A week of horrors

 

It has been another week of horrors.[1] On Monday Sydney’s CBD went into lockdown as Man Monis captured staff and customers in the Lindt Chocolat Café. !6 hours later three people were dead. A day or two later seven armed men attacked a school in Peshawar, Pakistan. Within a few hours 132 children and ten adults were dead. In both case armed intervention saved many, many lives, but for the families of those who died there will never be release from the weight of grief.

Three lives lost in Sydney generated infinitely more pixels and print columns in NZ media than 142 deaths in Peshawar. Philosophers speak of “otherness.” Australians in Sydney are only a little bit “other,” so we care. Pakistanis in Peshawar are a little more “other,” so we care a little less. Six thousand Africans die of Ebola and we fail to blink. One person dies in the USA and the whole thing becomes a little less “other.” Slowly though the enormity of the Peshawar horror grew on us, and we began to care. We have incidentally long forgotten to keep on caring about 276 Nigerian school girls; they were not shot, but probably sold into sex slavery of some form or other.

We notice that the perpetrators of Sydney’s and Peshawar’s atrocities were very “other.” The Taliban in Pakistan and Man Monis in Sydney self-identify with Islam (no matter that Islam’s International leaders disassociate from Taliban or the Da’esh group that Monis claimed to support). To most of us that’s very “other.” We descend into paroxysm of fear of otherness, and hatred erupts: this is why we mustn’t let “them” (the great word of “otherness”) into “our” country. Muslims in non-Muslim communities cringe once more as hate vomits in the streets. We lower ourselves to the standards of Taliban and Man Monis.

Suddenly a remarkable counter-culture takes off: the hashtag #I’ll Ride With You erupts, expressing of practical compassion. Ordinary people begin saying that other ordinary people should not be victims of hate just because of the actions of haters in the Lindt Café or Peshawar. Ordinary people ride the Sydney trains with Muslim people, saying “actually you’re welcome here; we no more judge you by the actions of Taliban or a mentally deranged fake sheik than we judge Christians by the action of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh or one time theological student Joseph Stalin.” Ordinary people exercise radical compassion and practical love.

There will be the usual cries that religion is the source of all evil. Taliban and Man Monis identified as Muslim and wore non-western garb, clothes of “otherness.” Practitioners of evil have always used religion as their excuse: recently Buddhists have killed Muslims in Burma and Sri Lanka.  Jews have killed Muslims in the West Bank, retaliation for Muslims killing Jews in the same place. Sunni Muslims of Da’esh have killed Shia Muslims, Christians, Jews, Yasidis and others in the Levant. Christian extremists (terrorists), particularly in the USA, have killed Muslims, Sikhs, and abortion doctors (and anyone else they didn’t like) whenever they have reinvented the voice of God inside their heads.

Nationalism, born of the arbitrary lines drawn on nineteenth and twentieth century maps, born of European exploitation of the rest of the world, born of oppression and disappointment and anger, has far more to do with extremism than religion. Religion becomes a foil for hatred, exploitation and revenge. Practitioners and non-practitioners of religion alike occasionally rise to moments of counter-cultural brilliance: #I’llridewithyou was not a religious movement, but a deeply human and countercultural movement that those of us who are religious should applaud. Religious practitioners must bend over backwards to demonstrate that hatred of the “other,” that violence and exploitation and injustice are not the truth to follow. The Taliban in Peshawar and Man Monis in Sydney are products of oppression and perpetrators of hatred. We only advance their crimes if our response, too, is to hate and oppress.

Christians this month will celebrate the birth of the God-child. That exemplary child of Bethlehem exercised volatile action only once: when he took to exploitative hypocrites in the temple of his faith. Our task is to exercise practical love and justice, learning from those like the #I’llridewithyou initiators of Sydney, breaking cycles of hatred exercised by false religionists like the Taliban and Man Monis, and ensuring that love, not hate, has the final word.

