Blog

Aung San Suu Kyi – the song of the ruthless is silenced

As heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is silenced. Isaiah 25.5

Every generation has its symbols of courage, hope and freedom. For over 20 years Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken truth to power, and power has sung its ruthless song, seeking to drown out the melodies of hope, the anthems of freedom and the hymns of truth.

But these too have their songs and their singers. In her first words to the gathered crowd greeting her release she said, "There is a time for silence and a time to speak." In a symbolic act potent with its own meaning, wearing the trditional lilac dress, she placed a flower in her hair. Flowers, are fragile sources of seed, each seed itself latent with life and replete with new possibility. The great visions of freedom and hope that illumine Isaiah and Micah, look forward to days when human beings live without oppression, fear and confiscated speech – desert places burst into bloom and the wilderness is carpeted with flowers. This woman embodies that humane hopefulness, that yearning for liberation of mind and soul, that humanising hunger for freedom to speak the words that change the world. On a day when we remember the cost of freedom, and the sacrifices of those who died to preserve it, we require to give integrity to our rhetoric; our prayers of intercession should include people like Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi (Iran) and Liu Xiaobo (China):

Lord silence the voice of the ruthless,

and give voice to the words of the oppressed.

And as Advent draws near, and we reflect on the people who walk in darkness, and languish in prisons of other people's making, it is central to the church's mission to articulate hope, to sing the song of the merciful, to speak truth to power and pray for those silenced by the songs ruthless. This God-loved world is a dangerous place, and there are deserts waiting to blossom, and other songs waiting to be sung.

14 November 2010
Where does God live?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is one of the spiritual treasures of contemporary Britain. Ever since his Reith lectures on The Persistence of Faith I've read and listened and learned from this thoughtful interlocutor to the cultural arguments of our times. In one of his radio broadcasts he tells a story and draws clear lessons – as good teachers do, the narrative telling of truth.

"The Hasidic Rabbi asked his disciples "Where does God live?"

They were stunned by the strangeness of the question. "What does the rabbi mean?, 'Where does God live?' "Where does God not live? Surely we are taught that there is no place devoid of his presence. He fills the heavens and the earth."

"No", said the rabbi. "You have not understood. God lives where we let him in.

That story has always seemed to me more profound than many learned volumes of theology. God is there, but only when we search. He teaches, but only when we are ready to learn. He has always spoken, but we have not always listened. The question is never "Where is God?" It is always, "Where are we?" The problem of faith is not God, but human beings. The central task of religion is to create an opening in the soul."

Throughout the writings of Jonathan Sacks I hear echoes of that other great Jewish teacher, A J Heschel. It isn't that Sacks copies or quotes Heschel – it may not even be that he is all that familiar with Heschel's writing, though I suspect he is. But the spiritual honesty, the intellectual humility, the gentle confidence in the reality of God, the unswerving quest of the prophet for truth and integrity of life, and the instinct for prayer and devotion as essential human activities – these are held in common by Sacks, Heschel and those others who take the quest for God as the defining priority of the religious life and who recognise too that God is in quest of each of us.

13 November 2010
Paying lip service to servant leadership – and the alternative

In his book Prophecy and Discernment R W L Moberly describes in unmistakably kenotic terms the nature and practice of Christian existence.

Because his message is "Jesus Christ is Lord", its corollary is that Paul's role entails not mastery over others, but rather service of them…to proclaim the lordship of Christ entails a revaluation of human priorities in the way of Christ, the renunication of self-will and self-aggrandizement and the embrace of self-emptying and self-giving for the welfare of others. This is not only possible for Paul because he has "seen the light" – the light of God's glory revealed in the person of Jesus; it is this knowledge of God that determines Paul's priorities.

Quoted in New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology.Engaging with God, Scripture and the World, Ed. Tom Greggs, London, Routledge, 2010.

My feeling is still that much breast beating rhetoric about servant leadership never quite engages with those other psychological drives more satisfied by being the leader, and more emotionally content with discourse of authority, envisioning, initiating and the other euphemisms for having a sense of power. I'm not against power – it exists and has to be managed. But the questions will always be – who has power – how is power exercised – what quailifies, constrains, governs power? And in Jesus' case it was love. So when leadership is discussed, described, embodied, let's use the discourse of love for others rather than the discourse of authority over others. Hmmph!

11 November 2010
Pastoral Care, unforeseen consequences and the undercurrent of grace.

A voice from my past came back to bless me the other day, through an email from a friend. My friend was speaking to someone I had helped decades ago, and whose memory of kindness shown then, and non-rejection when life was messed up, remains blessing to her, and is now encouragement to me. That email touched into something that is a given in pastoral care – the invisibility in the present of later consequence. And for me mixed memories, of hard decisions, sometimes unrewarded effort, becoming the target of anger and frustration that has to earth somewhere, and the sense that an undercurrent of grace carries us along sometimes despite our best efforts to row in the other direction.

Mary Oliver's poem below expresses with psychological precision and pastoral prescience what that undercurrent of grace can sometimes feel like – the categorical imperative of caring.

