Musings on the resurrection

It's been a glorious resurrection day. I've enjoyed the sunshine and watched wagtails and blackbirds in my garden as the forsythia and cherry blossom light up the springtime urban landscape.
In an idle way I've been musing on resurrection, on the rather militartistic language of triumph we use to talk about the mighty resurrection of Christ. I've been thinking about how we remain rather obsessed with the image of the cross and seem unable to cope with the image of the empty tomb, the upright, masculine image of the planted cross is clearer than the more hidden and feminine image of the empty tomb.
Over the doors of the Protestant Church here in Ferney you can just decipher "nous prêchons Christ crucifié" 1 Cor. 1.23 and whenever someone suggests regilding the lettering I try to resist, wishing it rather said something about resurrection or love and not more concentration on the crucifixion and Good Friday. Our German guest at dinner yesterday said that he even now had the feeling that Good Friday was really the holiest day of the year. My rather speedy reply to that was well of course you're a German Protestant! Yet the piety that focuses on Good Friday means that the joy and exuberance and beauty of the resurrection sometimes never really touches people as deeply as the pain of the cross. Many German Protestants may only take communion on Good Friday, which doesn't really give them a fully rounded experience of the eucharist.
Today I've been reading what is available to read online of Grace Jantzen's book Foundations of Violence - Death and the Displacement of Beauty. I feel both challenged and reassured by her insistance that we are natals not mortals, concerned about my own obsession with death rather than with life. I've been wondering if I am up to the feminist challenge of preaching in a way that believes in beauty rather than is obsessed with death. I've tried a bit in my sermon for tomorrow morning, but I suspect in the end I am not radical enough, too loyal to the institution. Grace was a Quaker.
Anyway here is how Jantzen's erudite and intuitive book begins - I've just ordered a copy and have discovered to my delight that volume two has now also been published, real resurrection good news.
"At the height of the bombardment of Sarajevo, so the story goes, a string quartet visited that city. One morning, as bombs were falling, the cellist look his instrument out into a square and began to play. Soldiers, hearing him, rushed to order him to take shelter, 'You are mad." they said; 'get inside. Look! Can't you see what's happening?'
'Yes" he said. 'Look. Can't you sec what's happening? And you say that I am mad?'
Who is mad and who is sane in a world in which beauty confronts death, and violence silences creativity? How can we learn to name what is happening, and find resources for transformation? Where are the springs of hope, that could bring newness and flourishing into a death-dealing world?
Not all sources of hope are intellectual of course; but my concern here is with what intellectuals offer. It is my belief that what the world sorely needs from intellectuals is an analysis of how the thought patterns of the west!have shaped and mis-shaped the world, and how they might be changed to enable human flourishing. There is a widespread 'demand for a transformative practice of philosophy that would be capable of addressing criticizing, and ultimately redeeming the present' (Critchley 1998: 10). How can newness enter the world? Where may we look to find the resources for redeeming the present?"

Getting older - ach Happiness!

There's no avoiding it, I'm getting older. As they say it's better than the alternative, but it's also not easy to change to grow older, slower, wiser (perhaps!), faster too at some things. Interestingly older translators are often better due to simply knowing the job and work, I think I'm not quite old enough to have reached that echelon but I am nevertheless old enough to be getting older - if you see what I mean. I experience the problems but not yet the benefits!
For my birthday earlier this month a friend gave me Ach Glück by Monika Maron.
In 1987, when she was probably younger than I am now I heard Maron give a public reading from one of her works at the East Berlin Kirchentag. She moved to the West just a year before the wall came down. I haven't read the book yet but it seems from the blurb to be about the limitedness of human life. I wonder how I shall like it once I make the time to read it. I also wonder about how I shall reflect on a book which is about how we can only do some things we want to do and link that to Grace Jantzen's ideas of us being natals rather than mortals.
What would a novel of the endless birth of life look like I wonder, would I ever be able to write a hopeful novel of that kind? Or would I too be more drawn to how mortal our existence is, how short and limited life is if I wrote fiction? I hope not, but I'm not sure I have enough imagination to dream up a novel of natality. Perhaps though in some ways Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful novel Prodigal Summer does that - even though she has probably never read Jantzen.
Of course some would say that as I preach I am already involved in the art of fiction, I would of course beg to differ. However one of the benefits of getting older is knowing how to avoid pointless arguments or confrontations on such pointless subjects and concentrate at least part of the time on what you want to do. Let's tell stories that build trust, confidence and life.

