Category: Making things whole

Revolution in the air

But it’s OK

In a single month a while ago I made four visits and had four snapshots of quiet revolution.

  1. A tour round Jimmy’s Nightshelter in central Cambridge
  2. Taking some furniture to be recycled at the Emmaus community north of Cambridge
  3. Buying some fairly traded food at the Daily Bread Cooperative in the North of Cambridge
  4. Popping in to see the manager of our own St Martin’s Centre for the elderly.

Each place exuded peace and a kind of a quiet well-ordered-ness. Each place runs through the hands of many volunteers and a number of full-time staff who are not paid well. Each fights almost daily battles with bureaucracy and politics that threaten to capsize the whole ship. Yet each provides a vital service to a large part of a city.

Each is an expression of Christian faith that is unsung, long-term, wholly appropriate for the 21st century.

Then I read this quote — more appropriate to regions outside Europe, but still relevant.

‘Alongside the political, economic, social and technological revolutions … which have commanded enormous media attention and coverage … there has been this far less trumpeted, but equally important revolution in the status and standing of worldwide Christianity. Few have taken on board what is happening.’ (Kenneth Hylsom-Smith To the ends of the earth ISBN 978 1 842 274 750)

The Rock that is higher than we are

And we don’t quite know how we get there

Rocks, Sedona“Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”
― Frederick Buechner

So stirred by this quote. I think we can pray in many ways. Sometimes it’s good to lift up people we love and situations we care about, working through our lists.

Sometimes we can worship.

Sometimes we work our way through a psalm, or a liturgy.

Some of us like to use the Lord’s Prayer as a set of headings or jumping-off points, a kind of road map to guide our thoughts.

But I wonder if this best sort of prayer is beyond all of these. It’s to do with unpacking our problems before Christ until we come to a place, not necessarily of understanding, but of peace.

Or clambering up an impossible problem in prayer, scrabbling for a foothold, until again, Jesus reaches down and gives us something to hold onto, something that holds us and gives us quiet, happy hearts. The view all around may be terrifying,  but we are safe and snug, supported by some promise or gift of trusting that is beyond our understanding.

We have stumbled onto the rock that is higher than we are: Christ’s own trustworthiness. We don’t know how it happens, but it happens.

First light

First light: it isn’t dark: the sky is brightening, day is inevitable. But it isn’t day either, because the Sun has yet to rise in all its glory, transforming everything.

When the Sun rises, it touches the mountaintops first. The church is very like these mountains. We are positioned there in the night-time landscape. We ourselves are a mixture of darkness and light. But what makes us different is that without any merit on our part, without us even particularly doing anything, the Sun is shining on us.

Here in the night-time, we are already enjoying the day-time. God brings a little day-time to us, and through us a light is cast on a twilit world.

Something real has happened to us if we turned to Christ. The New Testament boldly states that when Christ gives someone a new heart, it’s a piece of the world to come: ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!’

Then—like that sunlit mountain—we are a sign of something, and an example of something, to the world around.

It may not be the end of the world

But it is the end of a paradigm

As has been often observed, the old paradigm in the West is Christendom, and it’s disintegrating.

We now need to rethink this new day. But we have help.

The prophet Jeremiah also saw two paradigms in his own lifetime. He saw the idea of God’s-people-as-a-country, with its surface-mounted devotion, corrupt and hollow, collapse — the end of one paradigm.

At the same time he called on Jewish exiles in Babylon to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jeremiah 29:7).

This was astonishing. God’s people are no longer a nation, Jeremiah was saying. They were to be more like a network. In his way, Jeremiah was as radical as Moses, radical enough to see what of Moses to scrap.

No more separation from the non-Jewish people around you, Jeremiah told the people of God: get stuck in. Keep your faith, but build a good city along with them.

No more Promised Land: now the God of the Promise, present with God’s people in every land.

No longer propping up an abandoned structure: now they were starting a new build. No longer a national focus: now a global one.

This echoes down into the New Testament, and is our call now.

Day 33 2014
Andy Atzert@flickr

 

A thanksgiving prayer for the ability to urinate

You shall be free indeed

Not found in common books of liturgy, I reproduce it here with thanks to the peerless Neal Stephenson who puts the prayer into the mouth of Samuel Pepys. (Lithotomy is of course the removal of a gallstone.)

‘Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that you shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun’s radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobbly stones hidden in our coat pockets remind us that we are all earth, and we are all sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr Waterhouse?’

‘Only, Amen!’ (p 500)

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What we lost

Not entirely as expected

New Years day
Nick Kenrick@flickr

The collapse of civilisation is, on current evidence, greatly exaggerated.

