SUSTAINABILITY, SOLIDARITY & SECURITY

San Diego (California) Bishop Robert McElroy preached recently drawing out three lessons from our pandemic which give hope for the future. First, he reminded us that the local community we call church is not a fixed structure like the bricks and mortar of the building which will survive, pandemic or no pandemic.  A community is a living entity which needs sustenance to survive.  If people do not meet regularly for liturgy and parish activities the community is in danger of withering.  Many people now ‘go’ to church via the internet in Hong Kong this week and New York next. Could this become a habit, a preference, especially as one can ‘shop around’ and find places far more interesting than my local parish?  To abandon my parish just because I cannot get there is to expect my community to survive without regular contact. That is the danger. 

But there is also an opportunity.  Since I can no longer take my parish for granted I have to now actively find ways of reaching out to people so as to keep communication alive. This leads to the bishop’s second point: solidarity.  He is a church leader in a country waking up to its imbedded legacy of racism and the drama of ‘Black Live Matter’ – a movement that has gripped people in America and across the globe. It is amazing that this is happening at the same time Covid 19 is hammering us. It is not just religious people who are reaching out to others.  Everyone is. Really moving and beautiful things are happening. Nearly all are unseen and unreported. People are showing compassion and this can change the world. It is not just the virus of corona but the virus of indifference to others that has sparked a global response.

There is a feverish search for a vaccine and that will be a blessing when it comes. But we should also relish this time before it comes.  We long for the security of a vaccine but there is a greater security staring at us if we can grasp it, the bishop’s third point.  It is to imbed this solidarity and compassion into our way of thinking and being. Covid has told us no one is safe unless all are safe. This is just a mirror of what we often say: no one is free unless all are free. Our greatest security is within. It is not in vaccines and walls and weapons. We, those of us who call ourselves Christians, should note that the greatest efforts towards solidarity and hope are happening without any apparent input from the churches.  If ever there was a dramatic expression of this it must be the 27 nations of Europe hammering out a plan to care for all their citizens including the most vulnerable in the face of Covid.  We have to pause and savour this moment. Here are the leaders of many nations sitting down hour after hour well into the night and early morning to reach a consensus on a way forward in response to the crisis of our time. Anyone who knows anything about how the same nations drifted carelessly into two world wars will be struck with awe.  This really is human progress and we should rejoice.        

26 July 2020  Sunday 17A    1 Kings 3:5-12             Romans 8:28-30        Matt 13:44-52      

HAGIA SOPHIA, DIVINE WISDOM

HAGIA SOPHIA, DIVINE WISDOM

It was twelve years ago; I was in Turkey and we were running late. A visit to Hagia Sophia, the massive Cathedral built by Emperor Justinian between 532 and 537, was on our programme. We were crossing the Sea of Marmora and I was looking at my watch.  We would not make it. But Mehmet, our Muslim guide, persuaded the guards to allow us in even though it was after hours. We had this magnificent building to ourselves and I felt the emotion of standing in a place, adorned with icons and mosaics, where people had come to pray and celebrate the Eucharist for nine hundred years before the city fell to the Muslims in 1453.

The Muslim ruler at the time, also called Mehmet, had the icons and mosaic decorations covered over, but not destroyed, by whitewash. Then he put up Muslim symbols and turned the building into a mosque and so it remained for near to five hundred years. The Ottoman (Muslim) empire collapsed at the end of the First World War and the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in a gesture of reconciliation and modernisation, kept Hagia Sophia neither as a mosque nor as a Christian cathedral, but made it a museum, a neutral meeting place for all people.  