Can death overcome death?

This morning Father Daniel Buda led our prayers in the chapel and we began by lighting candles and passing the light of Christ's resurrection from one to another in this symbolic way.
There were powerful prayers and songs as we contined to affirm Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!
There are several lines in the liturgy which say:
trampling down death by death …Christ has destroyed death by death.
On the bus in the morning I'd begun reading Becoming Divine by Grace Jantzen and was as I walked into the chapel trying to get my head around her idea of natality rather than mortality. I suppose it's not really surprising given those circumstances that I found the idea of death triumphing over death or death destroying death a discontinuity.
For me it is Christ's love, Christ's giving, Christ's following and faithfulness that triumph over death. If I had not heard and read the words the order of service this morning I'm not sure I would have so quickly understood what it is Grace Jantzen is driving at in her development of a feminist philosophy of religion.
Life, love and hope tramples down death but then I suppose my mystical meta-narrative would discern and fashion things in such a way.
Anyway despite these thoughts triggered by stray words in the liturgy I still felt connected rather than disconnected through worship and prayer, the message of the resurrection held things together for me.

An Easter sermon on Luke 24

Where are you with the Easter story?

Are you still looking at the outline of the three crosses against the sky, wondering about the terrible communal and individual violence that led to a prophetic leader being brutally and slowly publicly executed?

Or are you with the women carrying creative pungently perfumed spices - terrified and shocked to not be able to anoint the dead body in the tomb.
Either way the focus seems to be violence and death.

Yet somehow the words of the two men (were they angels?) dressed in dazzling clothes begin to convince the women that this is not a story about death but about the risen one. The terror is replaced by a remembering of what Jesus said to them while he was with them, and the women leave the tomb of death and tell their story to the eleven who dismiss it as an idle tale.

Yet because the women have dared to listen to the angels,
dared to remember what Jesus said to them while he was alive,
dared to return to relationship and to tell their story in the face of ridicule,
the story of the resurrection gets out of the tomb
And there's something about the idle story that sets Peter's feet running
Something about the grave clothes that makes him wonder …
Was it really just an idle tale?

Christ's resurrection was never a conjuring trick with bones
but was always about the triumph of relationship, humility, beauty, audacity and creativity over the obsession with death and violence.

The Canadian theologian and Quaker Grace Jantzen begins her highly erudite and very intuitive book Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty by telling this story and asking these questions:

"At the height of the bombardment of Sarajevo, so the story goes, a string quartet visited that city. One morning, as bombs were falling, the cellist look his instrument out into a square and began to play. Soldiers, hearing him, rushed to order him to take shelter, 'You are mad.’ they said; 'get inside. Look! Can't you see what's happening?'
'Yes’ he said. 'Look. Can't you see what's happening? And you say that I am mad?'
Who is mad and who is sane in a world in which beauty confronts death, and violence silences creativity? How can we learn to name what is happening, and find resources for transformation? Where are the springs of hope, that could bring newness and flourishing into a death-dealing world How can newness enter the world? Where may we look to find the resources for redeeming the present?"

Of course the cellist playing did not immediately stop the bombs
And of course perhaps it is just an idle tale and he never really played in the war zone

The resurrection is about beauty and creativity, perfume and tears being the key resources for redeeming the world

So the story of the cellist is still being told
And the story of the bread breaker, foot washer and tomb quitter from Galilee also still goes on

In our language about resurrection we so often get lost in triumphalism,
Talking about the mighty event of the resurrection

Yet actually resurrection is about a remembered promise in an empty tomb
It is by humble word of mouth that the idle story that changes the world will be told

Most of us will not play cello to make beauty sound out while the bombs fall
Though some of us in this amazing international place may have done even more beautiful and audacious things than that

Resurrection is about relatedness,
The joyous beautiful sound of laughter
Random acts of kindness

An encouragement to all of us to go on telling the idle tale
To overcome obsessions with death and violence and to feed Christ's resurrection creativity and beauty back into the world

So where are we now with resurrection?
Still stuck at Good Friday or daring to threaten the world of violence and death with our cello tunes of beauty and creativity against bombs, bullets and stabbings?

Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!
Let us in joy greet one another with this Easter affirmation – Alleluia!

Sermon preached in the Ecumenical Centre, Geneva Tuesday 14 April 2009
copyright(c) Jane Stranz/WCC

Further reading:
Grace Jantzen, Foundations of Violence – Death and the Displacement of Beauty, Routledge, 2004.
Janet Lees, Word of Mouth, Wild Goose Publications, 2007.
Kennings and Cookies
On the Vision4Life website

Word of the day: Aha-Erlebnis

It is official, I have become a "poseure" (yes I do inist on the final "e" please).
Now I should explain that Ferney Voltaire does not really have the equivalent of Aix en Provence's Les deux Garçons or Paris' Les deux Magots, so philosophizing is reserved for my morning bus ride. On days when I don't have a book I often try to read the titles of what my fellow travellers are reading. This week I've been feeling a bit of a fraud, wandering around carrying a book which has "Becoming Divine" in large letters on the cover. Regular readers of this blog will know that my usual reading matter tends to be the latest detective fiction.
Today I nearly missed my stop because I had what the Germans refer to as an "Aha Erlebnis". Something Grace Jantzen wrote really struck a chord with me and moved me. I suppose I suddenly realised that it is absolutely ok to think theological thoughts in my crazy, imaginative, feminist, francophone-anglophone, intuitive way ... I arrived at work feeling good about life, about thinking, about ways forward. Perhaps this really is what is referred to as one of the consolations of philosophy!
I realise that once or twice before I have experienced something similar while reading philosophy. I was still rather under the influence of Walter Benjamin when I first really met and impressed Dr B, and I remember having a rather minor epiphany reading a page of Adorno
many moons ago on an East German railway station.
Anyway I'm not sure that what I am currently reading will change my life but anything that can both nearly make me miss my bus stop and lift my mood must have some power to it. It also made me want to read more and believe I would continue to understand. Here's a small taste of some of what la pasteure poseure was reading - but perhaps the Aha-Erlebnis only came as a result of my longing for café society!
"... if ... the aim of philosophy of religion is to enable becoming divine, becoming our sacred sexuate selves in relation to the earth and to one another, then mathematics and rigorous applications of scientific epistemology are less likely to be helpful than are psychoanalytic theory, imaginative possibilities of human becoming drawn from literature and the arts, and careful social and political analysis."

Mortal where are you? Mensch wo bist du?

So I got given my Kirchentag's scarf yesterday. It's long and pale blue and has two cloud like bubbles saying on one "Mensch wo bist bist du?" and on the other "Hier bin ich!" (I have a photo of it but cannot upload it - same old, same old banning problem!!)
"Mensch" is a really wonderful word but tricky to translate, sometimes I just think we should translate it by the Yiddish mensch but that is a bit of a cop out! So do you use people, person, human being, humanity, men and women - what do you do? In the case of the Kirchantag theme in English what was finally opted for was a return to the King James translation of the Bible - not one I usually recommend - and the word "mortal". In many ways "Adam" in Genesis also means Mensch.
You can see that this is an ongoing issue in German to English translation by comparing older and more recent translations of Bonhoeffer's poem "Christians and Unbelievers" which begins "Menschen ...". One well-known translation begin:

Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,

It scans very nicely but it's not right. If my memory serves me right there is a very good new translation of the poem by Alan Gaunt in Rejoice and Sing perhaps Dr B can add it to the comments. The French of course have no such quibbles and just settle straight away on "les hommes vont à Dieu ..."
Mortal where are? Still trying to work out whether God really did create them male and female?

Anyway, as my recent reading of Grace Jantzen has been encouraging me to think less in terms of being mortal and more in terms of being natal, I'm having to change tack again here at the Kirchentag. In many ways though the approach to mortal humanity being promoted here is much more Jantzenian (I admit I enjoyed writing that) than using the word mortal may show. Much of our discussion at the Global Network Congress is about trying to find creative ways through impasses at global and local levels, tapping into our energies and possibilities to give birth to a new future.