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[1] This piece was written before the Cairns multiple killing.

striving for mediocrity

Originally published

as a

COLUMN FOR MARKET-PLACE

DECEMBER 2004

Since 1980 business has taken over the language of mission. Mission statements take pride of place on walls and prospectuses. Since the early 1990s the once-called public service, including education and health sectors, has utilized the same process language. Since the late 1990s the community of faith has awoken to a bright idea, noticed that “relevance” is heralded by mission statements and vision statements the world over, and vomited them out willy-nilly.  Change a word here and a commodity there and the various statements could have been mass-produced in a Beijing factory. Lear jets, antitank missiles, super dooper fatburgers, grade six and the gospel all utilize the same bland idiom. 

“Process language” is a formal term given to language produced not by passion, but by, yes, process. This is not the language of the making of love or the making of hatred, but the language of manufacturing a carefully contrived outcome designed to please all comers.

The language of passion cries out “let’s make love.” The language of process multiloquates: “recognizing the existential state of human aloneness in which you and I coexist, and recognizing also the universal human longing for procreative and, as a possible by-product of the procreative, recreative encounter, we will, subject to mutual  acceptability, facilitate a personal encounter that addresses this existential bifurcation and thereby provides conjoined enrichment and satisfaction. We will maintain this co-operative encounter for as long as it is reciprocally edifying.”

Sure, it’s possible to reduce the number of syllables, but the pseudo-legalese cover-all-bases of mission statements bends over backwards, sideways and diagonal-ways to ensure that every possible dimension of every contributor’s perspective is affirmed and included in the final printed outcome. The desire to make love requires a very limited number of – (let’s avoid the trendy in-speak “players” and opt for a good old-fashioned noun) – participants. Provision of a commodity or a service will involve a greater number of participants – (let’s avoid, too, the ghastly “stakeholders”) – and the number of bases covered and egos satisfied suddenly seems to necessitate a broader, wider, more widely acceptable catena of non- or not-too-specific words, clauses, phrases, sub-clauses. Like a poem written by a committee, it eschews the personal and achieves the general:

this parish/school/retail outlet/factory/agency is committed

to produce the highest standard of worship/education/service/product/assistance.

Using a wide range of traditions/educational methods/suppliers/materials/networks

we will offer relevant/up to date/fiscally responsible/strong/wide-ranging

encounters with the Divine/whole-of-life formation/weaponry/prophylactic products/community service

to as wide as possible a sector of the community in which we serve. 

To establish such a statement it is desirable to incorporate the views and opinions of as many as participate in the planning. Staff, volunteers, all, are asked to submit phrases and to attain broad consensus. In that process of ultra-egalitarianism passion is lost. As mid afternoon migraines set in and we are still bogged down on whether our liturgy/weaponry/burgery is supposed to be relevant/uplifting/life-enhancing or world shattering a vocation to climb a pillar in the middle of a desert attracts.

In my case a certain nasty and subversive imagination begins to gnaw at my consciousness. I begin to pen an alternative mission: “Plastic burgers Inc. is sort of committed, perhaps, to producing sheer tasteless fat. Knowing that our customers live in a world of mediocrity we will endeavour to out-blasé the most tasteless of all plastic soggies.”  Or an ecclesiastical equivalent: “this parish will strive in a non-interested way to achieve mediocrity in all facets of its existence.”

When Jesus said “come, follow me”, I wasn’t turned on by his cautious egalitarianism or the inclusiveness of his vision. I wasn’t impressed by the manner in which he and his disciples – (who had previously tendered expressions of interest in facilitating his mission and presented a memorandum of understanding of their co-facilitationary role) – provided a well rounded strategy inclusive of all possible eventualities and impacts of their mission. I was attracted by the urgency of his challenge and the passion of his commitment (and that of his followers).