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it

from the sand.

Let me fumble it into a box, with the

lid open.

Okay, I put the box into my car, and started

up the highway

to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,

such things can be mended.

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I

won't call it good or bad, just

    one way or another.

Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

the back of the front seat and

    punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

But we all know, son't we, how sometimes

things have to feel anger, so as not

    to be defeated?

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world,

even in its hard places.

So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

you have to do something.

From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.

The poet achieves accuracy in describing the ambiguity that surrounds those responses we like to think spontaneous, but are often either premeditated or arise out of habits of the heart. Three times she uses "Okay", and it can mean concession or defiance to those who might wonder why she bothered. Her understanding of the language of anger, and why anger may be all a person has to prevent being overwhelmed by circumstance, is one of those profoundly humane insights that makes Mary Oliver essential reading for those whose calling is the care of others. To love the world in its hard places requires commitment to act, without foreseeing consequences beyond that present immediate imperative, "to do something".

The photo comes from here – where you can find a vision of an alternative lifestyle in an altogether different climate from Scotland in November.

6 November 2010
Ye May Gang Faur and Fare Waur – a tribute 🙂

Now I don't often advertise on this blog. But when it comes to food those roadside oases where weary travellers can stop and be refreshed by good food, hot drinks, pleasant service, – well, such places are hard to find. So when you find one, become evangelical about it. Witness to others about your experience. Share with other weary travellers the good news that there is indeed a place of quiet rest, of spread tables, where the body as well as the soul is restored.

Now let's be clear. I'm talking about the food, the people who make it and serve it, the price, and its convenience to the road. I'm not talking about ambience, plush surroundings, expense generating window dressing. I'm talking about "Ye May Gang Faur and Fare Waur"; translation You Could Go Further and Do Much Worse".

At the Stracathro Service Station, about 40 miles South of Aberdeen, this transport cafe is one of the best stopping places I know. Yes the tables are formica topped. The interior is about utility, hard wearing carpet, factory standard lighting. But the food. Honest, real, cooked on the premises and served by people absolutely confident that what you get to eat is substantial, not fast food, good value and no nonsense. Nonsense usually consists of high prices for low quality. This place reverses that – high quality low prices.

Take last night. travelling from Glasgow to Aberdeen, I had a light meal with friends before tackling the M8 and onwards. Two hours or thereabouts gets me to beyond Dundee and near Brechin. Time to stop. It shuts at 9.00. I get there by 8.30. What do I have? Forget the coffee and expensive pastry! Or the Coffee and fat laden muffin! Anyway they only serve home baking done in house or locally. No. I have a mug of tea. And a bowl of baked rice pudding!!! Probably the same calories as one of those soft, wet gooey muffin things – but different culinary cosmos. Nutmeg skin, warm and sweet – and by the way I declined the jug of cream that goes with it. I was looked upon by the smiling no nonsense rice pudding dispenser as someone who had flipped their lid.

"No cream? You want milk? Milk?? In my rice pudding???"

I quote exactly.

By the time I got back in the car and started the final leg home, the inner man was renewed, a kind of spiritual glow that had little to do with religious devotion – unless rice pudding can be considered sacramental……

4 November 2010
Mary Oliver – a poet’s gestures towards holiness

Mary Oliver at her didactic best – which means she teaches us without trying to, what we learn being a by-product of what her poems do to us, in us and for us.

"It is salvation if one can step forth from the

clutter of one's mind into that open space —

that almost holy space — called work.

I suppose only a poet would talk about work like that? Or at least someone for whom work results in the expression of the self in creation towards communication. The fashioning of meaning, ideas and image from words, touching the inner lives of others through the shared currency of a vocabulary congruent with experience, discourse with a shared language though perhaps different accents, these are indeed gestures towards holiness.

And then these lines –

Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in

my heart. It's going to take something I can't

even imagine, to put them all out.

As a writer, a theologian, and a teacher, I recognise in these lines that same gesture towards holiness. The sacred source of ideas, meaning, and the words that enable one mind to share with another some of those fires, lies somewhere between the intellect, the heart and the will. She is describing something deeply and definitively human.

(From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2010, page 52.)

3 November 2010
A Prayer for when the world seems unsafe

Sometimes you just don't know what to do. The world suddenly seems unsafe, or what is asked of us is just too much, or the mess we humans can make of each others' lives becomes an undertow that drags against hope. Bonhoeffer knew such experiences, and at the end of a sermon preached in 1932 just before the Nazi takeover in Germany, he lapsed into the discourse of prayer, psalm type prayer:

Do not let us sink with these bits and pieces upon which we are drifting. Do not let it be eternally foggy and cold around us. Show us the light of your Resurrection in all of the darkness of the cross…We who are children of the world, men and women of work, of action, we stand before you, God and pray. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are fixed on you…Hear us O Lord.