Christen und Heiden - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Menschen gehen zu Gott in ihrer Not,
flehen um Hilfe, bitten um Glück und Brot,
um Errettung aus Krankheit, Schuld und Tod.
So tun sie alle, alle, Christen und Heiden.

Menschen gehen zu Gott in Seiner Not,
finden ihn arm, geschmäht, ohne Obdach und Brot,
sehn ihn verschlungen von Sünde,
Schwachheit und Tod.

Gott geht zu allen Menschen in ihrer Not,
sättigt den Leib und die Seele mit Seinem Brot,
stirbt für Christen und Heiden den Kreuzestod
und vergibt ihnen beiden.

Off to Rome for final part of course on spirituality and leadership

Sad that it's the last time for now that I shall take the night train to Rome
Here's a taster of a tiny (and bloggable) bit of what I have written so far:

Surf the Volcano, Visit the Circus: A Liturgical and Feminist Reflection on Organisations and Leadership

...

Reflecting on issues of management and leadership, I have realised that some of the models for reflecting on these categories are set, if not by an overtly patriarchal discourse, then at least by a discourse which sometimes forces women leaders into models that they have not always had the chance to develop. One of my concerns as an ordained woman is to see what models for women's leadership may be possible, could be developed, might be taken up by the churches and church organisations. How can I as a woman, how can women more generally find their voice?

Recent reading of Grace Jantzen's work also helps me to see that often simply by being and by having their own voice, women are putting a spanner in the works of the way things have always been done. This is a challenge and a responsibility for women involved in leadership, and something that male and female leaders in the church need to become more aware of to have a more holistic approach to understanding some of the dynamics at work in their organisations. In what ways do I / we as wo(men) leaders support and conform to systems which so often work against us? What does surfing the volcano and visiting the circus mean for women with leadership responsibilities today? In churches, such as mine, where women have been ordained for several generations (the first woman in my tradition was ordained in 1917) there is also the question of how we support one another as women leaders at a time when the clergy in many protestant denominations is being feminised.

Théologie totale and the future for gender and systematic theology

Thanks to Ben Myers' blog I have been reading Sarah Coakley's article on Is there a future for gender and theology?
In it I have come across the term théologie totale which is probably something I should add to our terminological database at work. You can find a résumé of Coakley's article here. I really like the idea of a théologie totale methodology, one which takes the spiritual and mystical search for God as seriously as the academic search.
Anyway I'm looking forward to reading more of Coakley, sounds as if her systematic theology will be an interesting read alongside Grace Jantzen's philosophy of religion. Theology that seeks to integrate the spiritual is surely worth working towards.

Luce Irigaray and the potential to become divine

"Love of God ... shows the way. God forces us to do nothing except become. The only task, the only obligation laid upon us is: to become divine men and women, to become perfectly, to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfilment."

Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies

"According to Irigaray the wisdom that women and men in the postmodern world most require is the wisdom of becoming divine, without which we 'shrivel and die'."
Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine.

Between the past, present and the future at feminist theology

It is nearly two weeks since our feminist theology evening with the excellent Anne Claire Rivolet.
We are this year looking at "Between the past and the future, living in the present" at our encounters this year and Anne Claire invited us to have both a personal and biblical approach to the question of "living in the present"
She began by asking whether "living in the present" or "living the present" (the French is Vivre le présent) is the same as "consuming the present, building the present, suffering or being subjected to the present". What is the present that the God of Jesus Christ gives us to live?
She ended this introduction with the brilliant phrase "my faith inscribes me in a different time to my watch!"
She then asked us to think about the kingdom, God's commonwealth which calls us to be actors in the present. We then spent some time thinking personally about an image from our own lives that brought this idea together for us. Anne Claire also encouraged us to think of a gospel or biblical passage which heléped us see this more clearly.
As always we came up with come wonderful examples - livign in the present is looking at the wheat rather than the tares, to not look at the speck in others eyes or even the beam in our own but to focus on what is growing and good. some spoke of the joy of simple Christmas pleasures; of the joy of recognizing that one's church is outside the church and being in the present of unconditional welcome of the other...