Now this generous and imaginative act has been reversed and, despite protests from all over the world, the Islamic fundamentalist minded Muslims in Turkey, led by their populist-oriented ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have made it a mosque again. ‘Populism’ is a rediscovered ideology which thrives on responding to the narrow interests of inward looking nationalism.  The opposite is imagination, generosity and compassion and the loss of these qualities through this decision is causing the world to weep.  Just when we need a dose of hope in a time of multiple challenges, we have an action which takes us backwards. Islam is going through this phase at the moment. It has not always been like that and, even now, not all Muslims agree with this revanchist response. If Mehmet, who took us round the sites of the Apostle Paul’s labours in, what was then, Asia Minor, is one to go by, there are many in Turkey who want to be open and welcoming to people who are different. Mehmet astonished me by the number of times he devoutly referred to ‘Mother Mary’, who appears in the Koran more often than she does in the Bible. He was not just being nice to a group of retired teachers from Catholic Ireland.

Hagia Sophia, Divine Wisdom, was from 1934 to last week a symbol, drawing all people together in solidarity.  This decision, to return it to being a mosque, is deeply painful, as Pope Francis has said. The people who made it cannot see that they are returning to a divisive past just when the world is searching for ways of coming together.

One consolation is that they do not have the momentum of history on their side. The decision will be reversed but not until it has run its course – as happened in Russia, when the revolutionaries renamed St Petersburg as Leningrad. The name was used for seventy years but now the city has reverted to its old name. And so it will be with Hagia Sophia, when narrow religious feeling has become a spent force.      

19 July 2020    Sunday 16 A    Wisdom 12:13…19     Romans 8:26-27          Matt 13:24-43

A DIVIDED HEART

A DIVIDED HEART

Ruth Burrows, whom I have often drawn on in this column, wrote in Before the Living God of the formative years of her life: ‘If I were to say I want to show people what really matters is utter trust in God; that this trust cannot be there until we have lost all self-trust and are rooted in poverty; that we must be willing to go to God with empty hands and that the whole meaning of our existence and the one consuming desire of the heart of God is that we should let ourselves be loved, many spiritual persons would smile at my naïveté.’ People will switch off. ‘We know all that’.  But, she says, they know it in theory. In practice our heart is divided, as Hosea said it was, long back (10:2). What if we were to utterly trust God and come to him with empty hands?

Peter Paul Kennedy was a renowned English Jesuit who was appointed to run the final segment of Jesuit formation for an international group of Jesuit priests. The story is told that his opening words on the first day he met them were, ‘Fathers, the cupboard is bare, I have nothing to offer’. What they made of this is not recorded but he went on to lead them through a programme that is still remembered decades later by those who were on it.  He came ‘with empty hands’ but he filled their hearts.

We live in a critical time and, as the weeks give way to months, people are beginning to tire of the unseen enemy. When will we get back to normal? When can we go back to bars, restaurants, football games, beaches? People in Europe seem almost desperate to go on holiday! Yet the World Health Organisation warns that the pandemic is nowhere near over and, in Africa, the worst may be yet to come.

In the early weeks of Covid 19 we rejoiced in the cleaner air, the return of birds to our towns and the attention we were giving to each other. We wondered if we could implant these blessings in some permanent way into our societies. But gradually the impact on the economy of staying at home became more noticeable and a growing sense of frustration, even panic, began to grip us. In searching for scapegoats, governments looked for undocumented migrants as carriers of the virus and expelled them.

The words of the song Joan Baez popularised at the time of the Vietnam War, have come back to haunt us, ‘When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?’ The war seemed pointless and this repeated question lingered in the air. It still lingers as we stumble from crisis to crisis.  We never seem to learn. Yes, we pray for an end to the virus but do we do so with empty hands? Do we ever learn to allow God to show us the way or are we so sure we know it? Do we not cling on to our own ‘solutions’ without allowing room for God to show us the way? ‘The whole of creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth’ (Romans 8:22)

12 July 2020       Sunday 15 A                 Isaiah 55:10-11      Romans 8:18-23          Matt 13:1-23

‘O HAPPY FAULT!’

‘O HAPPY FAULT!’

This phrase does not appear in the Bible but has been sung in the Easter celebration for two thousand years. At the vigil on Easter night the Church recalls the key events in our human story beginning with the creation, as told in the Book of Genesis, and working its way through to the Resurrection of the Lord on Easter morning.  As the vigil gets into full swing the Church proclaims the Exultet, the exultation, a sustained cry of gratitude, in which she, as it were, spontaneously shouts these words.

