Monday, 17 December 2018

on hymnic dissonance



There are some words and phrases that seem to slip slowly into one’s consciousness. Then, like terrible predators that consume their host from the inside, they burst into full glory uninvited. For me there have been harmless examples like “whatever” (with shoulders shrugged, lip curled), “yeah nah” (with emphatic disinterest), “sweet as” (which to my Australianised ear remains “sweet ez”). There have been more serious ones, too. I found “passive aggressive” suddenly bandied around every dysfunctional office, virtual or actual. I’m sure there were others. But “cognitive dissonance” is perhaps my fave.
It’s got lots of syllables, I guess. I like syllables. They’re kind of cute. They reverberate around the wordosphere full of self-importance, then die on a virtual pavement somewhere because they can’t survive divorced from their environment. They usually twitch a bit before they die, and it’s all rather sad at first, until they’re forgotten. A metaphor for us all, really.
Apparently, it was Leon Festinger who coined the theories of cognitive dissonance, but I suspect they spread far and wide beyond his intentions once they left his pen. He was big on group locomotion, too, incidentally, which always has me wanting to join Kylie Minogue (oh, and Little Eva and Grand Funk Railroad long before her) singing “come on baby, do the …” – but never mind. They might not appreciate my efforts.
Still, I was cognitively dissonating or whatever one does all over the place in church yesterday. You see, before Mass I like to grab a coffee, to centre myself, slow the world down, find some sacred stillness. Yesterday was no exception. I was heading to Mass at the cathedral (yeah, I still do cathedrals from time to time, and there’s a dissonance, cognitive or otherwise) but first I was reading whatever my latest world-expanding adventure might be.
As it happens it is very world-expanding. I’ve reviewed it elsewhere,[1] but Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar is a mind-blower. If you’re not sure where Sinjar is don’t rush off to add it to you bucket list. Not yet at any rate. Thousands of Yazidi were slaughtered there by Daesh in 2014, 500,000 fled as refugees, and the world in general has wrung its hands, hated the perpetrators, hated the victims, erected razor wire fences and elected governments of nationalistic protectivist hatred ever since. Yes, Trump, Morrison (or whoever the latest Australian prime ministerial incarnation is this week), May: I’m talking about you.
At any rate, Dunya Mikhail’s tale is not easy reading, and there was probably a fair bit of cognitive dissonance swilling around in my latte by the time I swallowed the last dregs and headed off for the holies. And yeah, I’m an old-fashioned sort of a bugger, and I like tradition and stillness, and awe, and ritual, and the kind of counterculture (yeah, there another buzz word) they generate in the midst of road rage and depressing news and bills to pay. So a cathedral’s not a bad place if one overcomes the vast emptiness (that reminds me a little bit of the universe) and the sometimes crippling weight of crumbling dreams and glories, sometimes-corrupted glories past.
And the hymns sung and prayers murmured and words pronounced are thick with accruals of centuries of hope, guided and mis-guided, saturated with the implication that countless others have stood and knelt and wept and trembled, and occasionally laughed and danced too, in this place and this tradition. They remind me too that while I’ll soon enough lie down with their dead the universe goes on and perhaps hope does too, and the vast vaulted ceilings (small of course in universal schemes, but vast enough) rumour infinity and paradoxically perhaps a hope greater than infinity.
Occasionally these contexts can slap the participant across the psyche with the wettest of metaphysical wet fish. Singing songs of celestial expectation moments after reading of the slaughter of thousands of Yazidi in the valleys of Sinjar generated brutal cognitive something. Dissonance will have to do. From the comfort – all things are relative – of our pews we sang ancient words of hope, set to a reflective tune, celebrating the victory of Good over Evil. We sung in our comfortable setting of a saviour, who
… comes in succour speedy
to those who suffer wrong;
to help the poor and needy,
and bid the weak be strong;
to give them songs for sighing,
their darkness turn to light,
whose souls, condemned and dying,
were precious in his sight.
I could not but think of Yazidi men gunned down in the pits that awaited their death, and the women captured, sold and raped, and the children beaten and often raped as well, and the perpetrators who justified their acts of rape and other violence as, believe it or not, a form of redemptive prayer. Infidel women raped by the faithful are, according to Daeshis, made houris, made virgin, so they can be raped by men again in heaven.
I could not help but think of Dunya Mikhail’s narrative about lives turned from innocence to brutal experience, trust turned to despair, children brainwashed to become Daesh soldiers (and canon-fodder) while their mothers wept inexpressible sorrow.
Nor could I help but think of Scott Morrison’s determination to leave these same or similar families incarcerated on Pacific hell-holes, or the European skinheads marching for the right to exclude the unfortunate from their protected lands.
With sorrow I recalled three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, fleeing atrocities related to the same struggles told by Dunya Mikhail. Alan Kurdi whose father Abdullah now laments doors slammed in the face of refugees around the world. A broken, lifeless body on a foreign beach. 
I think, too, of Trump rarking up mantas of hate, claiming (again) that refugees bring terror and disease, leaving seven-year-old Jakelin Caal to die at the border, dehydrated in USA care, where she and her family sought safety, liberation from the oppression of corruption and institutional evil, but of course Trump and his cronies have never read the Beatitudes.
Yet as I stumbled away suppressing tears easily because big boys don’t, but wishing they would flow, I found one tiny sliver of hope. Because in the end – or beginning – this strange narrative of hope in turmoil, light in despair, was born not in a cosy armchair but in a context of cruel persecution, and somehow, somehow those first Christians found hope in the experience of a crucified God.