My favourite story was of the heavily pregnant 42 year old single woman who distributes communion in her local Catholic church. Living in God's present, included fully by her church, carrying the future and knowing it will be her baby and God's child, offering a present taste of the kingdom to those receiving the host from her hands.

In this time of exchange I realised and was able to speak about some of my own recent pain and sense of hopelessness. The biblical image I chose to focus on was of the grain growing in secret from Mark 4:26 - to focus on what is growing now almost unnoticed until suddenly it is time for the harvest.
I spoke about how in recent months I had discovered how destructive of the present it is to live without any sense of the future, or any sense of having a role in making that future. As I said that with a heavy heart I also recognized how much this is the case for so many, perhaps even the majority of the world's population. Subjected to the adversity of the present without being given any real stake in the future.
I was also able to say though that in my personal depression something had broken through the previous evening, a kindly offer to take me home, an attempt to rebuild trust. Strangely it was only as I began to see the future again that I realised how much I had been missing it and weeping for it. Yet somehow the seed of it had been sown and was busy growing, I sense there is a long way yet to go until harvest yet I can see that perhaps the fields may turn green and then gold again.

As our discussion moved forwards looking at how the present is the time of revelation, God is revealed in the here and now. Given to us in our own time. Our human time when it is penetrated by the time of God becomes an incarnation.
Much of what Anne Claire shared with us and encouraged us to share together showed how it is spiritual understanding, the work of wisdom and spirituality which help us piece together understanding and commitment to God's future-filled present. this made me think of the work of Sarah Coakley and Grace Jantzen, both working in the area of feminist theology and both insisting on the insights of mysticism and spirituality for theological understanding. A great shaem that neither of them have been translated into French.

Anne Claire is about to move from her responsibilities at the Ecumencial Centre for Catechism here in Geneva to become part of the Swiss religious broadcasting work based in Lausanne. She'll begin on December 1 so we wish her well with this new professional challenge and with her recent marriage. Our thanks to her for imbuing our present with a sense of God's ongoing future. That's what helps us go on living and find meaning in the here and now.

Playful wisdom - transgression and mysticism at feminist theology

I have come home from tonight's feminist theology group richly blessed as ever and laden with gifts, including a copy of Grace Jantzen's A Place of Springs. I am so delighted! I also got some very special Faverger chocolate and a splendid bottle of Ecrivain Poète Genevan wine.
Tonight was the last time I shall be with the group for quite some time as it really will not be possible for me to get back from Paris on a regular basis to be with them. This is a shame because the programme for the year ahead is really interesting: "Obéissance et transgression: Créatrices et créateurs à la suite de Dieu".
So we began tonight with an apple on the table as a symbol of trangression and its desirability. I spoke about mysticism and integrating spirituality and faith for this first session and we did various exercises - writing down the name of a woman and man who had been important for our spiritual formation, either folk known to us or historical figures or even ficitonal ones. Each of us spent some time, in the silence of our hearts comparing these two figures - had their influence been different because of their gender, is their a male or female spirituality or mysticism? We held on to and "contained" these thoughts as I went on to lay out some thoughts from Sarah Coakley's book Powers and Submissions about how "kenosis" the notions which have grown up around self-emptying have been seen in extremely different ways in by feminist theologians such as Rosemary Ruether and Daphne Hampson. In her book Coakley works carefully and persuasively through the text in Philippians 2 to offer a non destructive basis for kenosis as a foundation for spirituality. Tonight I was trying to pick up the different ideas around kenosis as a way of trying to move us towards thinking about who the God we pray is - I admitted taht despite decades of feminist theology I have deeply internalised a judgemental God - fortunately not the only God I have internalised but part of teh God I pray to. As we were workign through some of this I asked everyone in the group fot try to write some kennings and encouraged them by offering some that I had written earlier. I wasn't at all sure about using this form in a raomance language but it actually worked quite well. As we had some anglophone folk at the group tonight and I was interpreting myself into English most of the time it worked well as I tried to kenning what people said in French back into English. Two of my favourite ideas about God that came out of this exercise ( and I wish I'd had the presence of mind to write them all down but hey...) were "joueuse sagesse - playful wisdom and berceur d'enfant which I suppose I would translate as lullaby singer - what a glorious image of God.
I am so grateful to this group which has been my lifeline to sanity, theology and laughter over these past 7 or 8 years. I shall miss our time together but hope to drop in from time to time so as to transgress together.
We ended by reading Chouraqui's wonderful translation of the Beatitudes - en marche les matriciels - Get up and go may mercy be born from you...
A wonderful evening. And my kenning for God was "love maker". Maybe all these years of fem theol are finally having a bit of impact!

