DISTURBED BY THESE WORDS

 

DISTURBED BY THESE WORDS

In 1954 Iris Murdoch published her first novel, Under the Net. It is about a man who is searching to understand himself and other people. The story is about four people; two men and two women. A love B but B does not love A; she loves C who in his turn loves D. And D loves A! It is not a triangle of love but a diamond. The title of the novel refers to the network of relationships of which we are all part – some of them link us to one another while others we use to keep people at a distance. Murdoch wants to get under this net. She writes:

What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself … it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

In 1954 no one thought of ‘the net’ in the way we do today where we can be in touch literally and immediately with people anywhere on the planet and even beyond in space. But are we any closer to understanding ourselves or one another? Do we get ‘under the net’? Has the ease of communication, the thickening of the net, made this harder? Have our relationships suffered as a result of the constant stream?  

These thoughts come as we approach Christmas. Malcolm Guite has written in a poem that celebrates the ‘O’ antiphons of Advent, ‘O Word beneath the words with which I speak’. All our words, all our efforts at communication, are expressions in some way of our desire to relate. We want to move closer to people or we want to keep them at a distance. There is a place for chatter, banter and even gossip! Harmless gossip! But these should only be the decoration, not the substance, of our relationships. It would not be good if our constant chat ends up being ‘normal’ and our only way of communication. Our chat is the surface of the well. It hides the clear still waters of our depths. These waters are there for us to draw and quench our aching hearts in times like Covid and economic struggle as well as personal difficulties.

The glitter of Christmas is fine but it too is only the surface. We are to go deeper to know the Word beneath our words, to get under the net. Mary was ‘deeply disturbed by the words’ of the angel Gabriel. She could not understand the message hidden in the words she was hearing. She had to ‘ponder’ and come to believe and find her own words, ‘let what you have said be done to me.’

20 Dec 2020    Advent Sunday 4 B     2 Sam 7:1…16    Rom 16:25-27         Luke 1:26-38

‘HOPE IS NOT THE SAME AS OPTIMISM’

 

‘HOPE IS NOT THE SAME AS OPTIMISM’

This observation, by the Czech playwright and president, Václav Havel, is quoted by Fr Diarmuid O’Murchu as opening a door to understanding where we are called to go in a future after Covid. It has been said many times, and most emphatically by Pope Francis, that we cannot go back to pre-Covid days as if nothing has happened. Some politicians are leading their people to think that if we can just get a reliable vaccine – and it seems we now have one – we can get ‘back to normal’ and, most importantly, get the economy going again.

But no, says the seemingly still minority opinion, it is not medicine only we need but conversion. We simply cannot go back to where we were where we squeeze nature to serve our interests regardless of the consequences. We can repeat the adage: God always forgives; men and women sometimes forgive; nature never forgives. But nature will bounce back if given a chance. The destruction of the ozone layer has been halted and is slowly reforming and fish have returned to the no longer polluted rivers of Europe. But we, and especially the young among us, now know that the planet will continue to warm up unless we take action. And a consensus is slowly accumulating to support that action, even to demand it.

And so we continue with the question: can we return to what we considered our normal way of life in a post-Covid world? What the mounting number of voices is telling us is ‘no’. We have to ‘lose our life if we are to find it’. We have to put a limit on our lust for power and wealth if we and our children are to have a good life on this earth. The human body has a built-in immunity as a gift of nature. But in the world of the spirit immunity is not built-in. It has to be chosen freely. The gift of the human spirit is that we construct our own ever evolving immunity by our choices. The vaccine, like any medicine, does not affect our choices. It just does its job, like air in a tyre or fuel in an engine.

We need another kind of immunity as a result of the scare both Covid and global warming are giving us. And this is where Václav Havel comes in. We find no solution in optimism which is often defined as ‘hoping for the best’ but which, in practice, means looking forward to things returning to normal. That is not hope. Hope is being open to a new future which will reveal itself when we preserve the best of what we have achieved while avoiding those things we now know to be harmful to us and our planet.   

In Advent, O’Murchu tells us, we focus on God coming to us but we would do well to invert the focus to one of us coming to God.  Covid is like John the Baptist: it comes to warn us to ‘make straight the ways’ and that means to pay attention to what we have to do to make sure this planet will still be around so that our children and our children’s children have ‘life to the full’.    

