number of baptisms, ordinations and religious professions is growing in Africa but this is one sign only of the growth of the People of God.  We also look for a growth in the commitment of lay people to take their faith into the market place, the social field and the political arena. And, thirdly, we look to see what influence the Christian people are having in the world where so many have no explicit religious beliefs but they are searching for ways of being true to what they find deep within them.

A report in The Tablet this week describes how young people in Europe prefer to join small business enterprises rather than big companies. They believe that smaller companies have a sharper social sense and are more responsive to vital issues like global warming. The Tablet article traces this social consciousness in part back to a conference called by Pope Francis at the Vatican some years ago.  And there is reason to believe the pope’s letter on climate change, Laudato Si, has had considerable effect in feeding into the world’s focus on the climate crisis itself.

When Isaiah called on people to have a social conscience 2,500 years ago he said nothing explicit about keeping the Jewish law. And when Jesus took up his words and told his followers, ‘you are the light of the world’, he did not say you must be baptised in order to shine. Despite the undoubted growth of the Church in numbers in Africa, if this is not combined with an engagement in the struggles of people, which make the whole of society take notice, it will be no more than statistics – a numbers game.

Recently we remembered – 75 years ago - the discovery of the awful state of the survivors of the death camps the Nazis ran during World War Two. As the allies closed in on occupied Poland and Germany they were numbed by what they saw. One of the Jewish victims, rounded up for extermination, was a young Dutch woman called Etty Hillesum. Etty was a deeply reflective person and, instead of hiding in fear as the Nazi police closed in on her, she went about the streets trying to help people cope with the situation right up to the time of her arrest. When eventually they were herded into railway trucks for transportation to the death camps she threw a post card out the window on which she had written, ‘We left the station singing!’

Etty’s light has never ceased shining. But it is important to note she never closed her eyes to the suffering around her. She recognised that God was present in it all. Her God was a vulnerable tender Presence and she spoke to him, ‘You cannot help us … but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last’. Human beings have made a hell on earth but God does not abandon them.  He cannot force them to change but he can ‘dwell inside us’. He is the God who is with us and anyone who struggles for justice recognises, even if implicitly, that they are not alone.

9 February 2020          Sunday 5 A

Isaiah 58:7-10              I Cor 2:1-5                   Matt 5:13-16