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

 

`AN ILL-FATED PEOPLE`

 ‘AN ILL-FATED PEOPLE’

The late Lawrence Vambe – he died last year aged 102 – opened his celebrated book, An Ill-Fated People, with a story of a rapid white wedding in Chishawasha before the Jesuits at the Mission discovered that Josephine was pregnant. A ‘verbal scuffle’ had ensued among the elders about what to do when the news of her pregnancy first surfaced. Her husband, Martin, though also a Christian, had scoffed at the idea of a rushed wedding. They had both fulfilled all the customs tradition laid down for marriage and in the eyes of the community were man and wife. But if they did not have a wedding there was a fear that the priest in charge of the mission might expel the whole family from the mission land. They had the wedding.

Vambe uses this incident like a grenade to blow up any complacency we might have that the reception of Christianity by the people of Zimbabwe was a smooth matter. He gives us a passionate account of how the whites used their military power to subdue the people from 1890 and trample on their freedom, dignity and sense of self-worth. The settlers were only momentarily checked by the risings in the mid-1890s before resuming, with greater determination, their plan to take from the people their land and their mines and make the locals labourers on their own property. Vambe gives a psychological as well as a political history of what this meant as he viewed events growing up in Chishawasha and listened to the accounts told again and again by the elders.

The missionaries were caught between their appreciation of the order and infrastructure the settler presence gave them, enabling them to pursue their task of preaching the gospel in word and action, and their indignation at the cruelty and racialism of the settlers which always implied the local people were inferior. Vambe felt the tension in his own person for, while he was deeply embedded in his own roots in Chishawasha and appreciated the culture and traditions of the VaShawasha society into which he was born, he felt drawn to the Christian message by the example of the sisters and fathers at the mission who educated him. He even explored his vocation to become a priest spending three years at the new seminary founded by Bishop Aston Chichester, half a morning’s walk from his home in Mashonganika village.

This tension is still there today and may explain why the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe is far less developed than in some neighbouring countries. Numbers are not everything but they are something: In the DR Congo Catholics make up 50% of the population and in Zambia 25%. In Zimbabwe the proportion is 9%. (These figures come for Google). It could be that the white alien influence, being much stronger south of the Zambezi, hindered the work of white missionaries. If it is true that the high sounding words of the Congress of Berlin (1884), about defending the rights of the local people when the colonisers carved up the continent for themselves, ‘have as much meaning as a rosary beads wound round the knife of a murderer’ (Vambe p 84), there was little chance that the Christian gospel would be welcomed warmly. The defeat of the Shona and the Ndebele in the 1890s destroyed the self-respect of blacks and degraded the whites. The implications of both these judgements of Vambe were played out in the twentieth century and have not been resolved to this day.

This Sunday is All Saints’ Day and we celebrate the many people who lived their lives faithfully often in harsh conditions. They are saints. Yet we have to hold that we did not succeed – and are not succeeding – in reaching those who are responsible for the running of our country with leaven of the gospel.

1 November 2020 All Saints Day Rev 7:2…14 1 John 3:1-3 Matt 5:1-12

STANDING UP

 

STANDING UP

My eye caught a report in the news lately of a courageous Indonesian who is engaged in the struggle against injustice in her country. Yuliana Langowuyo is a law graduate of Cenderawasih University in Jayapura, Indonesia, and she has accepted the job of leading the Papua branch of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in Indonesia. The threat of terror and intimidation are part of the risk people take in fighting injustice in Papua, says the 36-year-old lawyer who is gaining a reputation as an ‘iron lady’. She was hesitant as a lay woman but she set her doubts aside. ‘It was intimidating at first to work among priests who were smart and possessed excellent leadership skills. But they welcomed me and gave me the space to develop dialogue and communication’, she said. ‘We all have the same goal: peace in Papua’.

 

This Sunday we read the words of Jesus which he took from the ancient law of Israel and manifested in his own life: ‘You must love others as yourself’. We have come to realise that justice does not come easily anywhere and every country has had to struggle for it. Those in power do not cede their privileges unless there is both a constitution which sets limits to power and the civic muscle to ensure compliance with the constitution. Much as he would love to continue in power if he loses the election Trump knows there is no possibility whatever of his manipulating the results in his favour.

 

So it is a simple call: ‘love others’! I saw a picture of it scrawled on a London street last week showing that Covid 19 has drummed the message into our dull skulls. But it is a call many continue to ignore in the headlong selfish lust for power. It is painful to have to continually remind ourselves that no change comes without selfless sacrifice, the sort Langowuyo lives. We look at the situation in our countries and lament that so much suffering still awaits those who struggle to bring justice and peace.

 

25 October 2020         Sunday 30 A         Ex 22:20-26          1Th 1:5-10       Matt 22:34-40

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME

 

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS

 

The Minister of Public Service, Professor Paul Mavima, came to L’Arche Zimbabwe on 15 October to mark World Mental Health Day. One of the residents living with an intellectual disability, Tatenda, recited a poem she had composed, one line of which began, ‘No one understands what I am going through …’ She was referring to the experience of people living with intellectual disabilities but her words struck me for another reason.

Some time ago the BBC put on a series of programmes on the British royal family which explored the influences and pressures the royals are under and the resulting stress to shape up to what is expected of them. They have interpreted the demands made on them under the general heading of duty and, if we are to believe the TV series, this has led to a painful distortion of who they are as people. To put it bluntly, they cannot be who they are and more than one of them vocalises this in similar terms to Tatenda, ‘No one knows what I am going through’. It is excruciating to watch what can almost be described as the mental torture Prince Charles, for example, goes through in order to fulfil his ‘duty’.

But it struck me most of all in the way the Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret, is portrayed. When, in the early days, she was asked to do something official she tried to be who she was and spoke to people from the heart - informally and warmly. But she was soon reined in and, in struggling to conform to what was expected, never found a role. She died before her time (in 2002, aged 71; the Queen is 94) and, on the evidence of the TV series, was frustrated all her life.

Margaret and Tatenda lived, or live, an experience that many people do. They feel misunderstood and have no one who could help them work through this experience and discover how to develop their own inner strength.  We should be able to live our lives without worrying what others think. My self-worth does not depend on the opinion of others. If there are some people who try to understand, it helps! (One of the aims of  l’Arche communities is to provide just such an environment where a person, however handicapped they are, can become self-confident, accepting themselves just as they are).

But it is not enough to let people struggle on their own.  There are so many who long ‘to be who they are’ and become who they could become and there is a great need to reach out to help them just as we too also need help. Covid 19 is breaking down barriers and reminding us that our survival depends on others. The readings for this Sunday speak of help coming from unlikely sources. Israel came to understand herself through the intervention of Cyrus, the Persian, and Caesar, the Roman. Margaret and Tatenda would have got on great together. They could have shared and explored the loneliness they each felt and draw strength from the encounter.

18 Oct 2020    Sunday 29 A               Is 45:1…6       1 Thess 1:1-5               Mt 22:15-21