November 2024 – Glenn Myers

Making things whole (in a crumbly world)

With a cherry on top. Photo by Nik on Unsplash

We are all at it. It’s extraordinary.

I’m willing to guess that whatever you do, making things complete and whole is a big part of it. The passion unites hotel bed-makers and people not burning toast and people launching space probes. Or doctors or plumbers or interior designers or teachers or graphic artists or anybody.

It’s so deep inside us: make things, perfect things, complete things, tidy things up, sort things out. Make things whole. The meal isn’t cooked (as I am sometimes reminded) if the surfaces aren’t wiped and peelings have fallen into the cutlery drawer. A bike isn’t fixed until it’s fixed. A life isn’t complete if it didn’t end well. The baby needs a clean nappy and nice clothes and to look cosy and happy. The books aren’t complete if they don’t balance. All over the world, if we could just hear it, is the sound of things being sorted out, done properly, made neat and tidy, finished, polished, dusted, double-underlined, with a cherry on top.

This is all the more odd because we live in world where everything crumbles, wears out, has its day, breaks, tarnishes, rots; or is anyway deeply flawed, provisional, partial, compromised and just not quite completely whole.

I’ve been reading the Old Testament scholar John Walton and his take on creation is that God’s involvement in it, as described in Genesis, is giving it form and function and then co-working with humans to turn back the chaos. It’s a bit of a setback when humans imbibe the chaos and become both part of the problem as well as part of the solution; a solution finally only resolved by, and in, Christ.

Here’s a fun thought though: when we (attempt to) make things whole, nothing speaks more loudly of God’s image inside us. Nothing is as fulfilling, as satisfying, as purposeful, as setting out to do something properly and succeeding. Nothing is so good for our mental health. Even if it’s just getting dressed. Every time, it’s like we’re answering some distant call from God.

Green old age

Last spring we held a party for three 90-year-olds in our church. In the months since, two have died and the third lost his wife of many years.

It was, perhaps, a good shout that we had the party when we did.

I was thinking about them the other day. I liked them very much. The thing that stood out, I think (particularly in the two who have now passed on) was their zest and enthusiasm for life. They gave life to people, rather than sucking it out of them (as an introvert I am sensitive to this). Bits of them were falling off into the grate, as it were, but the flame was still burning bright. I remember joshing with each of them, weeks, as it turned out, before the end.

A life-filled, green old age can’t be easy, and perhaps doesn’t always happen even with God’s saints. The Bible describes old age as ‘the clouds return after the rain’ (Ecclesiastes 12:2): it must be hard not to be depressed at yet another medical appointment, yet more health-related indignity, yet further limitation. Yet their record stands. This life, this life-givingness, is that what healing looks like in old age and decline?

The gospel industrial complex and the big drummer in the sky

(I am grateful for the writer Chuck Lowe for this brilliance, which I hope I have not sullied too much.)

You need to make something happen? Here’s what you need:

A parts list
Step-by-step instructions
Hazards to avoid
Useful techniques for greater efficiency

Apart from the side effect of turning people into automata, this approach was powerful for simple things like recipes, fast-food restaurants, internal combustion engines, mills, factories and much else. The Industrial Revolution (I suggest) was a revolution because of the discovery and application of this power.

It is such a powerful approach that we humans have totally lost control of it and are applying it to everything, particularly complex systems, where it doesn’t work at all. Here is a partial list where it doesn’t work:

Babies
Adults
Children
Societies
Economies
Medicine
Education
Business

You get the idea: anything human. I notice (following Chuck Lowe again) how what powered the Industrial Revolution has hijacked the Christian Church, or at least the bits I inhabit. (Perhaps Orthodoxy largely escaped? I don’t know enough. )

Right now, around the world, how many courses are being delivered, how many notes taken, about about how to get the gospel working in lives and churches: evangelistic programmes, discipleship programmes, instructions on how to pray, heal, defeat evil, live well? What colossal percentage of time and energy is wasted delivering and receiving these courses. Because what works for the simple does not work for the complex. Anybody who has spent the shortest time with a toddler knows this.