2 November 2010
Did Jesus Really Say That?

I spent an absorbing hour or two yesterday trying not to push Jesus through the grid of my presuppositions. Rudolf Bultmann's "Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?" is one of his seminal articles, and the question is a tad awkward. Can any of us come to a text without much of our mind already in the process of being made up by our experiences, prejudices, extent of previous learning, existential commitments, a bias in favour of what we already think? And when the text is the Gospel account of Jesus, what he said and did, how can we possibly read it without what we already think of Jesus shaping our preferences for the exegtical options?

Here's the problem. Luke 16.1-8a is a scandalous parable. Scandal, deriving from 'skandalon', "an impediment placed in the way causing one to stumble". Could Jesus really be saying that embezzling and squandering an employer's property, and then quick witted cleverness in using the proceeds to buy yourself out of trouble is something to be commended? If Jesus did say that what does that do to our view of Jesus? If he couldn't possibly have meant what it seems he said, what did he mean? And why did he say it in the first place? And here's the hard bit – how far is our difficulty in interpreting this parable due to our refusal to believe Jesus might have said something so offensive?

That raises further questions. Was Jesus being ironic? Are we so unable to think ourselves into the codes and norms of a very different culture, that we become postmodernists with a dangerous residue of literal woodenness? Does reverence for Jesus get in the way of that deeper devotion that tries to hear the authentic voice of Jesus, however disconcerting? In the parable itself, was it the master who commended the dishonest manager, or the voice of Jesus, or the voice of Luke the narrator? And what was commended? Was it the dishonesty, embezzlement and bribery, or the recognition of crisis and the urgent action taken to survive. In which case the methodoloy (cunning dishonesty) isn't the point, indeed is beside the point; and instead the alertness to see and the motivation to survive the coming crisis, that is the point. Or is it? Or is that exegetical option driven by my presuppositions about what Jesus could or couldn't say?

I am happy to hear from others who have puzzled over this parable in pleasurable perplexity and exercised exegetical energy extensively – and if you have reached any conclusions that might have survived the process of presuppositional prejudices – that is, if such a thing is possible? (Smiles broadly!)

31 October 2010
The now not so hidden cost of those spring onions

I like spring onions. Salad needs the fresh, sharp, kick of mild onion to balance the sweetness of tomato and the slight bitterness of leaves. Never occured to me to ask where the spring onions come from, and who picks them.

So when I hear that Romanian children as young as 9, and up to 16 have been harvesting spring onions in Worcestershire I'm appalled, angry, ashamed. But wearing a cotton dress and sandals in October and in a northerly wind with low temperatures. And as employed supplementary labour to their parents with derisory wages. At that stage I'm beginning to feel as if time has slipped and words like safeguarding, child protection, and human rights have still to be invented and legislated into existence. And then to fuel embarrassment and incredulity with more anger, I discover there is a Gangmaster's Licensing Authority which has the good purpose of "regulating those who supply labour or use workers to provide services in agriculture, forestry, horticulture, shellfish gathering and food processing and packaging".

And I am relieved and grateful such an authority exists and intervened in this case. But my anger and incredulity is that such a regulatory body is best described by the word Gangmaster; that such a body is necessary is patently and sadly obvious. But that in this country the children of migrant workers can be so unprotected as to be defined as those whose welfare depends on the Gangmaster (say that word out loud) the Gangmaster's Licensing Authority is for me a moral disgrace.

And it leaves me with several questions. Which supermarkets are stocking food harvested under such exploitative conditions? Do supermarkets have codes of practice for their suppliers and do they enforce them? How does such exploitation of children in forced child labour relate to the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child? What is the sub text, the subliminal impact on how we see other human beings, when we legitimate such discourse as "gangmaster"? What are the criteria for slavery, and which of them do not apply to a child with no choices, nor protection from the demands of the labour market, and no status in a country of which they are not citizens?

According to the Guardian, "the minimum working age in UK and European law is 14 although 13-year-olds can work in special circumstances. The number of hours children aged 14 and 15 can work is controlled and restricted to school holidays and weekends. There is no minimum wage for under-16s." Now as a boy I used to pick berries in the summer, and potatoes in October, for what was then not a lot of money. In Scotland the October school break is still called by those old enough to remember "the tattie holiday". But I was never forced to work. I was older than 9 years of age. I was paid enough to make it worth it. I had warm clothes. I wasn't denied school. And home was just a mile away.And the farmer wasn't a gangmaster!

The measure of a society is how it treats its children. To put it another way – this week, the measure of a society is how we harvest our spring onions.

30 October 2010
All the prayers I ever prayed for myself – distilled by the poet.

Whispered Poem

I have been risky in my endeavours,

I have been steadfast in my loves;

Oh Lord, consider these when you judge me.

Most of the words I've ever spoken in prayers about myself could probaly be distilled into these three lines. Don't ever tell me that prepared prayers are less spiritual than the spontaneous. Passion, devotion, consolation, contentment, reminiscence, self-knowledge, and humility with a hint of defiance – all in three lines.

The new collection of Mary Oliver's poems is too good, and too wise, to read through any other way than a carefully rationed poem a day.

28 October 2010