Ultimately we will generate more God-interest by imitating the heroic desert fathers – many of whom did opt out of meaninglessness to face the tumultuous challenge of pillar-sitting – or the impulsive disciples than by producing vacuous, if well intended and much-owned, mission statements. We have a mission statement – albeit one imposed on us: “go: make disciples.” I’ve yet to see an improvement on that.

Believing in a rational world

 

SERMON PREACHED AT WOODFORD HOUSE GIRLS COLLEGE
HAVELOCK NORTH
A EUCHARIST OF REMEMBRANCE

 

Reading:              John 6:37-40

 

Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; ³⁸ for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. ³⁹ And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. ⁴⁰ This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

When someone that we know as John wrote down a whole lot of Jesus sayings and wove them into the book we know as “John” or the “Fourth Gospel” he did so because he wanted his listeners (for such they were) to encounter the awe and the mystery and the hope and the joy that he had encountered in loving and serving one the Romans felt was no more than a crucified crim, but who he and his companions though had in some mysterious way overcome that most horrendous of deaths, not by not dying, but by dying and rising again.

Of course in a scientific rational world in which we love we know that dead friends don’t come bopping back a few days later. We are human: we wish with all our heart that they could or world, but the silent space they leave behind remains silent, the empty chairs and empty tables remain empty, and the ache of a human heart goes on. In our world we readily mock silly people who talk to their imaginary friend and hope things will get better.

Actually they did when John was writing, too. They didn’t really think that loved ones came back and sat at the table where we last saw them, even then. They weren’t dumb. Yet something had changed for them, and it was something so powerful that they were prepared to die for it. They felt that in the experience of worshipping and loving and serving the now unseen crucified, dead Jesus – and sceptics then would refer to them too as silly people who had an imaginary friend – in loving and serving and worshipping this person (that few if any of them had actually ever seen) they found supremely powerful hope. They found hope for themselves. They found hope for their friends – friends who they had shared life and love with but who now were dead – and they found and felt hope for their world.

They remembered Jesus talking about something called resurrection, and they felt his presence so powerfully in their worship and in getting together to pray and eat and sing that they began to understand what he had meant. They came to believe passionately that sadness and loss and even death were not the end, though they remain a passage through which they and we and those they loved and those we love must pass. They came to believe, against all the cynicism around them that even death was just a parenthesis, a break in transmission, a kind of brutal loss but yet one which would not end the experiences of love and fellowship.  People then talked about silly Christians and their Imaginary Friend, but slowly the compassion and the love and the hope the Christian community demonstrated began to attract others, too.

Sometimes in our rational world it’s hard to believe all that stuff. And yet every now and again I experience something so uncannily irrational, so utterly powerful in its rumouring of a life beyond the merely here and now, that I cling as those first Christians did to this weird thing called Christian belief. Through three and a half decades now it’s seen me through some pretty interesting times, and given me powerful experiences of love and hope and joy along the way. So I guess I get what those first Christians were on about as they remembered their loved ones, hoped for them in Christ, and dedicated their lives to believing in Jesus.

Da'esh and the compassion imperative

Last week Assyrian priest Fr Aprem Pithyou, of the Ancient Church of the East in Wellington, challenged New Zealand to take on refugees displaced by the atrocities currently escalating in the Levant. I am not quite a pacifist, but I am no fan of the George W. Bush approach to international relations, either. To be honest I’m not sure what the political and military response should be when a terrorist group act in the way Da’esh are acting. I suspect they are hoping to provoke a western ground troop reaction, hoping that will garner further sympathy from Sunni governments, and that this heightened sympathy will translate into increased military aid to their aims.

As it happens I doubt Da’esh will succeed in that outcome, and they have probably pushed too far too fast even by the standards of Sunni-favouring governments. International Islamic leaders have spoken out against their atrocities, and the major Arab nation most antagonistic to the West, Iran, is a Shi’ite nation alienated and angered by Da’esh executions of Shi’ite believers. Nations such as Nigeria or Morocco, potentially sympathetic to Da’esh’s Sunni claims, are likely to be the melting pots of dangerous but disorganized hatred rather than responding as unified political and military units.