They refer to Adam and Eve’s fall when they refused to follow the way God had laid out for them and decided to go their own way.  It was the archetypal refusal which informed all others. What the Church sings on that Easter night is the way God not only put this right for us through his passion and death but actually opened the way to an even higher destiny than was there before.

This may sound mysterious but when you see the knee of that man, whose name I forget, on the neck of George Floyd whose name we cannot forget, you begin to see some kind of opening to our understanding. O Happy Fault! There is one saying that kept being repeated about C19, ‘this is unprecedented’, and likewise there is a saying associated with George Floyd, ‘this time it is different’. If our expectations are fulfilled this terrible event – kneeling on a man’s neck for more than eight minutes and suffocating him – will shift attitudes in a way that has never happened before. Huge progress will be made in the long struggle to build a society which respects equality not just in its constitution but in its streets. O Happy Fault!

So this is the mystery. The man who killed George Floyd did something evil that will bring huge blessings, just as Pilate did something evil in condemning an innocent man and his death brought healing and wholeness to the nations. And we go on to consider the Jews.  In Jesus’ time, especially in the gospel of John, they are the ones who ‘prefer darkness to light’, but they do it representing all the generations of people everywhere who have continued to prefer darkness. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, struggles with the fact that he is himself a Jew and he goes on to hint that the time is coming when they, together with Pilate and the man who killed George Floyd, will know that the evil they have done has been turned by God into a blessing for the nations.

Our readings this Sunday start off with a shout from the prophet Zechariah: ‘Rejoice, heart and soul, daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem, See how your king comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant …’ Zechariah knew.

5 July 2020      Sunday 14 A  Zech 9:9-10         Rom 8:9-13     Matt 11:25-30

DISCOVERING THE GIFT

DISCOVERING THE GIFT

No one is thinking of Christmas but with the birth of John the Baptist (24 June) a marker is put down that we are once again on the way to that celebration. John announces the coming of the Messiah, among other ways, in how he searches for his own voice. Why did he spend all that time in the desert dressed in camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey? He was ‘a voice’ but he had to discover what kind of voice. The result was volcanic: ‘you brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Do we think that John just woke up one morning and started speaking like that?  That he was inspired from day one? No, there was a long preparation in which he searched for what he was called to do.

And so it is with us as we live day by day in a Zimbabwe, a country which seems to be going nowhere. What am I to do? What is the gift I have to offer to my country?  We are patient.  We are good at waiting. But are we also searching for our gift? And should we not ask for courage to offer our gift once we know it?

I suspect the name Jacqueline Mary du Pré will not be known to many. She was born in 1945 and died of multiple sclerosis in 1987.  When she was four she heard a cello being played on the radio and told her mother, ‘I want one of those’.  Her mother responded and she started to master the art of playing that large string instrument that looks like a massive violin. Within a short time it became clear she was highly gifted and went on to be regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time. From the age of 16 till she was 28 she travelled the world giving concerts and delighting audiences. Then her illness struck and she entered a painful decline and lost all ability to play. She died fourteen years later, aged 42.

If you google her you won’t find much on those last 14 years. Yet they were an integral part of her story, just as John’s squalid death in Herod’s prison was an integral part of his. Often we do not know what to say about suffering. We like ecstasy but not agony! We want success but we do not really buy into what is often tagged on to success; diminishment, rejection and death.  We fear these consequences and so we do not try to discover our gift. The risk is too great.

Can we break through these awful fears we have? Or do we remain under the judgement of the poet?

We are the hollow men …

Our dried voices, when we whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass … (T.S.Eliot)   

28 June 2020       Sunday 13 A      2 Kings 4:8…16     Romans 6:3…11      Matt 10:37-42

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

The woods near where I live were thick, the home of deer and smaller animals when I first arrived here.  Now the woods have thinned as people come from near and far for firewood – often their only means of cooking.  The deer are long since gone and in their place are gatherings of people chanting prayers, singing and drumming. I have discovered a way of walking through these woods without disturbing anyone but I occasionally stop to greet and the chat for a moment.