In the UK, teenagers are sobering up, youth courts are closing, fewer children are getting pregnant, crime is falling. Establishment hypocrisy and bullying (some of it ascribed to the church) is being exposed. Casual racism and discrimination are being challenged and people who were formerly above the law now seem to be being thrown in jail. And unlike my dad or my grandad, neither my son nor I have been obliged to serve the country as a soldier and, like them be shot at, shelled or gassed.

It may not last. But across the world (hard though it may be to believe), a smaller proportion of humanity is being killed by conflict, childbirth, childhood diseases, or mosquitos than in any human memory, living or collective.

An inconvenient grace

This is awkward in some church circles, especially in Europe and the West, where a story of national decline is as familiar as the story of Noah’s Ark:

  • Fewer people have a Christian outlook
  • God-centred morality is being replaced by harm-centred morality
  • National law is diverging from Biblical reference points.

The losses of living faith are I think real–witness the hulking, empty churches that surround us and once did buzz with people at least some of whom actually believed. But these losses of faith have happened in the middle of rising prosperity and health.

What then has been lost? May I suggest (among many things too complicated for me to understand) it is the shelter from the storm?

It’s what happens the typhoon hits. In my observation people who don’t know Jesus don’t do too well when crises and losses come.  It’s like they haven’t anywhere to go, no one to lean into when great sorrow pours down from the sky or erupts within bodies or families.

This is so massively, incomparably different for those of us in churches and with faith in Jesus. We are just as angry, just as confused, just as wretched, but unjustly held and undeservedly loved. And superrationally happy.

That’s the loss.

The arms of love that comfort me would all mankind embrace.

Giftedness: the sweet spot

What you love reveals what you’re good at

dog with balloon back hardwood dining chairMy friend’s eyes lit up when he saw the chairs, so we asked him about them. These were chairs that had somehow tumbled down through the generations of my wife’s family and ended up with us. He picked one up.

‘Aw, this would have been made somewhere between 1860 and 1880. Mahogany? No: rosewood. Lovely. Balloon-back rosewood dining chair. Put a little bit of detergent in water and they’ll come up lovely. Very easy to take apart, reglue, beautiful job, last you another 100 years.’

He picked up another.

‘But this one, ugh, look, someone’s put some screws in here.’ (The screws too were probably antique). ‘See, here too. Goes right through the tenon joint and splits it. Bodged job, no wonder it’s unsteady. Probably was steady for about half an hour after they screwed it.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘Oh yeah. But it’s a lot more difficult.’

The original job for which we’d called him in (fitting some doors) was forgotten as he lifted and turned and scrutinized the antique chairs with something like love in his eyes.

What’s hidden inside me?

What’s hidden inside you?

Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Extraordinary.

Behold the work of her hands

“I believe in the grace of God. For me, that is where all these questions end”

and then this:

“then there he would be, fresh from the gallows, shocked at the kindness all around him.”

I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading a book. I could feel the sobbing welling up inside. It was doubly embarrassing because I was lying next to a pool in the Cote d’Azur on a brilliant blue day, and my wife was reading Bill Bryson.

Perhaps it was post-traumatic stress speaking after my coma and paralysis three years ago. The book I was reading had the weight of an old hymn, suffering graced in music.

Or perhaps it was because God was beautiful and humans, like mathematics, need infinity to make the sums come out right.

Either way, Marilynne Robinson’s Lila is extraordinary.

 

What just happened?

Somebody sat on the Fast Forward button

Storm Damage, June 21, 2011, Skokie and Morton Grove
Oh my goodness.

And yet:

  • It’s always good to bet on the goodness and mercy of God. This political crisis is his doing.
  • Blessed (still) are the peacemakers.

I voted to remain and felt like I’d been punched.

Paradox, and what to do with it.

stormy photo
Photo by Karsun Designs Photography

Paradox can be a happy place, and leaving it for a simpler place just leads to trouble, I think.

Paradoxes are like the edges of our known world. We sail out to them. But however far we continue to sail, we realise we aren’t getting any further.

Is it true that in all the big questions, if you keep asking long enough, you reach paradox? Suffering and a God of love. Free choice and fate. Healing and sickness. Success and failure. Knowing things and not knowing things. Death and life or judgement and mercy. How can they both exist together? What happens at the place they meet?

This is the place of paradox, where we stand in the cross-winds. Or perhaps the cross-hairs. Or perhaps just in the shadow of the cross itself, where Christ resolved paradoxes by becoming one.

I think the place of paradox is a bleak, empty place, or a full, contented one, depending on whether we stand and complain, or fall and worship.