13 Dec 2020    Advent Sunday 3 B     Is 61:1-2, 10-11           1 Th 5: 16-24      Jn 1:6-8, 19-28  

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADVENT TAKES US BEYOND OURSELVES

 

ADVENT TAKES US BEYOND

Advent takes us beyond ourselves. There are times when we glimpse this, especially when we are young. I am old now but I remember moments which are indescribable when I was filled with wonder and anticipation. We would visit my grandmother and there was something about the pantry – and the lemonade - which went way beyond the grandest restaurants and the finest wines. We lived far from the sea but when we did go there the excitement went far beyond geography; the smell of the sea, its constant motion and its infinity – all spoke to me of mystery beyond my puny ability to understand.

In Advent we are called to stop and dwell on the mystery which we are. We can be tyrannised by the demands of each day and collapse exhausted on our couch at night. Yet if we can find moments to pause and soak in the poetry of Isaiah we will open a door that takes us beyond reason, beyond technology. We are not meant to make our home here for ever.  ‘Console my people, console them’, he cries this Sunday and it is not going to be the consolation of money or status or some other good thing of life though such things are good and have their place. It is the consolation of trust solidly placed in one who is beyond us and always faithful.

Last week I wrote of Fr Augustus Law dying in a lonely place without medical care and without those he was with understanding why he came. His mission was a total failure in terms of result based planning but his last written words in his diary before he died were, ‘I don't think that I could ever despair, even if I tried'. This week I listened to an interview with Jewish South African artist William Kentridge and at one point he said, ‘Follow through what happens at the edges’. An enigmatic piece of advice perhaps but when you think of Jesus noticing the widow putting her few pence in the temple collection plate you begin to see what he means. She gave all she had for something greater than herself. Jesus noticed her. Probably he was the only one who did. Our moments of attention to what is beyond us are pregnant with blessings.

‘Some times it was as if a chink had opened

Upon a scene unforeseen and enterable –

Seamus Heaney, The Real Names

The kingdom, the gospels insist, is ‘close at hand’. It is round the corner. But we have to notice it, to welcome it. We are to be alert to every person we meet or see. Advent is a kind of institutional ‘Rinse your eyes, stay awake’ time!

6 Dec 2020 Advent Sunday 2 B     Is 40:1…11   2 Pet 3: 8-14                  Mk 1:1-8

 

A LONELY DEATH

 

A LONELY DEATH

 

We had an unusual anniversary this week: a dying man attended by a dying man. Fr Augustus Law, a Jesuit, died of fever at Mzila’s capital, near Chipinge, on 25 November 1880, just 140 years ago. The man in attendance was Br Joseph Hedley, also a Jesuit, who recovered and lived for another 53 years. They were part of a team of four who set out from Bulawayo by ox-wagon in response to a promised welcome from the Shangaan king. One of the others got lost on the way and the other, Br Francis de Sadeleer, had gone back to bring up the wagon which they had abandoned when the going got tough after they crossed the Save River.

The round number anniversary this year seemed like a call to do something to commemorate the effort these men made all those years ago. After all, the Church in Zimbabwe grew out of seeds that died. Fr Shepherd Muhamba and I set off this week to try and find the place where Law died and celebrate the Eucharist on or near it. We got puzzled looks at first until eyes suddenly brightened and everyone we talked to – from the priest at Chipinge, Fr Abraham Nyamupachitu, to the soldiers on the border – became interested and enthusiastic. In fact they marveled at the story.

But we had set out without knowing precisely where we were going. We knew we must take the road to Mount Selinda and as we did so we received a gift: we passed a sign marked MZILA PRIMARY SCHOOL. The head was fascinated by our quest and phoned everyone he knew who could help. One of these was the local Chief, Madungwawa, who is also a senator. He wanted to help but he was in Harare. Robert Burrett, one of Zimbabwe’s most renowned archaeologists, had given us the approximate site of where Law had been buried – though his remains had later been moved to Chishawasha, near Harare, in 1904. The site was a few meters across the border and the soldiers would have allowed us to cross if we had the exact coordinates. I had never thought of that detail!