Abandon it all. What are we supposed to do instead? I think in the Christian sphere it is about the attitudes that flow from a worshipping heart; about love love of God and neighbour; about serving as your passions and circumstances lead and constrain; and about trusting God, the big drummer in the sky, to call the dance.

Following Jesus into the darkness

‘Seeking the one who is higher than us’: photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash

When I was a student seminarian, a group of us went camping the high desert in California. I am a timid sort, but a couple of our number wanted to explore some disused gold mines. Miles from anywhere, following the map, we climbed down into one.

At the bottom of the mine was a narrow passage leading to further workings. You needed to crawl through the rubble. No way was I going there, but one of our companions did, crawling into the claustrophobic darkness, and found a further chamber. When he got back, I asked if anyone else had a headache. Everyone did. Mindful of carbon dioxide accumulating in old mine workings, we left.

I do not think too many people in their right minds would follow Jesus into a similar dark hole, dark, closed in, rubble-strewn, deserted and miles from help. We wouldn’t chose it (unless you were my camping companion). And yet sometimes we are taken there.

I was thinking about this during a jet-lagged night recently, and praying for various people I know wh0 themselves had been required by Jesus to follow him into the darkness. They did not have a choice, except perhaps the choice to see Jesus there with them.

Why does Jesus lead us into the darkness? I think because he wants to show us something.

What does he want to show us? (If we could figure that out, maybe we wouldn’t need to go into the darkness at all, saving much trial and effort). I think it depends.

Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones and God showed him how Ezekiel’s words could turn it into living army.

Hosea saw a ‘Valley of Achor’ (is that bitterness or despair) leading to a door of hope

Caleb’s daughter-in-law, in words that resonate down the centuries, asked Caleb, ‘if you give me the desert, give me also streams of water. ‘
Joseph, exiled, jailed, and then part of the Egyptian government (led where he did not want to go) called one of his children ‘fruitful’ because ‘God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering. ‘
Peter was told ‘you will be led where you do not want to go’ . In the darkness of a prophesyed martydom, Jesus dealt with Peter’s deepest insecurity, his fear that he would again let Jesus down again at the last.

Paul despaired of life but emerged with a deeper realization that God raises the dead.

No-one emerges unchanged. Following Jesus into a claustrophic mine shaft, dark, isolated, cutting your body up rough and with bad air? You would rather not. But he has something to show you.

Dumped women of the Bible

There have been many low points in Christian writing for women. Of books that have crossed my path (and that I have of course not read) were the booklet from the New Frontiers movement in the 1980s, ‘How to be a better leader’ s wife’; and from a parallel school, ‘Queen Take Your Throne, Becoming a Woman of Power and Authority.’ Thank goodness most books, presumably including these, disappear down history’s maw.

One book or Bible study I have never seen is ‘Dumped women of the Bible’. It is a surprise, because it is a ripe and rich area of study. How about Rizpah, descendant of King Saul, who spent one summer keeping the crows off the strung-up and rotting bodies of her two sons? Or the seven concubines of King David with whom Absalom slept and who were kept in secluded isolation for long years after David regained the throne? Or Abishag the Shunamite, carer for King David in his years of enfeeblement, then treated as a pawn in subsequent power struggles? Did these women, and hundreds like them, within and without the pages of scripture, have thoughts, feelings, lives, sufferings, laughter, endurance and perhaps also faith? Not many queens taking thrones here but an awful lot of battered and bruised people having to find a way through.

How refreshing Jesus was, taking delight in lifting women up and doing down the male disciples. Look at some of the things he said to them or to the disciples about them: ‘She has done a beautiful thing for me’; ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go in peace’; and best of all, to the tear-stained Magdalene, the simple, ‘Mary!’

(Compare this with another divine voice in a garden, asking: ‘Adam, where are you? )

History’s motor powers along, leaving battered and bruised women in its tyre-tracks, but Jesus follows, picking up the casualties, and perhaps together Jesus and the women watch history’s motor chug over the horizon, belching smoke.

Or rather, it looks like history’s motor, as men, mostly men, with spanners and oily rags, tune the machine up, squeeze efficiencies out of it, reducing God’s purpose to checklists and the replacement of defective parts.

But in Jesus we see that God moves at the speed of the women and children.