We might ask whether a united military response to Da’esh will achieve anything but more hatred. Logistical and military support to Turkey and the Kurds is the best response, but leaders like Obama have access to far more information than I do, and even Key may know a thing or two I don’t. If he is merely chest-beating (the Thatcher technique, perfected in the Falklands) then he deserves total scorn, but I cannot yet be sure of that.

What I am sure of is that Fr. Aprem Pithyou is right. Whether or not we spend tax-payers’ dollars on SAS involvement in the Levant, we should be spending money to host the refugees, the must vulnerable of God’s people. Fr. Aprem has pleaded for a far greater international (and NZ) response to the growing humanitarian crisis now no longer limited to Syria but across the Plains of Nineveh, as fierce northern winters approach. Many of the refugees have fled at gunpoint, leaving everything.

Many of those fleeing are Christian, and while this should not alter our compassion it reminds the xenophobic in our communities, especially amongst the NZ Christian right wing, that this is no mere bleeding heart wish, but a gospel imperative.

Let’s spend more energy and money on compassion than on militaristic chest-beating or pissing contests. Let’s open our hearts to the needy—and probably be surprised at the talent and rich diversity they might bring.

 

“Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”

THOUGHTS FOR RE-PITCHING THE TENT

SESSION THREE: THE CHURCH BUILDING

Luke 4:16

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read.

In New Zealand. post Māori renaissance, we might read this verse as “When he came to Nazareth, where his whakapapa was …”. The Greek conveys the sense not only of growing up but of immersion in a culture, not such chronology but Story. Luke, who has interests in establishment religion, wants his audience to see that Jesus is a pious Jew, however rebellious, and that he is from Nazareth – ko Nahareta tōna iwi. This was presumably because, despite the inconvenient business of having to be born in Bethlehem in the interests of prophetic fulfilment and Herodian politics, Jesus was known as a Nazarene. Some of you will be aware that, in scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany, ISIL/ISIS/IS activists are painting the Arabic symbol (ن) nun on the doors of Christians, who they refer to as Nazarenes after the hometown of our founder.

Luke is keen that Jesus is seen as having a place of belonging for th4\e sake of civic authentication, but portrays Jesus also as peripatetic, and therefore as (as James K. Baxter put it of the Spirit) “blowing like the wind through a thousand paddocks.” Luke walks a fine line between Spirit of Place and having what the author of Hebrews refers to as “no lasting city.”

To the Jews of Jesus’ time place was critical – and the place de la place was the Temple. But by the time Luke was writing the Temple was gone, and the synagogue was the only remaining place of meeting. I can think of no similar transition in pakeha kiwi history. All that was safe and trustworthy and eternal was gone, and the temporary was all that was left. Personally some will have experienced a house fire, when all that seems stable is lost, but there are few comparable experiences otherwise. For the Christians of the Levant that is not true. For refugees everywhere that is not true. All is transient.

As for Muslims today, Second Temple Judaism developed a dual-strand sense of liturgical space. The Temple was the centre of engagement with God. The synagogue, or place of gathering, existed alongside it around Jewish communities, as a place where ten or more might gather to pray. This roughly parallels the place, respectively, of Mecca and mosque today, but only roughly. Christians have no equivalent, though Jerusalem itself (pre fall), cathedrals and holy shrines sometimes fulfilled the place in medieval practice. The permanent became symbolic only, and a balance was struck between apparent permanence and actual transience. At the time Luke was writing the balance favoured the transient, but as the second coming was pushed back, and as Christianity was concretized, until WW2, the permanent began to dominate the narrative.

But in either type of space, temporary or permanent, the koinōnia, the sunaxis (which is the same word as synagogue and as synod), the breaking open of the word, anamnesis and the sending out into God’s world continued.