So we had to settle for the border itself and offered our prayer of thanks for these ancestors in the faith. I thought of Law lying on the floor without food that he could digest and without medicine, though the Jesuits were said to have alerted the world to the power of quinine. Rats were everywhere though there was a snake in the hut that kept them at bay. De Sadeleer later wrote it performed the function cats did in his Belgian home.

Law and Hedley were helpless, dying in what was for them a remote place surrounded by people who did not understand why they came. They were not hunters, traders or miners and seemed to have nothing to offer. They comforted one another reading from the Lord’s Passion. Hedley managed to hold Law in a sitting position to say his last Mass some days before he died, by supporting him with a rope tied to the rafters.    

It was a lonely death in a remote place. It seemed like a failure and Hedley and de Sadeleer, when they eventually met up again, returned to Bulawayo where they arrived 18 months after having set out and after accomplishing nothing. Or so it seemed. In reality it was an integral, even necessary, part of the story of the founding of the Church in Zimbabwe and beyond. Our journey this week and the interest it aroused shows that it touched a chord. The excitement of those we met seemed more that ephemeral. They glimpsed the reality. Perhaps we too planted a seed.

29 Nov 2020   Advent Sunday 1 B    Is 63:16- 64:7  1 Cor 1:3-9      Mk 13:33-37

BY BEING WHAT WE ARE

 

BY BEING WHAT WE ARE

The Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, died on the 7^th November. This news did not make the headlines in Zimbabwe or probably anywhere else but Rabbi Sacks was a remarkable prophet for our time. He longed to contribute the full weight of Jewish culture and religion to ‘the healing of the nations’ (Ezk 47:12).

Sacks saw society through the ages as oscillating between concern for the group and the affirmation of the individual. Traditionally, in Africa and elsewhere, the need to survive drove people to submit their own interests to that of the group, the tribe or the nation. When society reached stability and people were free to reflect on what they wanted at a deeper level than simple survival, individuals began to emerge from the group and question ‘tradition’ and affirm that things do not have to be as they are now.

This happened in the Reformation in the sixteenth century and in one way or another has continued right up to the present with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. The dominance of the ruling class, the people with power, is challenged by individuals who in their turn gather a new ‘tribe’ around them and a new reality emerges. Rabbi Sacks helps us understand how this tension between the individual and the group is being played out in this 21^st century.

So, he saw society moving from ‘we’ (responsibility to society as a whole) to ‘I’ (concern with the individual self) and he says this led to a counter move back to the group in the form of nationalism and racism where individuals felt once more under threat and submitted to new authorities who promised protection. This again led to a further assertion of the individual in the 1960s and finally to ‘identity politics’ in our own day, where people are again fearful and populist leaders play on these fears to carve out new autocracies. Trump is not the only one of these leaders but he is the most powerful and dangerous.

Sacks’ point is that this leads, in the words of his obituarist in The Tablet, Norman Solomon, ‘to the abandonment of traditional codes of morality by which society was governed and through which it maintained stability. Power and economics, he argues, cannot guarantee stability without a third element, civil society, the locus of morality, in which we all share’.

Then comes the punch line from Sacks himself: ‘By being what we uniquely are, we contribute to society what only we can give. That is a way of being Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Jewish while being proud to be English (or Zimbabwean) … If there is no such thing as a national moral community, if civil society atrophies and dies while all that is left are the competitive areas of the market and the state, then liberal democracy is in danger’.  Solomon concludes, ‘above all Rabbi Sacks was deeply concerned with the moral values of the society in which he lived, and he was fully committed to playing his part to bring about the civil society through which those values could be implemented.

This Sunday we celebrate Christ the King, whose statue often appears on TV dominating the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The gospel tells us we will be judged on basic things; ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, a stranger and you made me welcome’. These are moral values and we are not living them.

22 November 2020      Christ the King        Ezk 34:11…17     1 Cor 15: 20…28      Matt 25: 31-46

‘OUR CHILDREN MAY SEE THIS’

 

‘OUR CHILDREN MAY SEE THIS’

Far away from Africa in a corner of SE Europe a war raged that ended with a truce a few days ago. It could have been South Sudan, Mali or Mozambique: people failing to sink their differences and live together in peace. In this case it is a dispute between two Caucasian republics; Azerbaijan and Armenia. The former is Muslin, the latter Christian. Many Armenians lived in an area within Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh and, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, they wanted to join Armenia, now an independent state. Azerbaijan did not accept this and so war and death reigned in the 1990s.