Wednesday, 5 December 2018

giving sorrow voice






There are those tasks of clergy life that draw the jewels of tears. Tread softly, for you tread on my tears.
For the average run of the mill priest there were many of those moments. Were. Before civil celebrants cornered 70ish per cent of the scene.  Alister Hendery notes ‘funeral practices are in a windstorm of change,’ and adds, ‘It is as if the valley of death has been subjected to cultural forces that make the terrain almost unrecognisable.’[1]
In my own priestly career, I have seen funeral demands drop exponentially (if that is mathematically possible). Every traipse in the valley of the shadow was a sacred traipse. In the early Noughties, in a rural NSW community, demands peaked at a ridiculous and pastorally unsustainable peak of some 60, by memory, in a year. In my last year in parish priesthood I conducted only a couple.
Geographical as well as sociological factors drove those changes, but still. The tectonic forces that drove the changes produced some fine results, as mourners found forms of expression better suited to their beliefs than those driven by Anglican faith. But not always: I have unfortunately seen secular rites delivered with nonchalance at least as bad as any I saw in the terrible days when the vicar was the default in any community. I have been aware of some civil celebrants churning through an assembly line of grief with the pastoral compassion of cake mixer.
But there are other deaths, too. In his Earthed in Hope Hendery references the death of a city landscape that was going on around him; he wrote in the aftermath of the Christchurch/Canterbury earthquakes. He wrote, too, after Aotearoa New Zealand’s Pike River Mine disaster, when once more a nation’s psyche was scarred by the knowledge that many in our workforce live and work somewhere close to the cusp between safety and peril.[2] Anglicans in Christchurch have watched the long, slow and ungainly pivot of their landmark cathedral, stalled in suspended animation, hardly life-support, somewhere between death and burial.
At least five of the buildings I have lived in
have taken their journey from structure to rubble
What, then, when a city or a building dies? When the dreams of countless ghosts who have inhabited it are released into nothingness? At least five of the buildings I have lived in have taken their journey from structure to rubble, reminding me that they and I are but dust, and to dust they have returned and I will return.
Actually, having swum in a vortex of depression a couple of years back I’m partially glad I’m not with them yet. “Partially” not because I have any great worries about surfing the wave of all flesh but because I’m stumbling along rather happily – but yes, very stumblingly – in a new job that I would not be exploring if I were dead. In that stumbling I am working alongside some powerfully “in the now” fellow-stumblers. In particular I have watched with gentle awe as my new boss has addressed precisely the questions of the life and the ghosts and the death and the fading memories, yes perhaps even in that order, of buildings.
These are the buildings in which previous stumblers have laughed and wept and prayed and nodded off over decades, moments in which he has given lament a voice, quietly weaving full stop into the collective memory of a community. He’s been closing … “deconsecrating,” “secularising,” whatever …. churches in which our predecessor-stumblers have stuttered their prayers and hurt their hurts. I’m not totally unrealistic about these things. Buildings die, like dreams and like loved ones and me.

My father’s ashes were interred in the grounds of the church where his funeral was held, where his daughter was later married. Church, ashes, and the protea bush that marked the latter are all gone now, and that’s life and death and eternity (this side of mysteries unveiled, at any rate).
These are the buildings in which previous stumblers have
 laughed and wept and prayed and nodded off over decades

But my bishop sensed that, and trod tenderly on the dreams and memories of those who gathered in the little God-boxes, humble sacred spaces in Mataura and Athol, where the buildings face probable deconstruction (a fancy word from other circles that in reality means little more than knocking to buggery), and central Invercargill, where the great, the grand old worship space will be reinvented and strengthened against tectonic caprice, and become a dreaming and working and meeting space for a tertiary institute with a  truckload more resources than a dwindling church can or should summon.
My bishop knew the pain and the tears, and trod tenderly. The death of a loved one, the death of a building, the death of a dream. The Christian community has orchestrated and perpetrated some tragic wrongs across the millennia, and it is only just that our words, words that should have been the poetry of hope, have been baton-passed to other players, runners, whatever the metaphor. Yet we are kaitiaki o nga kupu o te whakapono, custodians of words of faith; these are words that include lament, the wailings of breaking human hearts, odes mumbled in the shadows of broken and dying dreams. Ours are words that acknowledge the brutality of death – we die, we do not merely pass – and yet there dare to rumour hope.
This bishop’s words were not his alone but words drawn into order by a community of hurting, stumbling, hoping peoples, giving sorrow voice.  As it happens I fear many, many more churches, outward and visible signs of our stumbling prayers, will surf the wave of all flesh. Many more if not all of our buildings will disintegrate or reintegrate and become “former” churches. C’est la vie.
But if, as my bishop did, we find sensitive and soul-filled stutterings to give human sorrow its voice then we may yet have a place in the landscape of world society. Perhaps if we learn to listen we may have a place even until the warming planet breathes its last and we are all both dead and alive in the mysteries of eternity, where tears shall be no more.  

(Dr) Michael Godfrey

Diocese of Dunedin
Ministry Educator 



[1] Alister Hendery, Earthed in Hope: Dying, Death and Funerals – a Pakeha Anglican Perspective (Wellington: Philip Garside, 2014), 12.
[2] A quick Google search of NZ mining disasters highlights the vulnerability of those employed in that industry. See https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10688752