 Luke 9:57-58

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’  And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’

 Very few people actually offer apparently spontaneously to follow Jesus in Luke’s account – this and the following exchange are the only occasions. Perhaps it is reading too much into it, but perhaps the offer is in a sense an attempt to remain tightly in control of the “offerer’s” life: I will maintain the terms on which I serve God and gospel. At any rate, both “offerers” appear to strike a stumbling block: priorities. Scholarly insight suggests that both “offerers” were effectively procrastinating: “I will … when I am good and ready.” By the time of Constantine’s reign early in the fourth century the holes and nests had come to take precedence over spontaneity, freedom and itinerancy, and as roots of temporal permanence (a deliberate oxymoron, because even then most thought acknowledged impermanence) and mendicant ministries were pushed to the fringes of experience. Even the monastic life slowly reverted from the eremos to the monastery, and slowly became magnets for capital and stability.

Huge cathedrals emphasized the dominance of the structure and the permanence of faith over the life-experience of the individual: builders and architects and benefactors rarely saw their work to completion, so they were not necessarily Ozymandiesque monuments to self-importance (“look on my works ye mighty, and despair"). The Lisbon earthquake of All Saints’ Day 1755, with its subsequent fire and tsunami began to change all that: amongst a myriad other monumental buildings the quake destroyed the Lisbon Cathedral, the Basilicas of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, São Vicente de Fora, and the Misericórdia Church, along with up to 100,000 lives. Permanence – and the protection of God, were irrevocably called into question.

The cathedral tradition was not destroyed, and the iconic survival of St Paul’s in London in the blitzkrieg of World War Two became a symbol of resilience, but the hold of the Big and Presumed-Permanent weakened. Ironically the not unrelated revolutions of the 1960s, the Beatles revolution ("Six Days that Changed the World") arguably instigated by the contraceptive pill, and its pious cousins the charismatic movement and the liturgical renewal movement that emerged from Vatican II, drove the focus further still from the Big and the Presumed Permanent: for better and for worse the immediate and the personal came to dominate narratives of faith.

The Son of Man stepped down from the Grand Extremes of the Universe to become the clown of Godspell. At the potentially higher end of popular culture Kendrick’s “Shine Jesus Shine” and Pink Floyd’s nihilistic “Another Brick in the Wall” became anthems of, respectively, joy-filled faith and faithless anarchy, but each had the potential to slide rapidly from meaning to vacuity by overuse. At the sugar-pop end of instant gratification the more empty-headed “Open the eyes of my Heart x 8”,[1] or the commercial and vacuous “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” became dominant expressions of nothingness.

Somewhere out on the fringes though there was another voice: hand in hand with the vacuously sentimental, there grew consciousness of the Divine in the Everyday, the centrality of the symbol of the agape-meal, the treasuring of silence, all tempered with the observation that the symbol is not the thing. Instead of representing the permanence of God by building an edifice removable only by calamity, we learned that there is greater permanence that has neither hole nor nest, which neither collapses in an earthquake nor disappears in a hangover: silence and stillness and reverence for eternity refocused on bread and wine and water, on minimalist sound and wordage; under Jewish emphasis on the white space between the words and ironically Buddhist emphasis on the sounds of silence, the sacredness of simplicity and silence reasserted itself, and a new understanding of the Son of Man with no-place began to emerge. In philosophical culture this was most spectacularly represented by Nicholas Cage’s three movement “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”; in liturgical culture by the minimalist chant of Jacques Berthier and even the composition of Arvo Pärt. In ecclesiastical architecture and interior design it was represented by focus on the simple and unadorned yet eternal elements of  bread and wine in the midst of a transient, passing people, us.