‘Why do you come here to pray?’ ‘It is a quiet place’, they reply. Even though they create a holy noise of their own they prefer this place of withdrawal to the commotion in the suburbs. Without knowing it they are following a long tradition in Christianity – and other religions – of fleeing the noise of daily life to seek God in the desert. They do not go alone but in a group and when they arrive they pitch their tent, cook their food and pray loudly.

If there seems to be a contradiction in seeking quiet in order to make noise it is beside the point. What motivates them is to seek God in their own way and pray for all their needs, the most recent being deliverance from Covid 19. Just today, we had a reading from the First Book of Kings, chapter 19, in which Elijah went into a cave for the night.  He meets the Lord there, not in a mighty wind nor an earthquake nor in the fire but in ‘a gentle breeze’.  Another version calls it ‘a small voice’, yet another ‘a light murmuring sound’ and still another – the one I prefer – ‘a sound of silence’.  

            ‘Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.

Every moment in every age, every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.

Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind, but all their notes have always proclaimed, ‘He comes, comes, ever comes’.

In the fragrant days of sunny April through the forest path he comes, comes, ever comes.

In the rainy gloom of July nights on the thundering chariot of clouds he comes, comes, ever comes

In sorrow after sorrow it is his steps that press upon my heart, and it is the golden touch of his feet that makes my joy to shine.

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, XLV

As I left the wood towards evening I met a new group coming in carrying food and blankets.  They too will pray and sing into the night.  And when they are tired they will lie down under the stars, happy to have come to search for the One who comes. 

21 June 2020               Sunday 12 A

Jer 20:10-13                Romans 5:12-15                      Matt 10:26-33

THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT

THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT

THIS IS NOT A MOMENT; IT’S A MOVEMENT. So read one of the placards in the on-going protests in the US over the death of George Floyd. Floyd is fast becoming another symbol like Rosa Parks who, in the 1960s, refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white person and sparked the Civil Rights Movement. There have been many black deaths at the hands of white police since but there is a consensus that this time it is different. The deeply felt indignity and insecurity that black Americans feel every day found, in this raw incident captured on camera, the spark that brought them, and many others in solidarity with them, out on the streets in cities all over the States and in countries around the world.

It happened in Minneapolis and it now seems possible that, starting in that city, the police all over America will be radically reformed to take into account the sentiments expressed so forcibly during these days of protest. Black Americans have found their voice in a new way and white Americans, and other people generally, have come out in solidarity with them. The time will come when we will stop talking about white and black and there will be just Americans; then the scar of slavery and superiority will finally be healed.

‘I have not come to abolish but to fulfil’.  Human beings have come up with all sorts of laws and customs to regulate society – some good, some bad. But the good laws have outlived the bad and keep pushing their way to the front. After the Second World War the United Nations came up with Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948 and the document was translated into 500 languages. It set out, for the first time, universal standards expressing the dignity and aspirations of all people.  It is an inspiring document but it needs fulfilment.  This is the hard bit. This is where we are now.

If we take the long view we can see the struggle of humanity from its earliest days of self-consciousness to improve how we relate to one another. We have made great progress! You do not have to be an historian to know this.  Even in Zimbabwe, despite all our present grievances, there is a freedom and respect for one another that was not there before independence in 1980. And, going further back, to the days of Lobengula, life was cheap and people could be slain for what today would be minor offences.

And so now modern technology, in the form of the an eight minute clip, has brought us to a new stage of growth and it feels different this time. ‘I am with you always’, says Jesus, ‘fulfilling, not destroying, all the work of men and women over the earth’.

14 June 2020               Corpus Christi             Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ

Deut 8:2 …16             1 Cor 10:16-17            John 6:51-58