Now war has just flared up again but the Russians have leant heavily on their former ‘colonies’ and managed to persuade them into a truce which recognises the Azeri gains, which were considerable, in the recent short war. Why I mention all this is because the scenes on TV, which are so deeply painful, are reminiscent of similar scenes in Africa and indeed in other parts of the world. You see people in Baku, the Azeri capital, dancing and rejoicing in the streets. Then you move to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, to see widows and mothers weeping and lamenting over their husbands and sons killed in the fighting.

A reporter asked an Azeri, ‘Can you now begin to live together with Armenians side by side?’ and the reply came; ‘Our children may see this.’ It is an honest answer. It will take time. It took time for the Germans and French to live side by side after three major wars. It took time for the Irish and the English to live side by side after 700 years of colonisation. Elizabeth was Queen for 60 years before the time was right for her to set foot in Ireland. And it is taking time for the many divisions in Africa to heal. It all comes down to attitude. Do I see the other person as a threat or as a fellow pilgrim doing the best she or he can? The more we put a good interpretation on the efforts of others to live their lives as best they can the sooner we will ‘see this’ and live together in peace.

This Sunday’s parable, about a corrupt businessman praising his associates for making 100% profits, is a daring lesson in seizing the moment for making peace or any other activity that will hasten the reign of God. As we near the end of the Church’s year we are given lesson after lesson in acting – and not letting opportunity slip like the man who hid his master’s money in a field because he was afraid to do anything.      

15 Nov 2020   Sunday 33 A    Prov 31: 10…31          1 Thes 5:1-6                Matt 25: 14-30  

TEN BRIDESMAIDS, TEN INTERPRETATIONS

 

TEN BRIDESMAIDS, TEN INTERPRETATIONS

 

There are different ways you can interpret the parable of the ten bridesmaids which we read this Sunday. You can turn it on its head and say the five ‘wise’ ones were selfish and unjust in not sharing what they had with their fellows and so excluded them from the banquet of life. They showed ‘concealed violence’ to those who were ill-prepared and so perpetuated divisions in society. Gerhard Lohfink, who wrote a great book, Jesus of Nazareth, What He Wanted, Who He was, tells us that the Christian community from the beginning has focused on one interpretation as being in accord with the mind of Jesus: Jesus was saying, ‘the reign of God is here, his kingdom is among you, seize the moment’.

This is the message of Jesus from beginning to end. Mark’s gospel, the first to be written starts with the proclamation, ‘the reign of God is close at hand, change your way of thinking and believe the good news!’ Every word and action of Jesus from then on supports, clarifies and demonstrates that proclamation. Another parable tells of a man who hears the message as if it were a treasure buried in a field. He ‘sells everything’ and buys the field. The key in the words and actions of Jesus is the sense of urgency. There is no time to waste. We are to act.

Interpretations that ‘kick the can down the road’, that divert our attention from the central point into, for example, a detached critique of social conditions as mentioned above, is simply an excuse for avoiding the urgent call to act. We may come up with a brilliant analysis of our situation but if we do not do something – however apparently insignificant – we are blunting the force of Jesus’ words and emptying them of their transformative power. We are like the people addressed in the story of the Good Samaritan who pass by saying, ‘this is the state’s responsibility, this is the Church’s task’ and we do nothing.

Thank God for young people! (We are all young once and know this!) They have terrific energy and a burning desire for change and they want to ‘seize the moment’. The sad thing is that today’s young people are often tomorrow’s comfortable middle class, settled in their professions with all their anger blunted by ‘success.’ But Jesus doesn’t allow us to get too settled. He allows ‘unsettling’ things to happen in our life. Over and over he gives us opportunities to seize the moment and by so doing we advance along the way for our own benefit and the benefit of those who are part of our world.

8 Nov 2020     Sunday 32 A   Wis 6:12-16     1 Thess 4:13-18           Matt 25:1-13