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[1] “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/To see You high and lifted up/Shinin’ in the light of Your glory/Pour out Your power and love/As we sing holy, holy, holy/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/Open the eyes of my heart, Lord/Open the eyes of my heart/I want to see You/I want to see You/To see You high and lifted up/Shinin’ in the light of Your glory/Pour out Your power and love/As we sing holy, holy, holy! (Repeat two more times). ” Paul Baloche, 2000.

Cicadas

It was the cicadas that won. The deafening, ear-vibrating fortissimo of the Australian forest cicadas was dramatic, but it lacked the subtleties, the rhythmic Morse of the trans-Tasman counterpart. It became a parable of choice: in your face juxtaposed against seductive invitation.

For twenty five years the various guises of a harsh red island held me captive, not entirely against my will, thundering an eremitic sermon of nothingness. While most in the wide red land clung to the coast I sought the dust storms of the center, the ferocity of eco-systems that told me only of my nothingness, that I was an intruder, and that my intrusion was as nothing in the vastness of an unconquerable land.

The cicadas’ crescendo counterpointed the harshness of the inland’s deathly silence. Nothingness is your being: dust you are and to dust you shall return. The cicadas crushed thoughtspace, obliterated identity, and taunted attempts to hymn the universe.

Awhitu… karanga tangata whenua

 

 WHANGAREI

5^th January 2007

Goodbye: go well

The recent controversy over the departure of Hamilton priest Michael Hewat and most of his congregation from the folds of the Diocese of Waikato-Taranaki has, as is usual in the media, glossed over complex issues.  Sooner or later all dioceses face these issues, and as fellow-travellers we possibly need  more nuanced view than the popular press provide.

For one thing, this is not goodies v baddies. Michael Hewat, who I suspect it is fair to say operates from a theological and pastoral perspective very different to my own, is clearly a person of strong principle. His particular line in the sand is a matter of biblical interpretation with which I disagree, but I admire his integrity.

Helen Ann Hartley is equally a person of principle.  Her particular line is one of canonical and legal interpretation, that is to say application of church law, and she too is absolutely right to draw that line. To belong to a denomination is one thing (many Roman Catholics do not toe the official line on such matters as birth control) but, in purely secular terms, to be employed by it is another: the contested Motion 30 of General Synod that has become the bridge too far for Hewat is now enshrined in New Zealand Anglican Church polity.

Of course I disagree with Hewat, which makes it easier for me to pontificate about these matters. Although I am fairly conservative in doctrinal matters, I have long been persuaded that a) marriage has ever been an evolving contract (monogamous “marriage for love” is a very recent development, and was greeted with considerable scepticism and opposition when it emerged as a practice in the Romantic era. For what it’s worth, in the Medieval courtly world adultery was considered all but a duty, not that I am recommending it!).

If that were the whole of the argument I might never have been persuaded. In the end though I was persuaded (many years ago, incidentally) when I saw the vast chasm between theory and reality, as gay men and women were forced to live lives of self-denial (fine, if its voluntary), deceit (double lives are never fine) and emotional torment. Perhaps it’s little more than a “lesser of two evils” argument, but I could not believe that God, on the basis of the highly poetic sentence that forms Gen 2:24, would condemn perhaps 10% of humans to incomplete and unfulfilled and lonely lives.

Which is not to ignore the opportunistic and un-edifying approach taken by those who want to marry their dogs, cows, sisters, or sanction paedophilia: there will always be idiot fringes adding grist to the mill of the thin end of the wedge argument. I’m not sure I have much truck for those who want to marry while dangling from a helicopter, either. The NSW judge who recently declared that incest should be legalised was not showing particularly advanced intellect.

In the end I want to mihi Hewat and Hartley alike. Hewat’s churchmanship is fairly reprehensible and un-Anglican to me, so I might at one level be glad to wish him gone. But I don’t dance on graves: I prefer to wish him and his flock well. At the same time I am deeply grateful that Bishop Helen Ann has recognized that any body must have boundaries, the church included, and there are times those boundaries of authority and discipline must be drawn.