From All Saints to All Souls' day.

Reformed Christians don't pray for the dead, nor do we pray to saints but at this time in the western liturgical calendar I recognise in myself an almost physical call to remember those who have died, friends, parishioners, family, aquaintances and "witnesses" from history. People whose lives continue to speak to me even though they themselves no longer can.
Until my close friend Yvonne Workman fell ill with cancer and then began to die I had almost never thought about the meaning of all souls' day. I was living in East Germany when the news reached me that her cancer was incurable, the Berlin wall had not yet fallen and I felt trapped by this personal tragedy, putting away the letter which spoke of death as if this could change her sentence.
A year later, two months before Yvonne died she preached and celebrated communion at Mansfield College chapel on all souls' day. I can still feel the radiance on her face as she preached and then broke bread and poured wine. Now this memory makes me smile with something like understanding - for many years it made my cheeks wet with tears. This seemingly not very Protestant festival gave her gave her confidence and trust in the future, it lent further meaning, strength and brightness to the remaining few weeks she had left. She too would be part of this mysterious crowd of all who have ever lived and be rememebered and celebrated on that day; through bread and wine and remembrance she would remain part of the feast. On that day in the early morning of the cold chapel I began to glimpse something like understanding of what communion of all the saints might be, for a moment I may even have really believed in life after death - and believe me for a rationalist, doubting Christian such as me this is quite something!

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia, we sang that day as she radiated hope and joy.

Yvonne died just after the feast of epiphany. The tiny United Reformed Church in Wheatley was packed for her funeral, Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford who had preached at her ordination had to stand in the church kitchen.

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia, we sang again at the funeral.

This week I learnt with real sadness that Grace Jantzen had died last year. She and Yvonne had been close friends in London. I met her at the funeral, we led the prayers together, wept together and exchanged letters afterwards about singing alleluia - which she didn't like much. I don't know whether she was already a Quaker by then. Looking belatedly at her obituaries I'm really interested in her idea that Christians should be less obsessed with death and more committed to life - less mortal more natal. A feisty, feminist and profound philosophical theology from a woman who despite knowing cancer early in her own life challenges Christians to live, to live, to live. In memory of her, in memory of Yvonne and in celebration of their great intellects I shall buy Death and the Displacement of Beauty, part one of what should have been Grace's 6 volume opus.
The dead still speak to me of remembrance and living life to the full. I suspect this is what Mexicans have been doing on the Day of the Dead for many generations.

Transgressive fragments: crusts of exile, hope and unity ... a sermon

Transgressive fragments: crusts of exile, hope and unity

Sermon preached on 5 September 2011 at the Ecumenical Centre, Geneva

Texts:

Exodus 12:39; Matthew 13:33

(This text is unabridged and rather longer than the preached version!)

Two philosophical introductions

Three fragments

and something that may be a sermon ...

“I chose to work on the writing of Paul Ricoeur because of his insistence on rediscovering a joyful ecumenism” said Beate Bengard at a lunchtime conversation hosted by the LWF’s department of Theology and Studies just two weeks ago. I was moved by her passion at Ricoeur’s thought, perhaps all the more so since I had just bought a book of the final fragments of his writings called “Lebendig bis in den Tod” - to live right up to and right in to death, would be possible translations, but perhaps a freer and better translation would take up Christian Aid’s slogan of “we believe in life before death”.

While listening to Beate I thought of the work of another philosopher and theologian, the Canadian, Grace Jantzen, who was a Quaker. In her work she pushed for a thorough-going non-violent philosophy of religion, based on natality rather than on mortality. Unlike Ricoeur she did not have the privilege of living into old age. Her series on Death and the Displacement of Beauty in Western Philosophy remained unfinished following her untimely, early death. Yet her work and witness remain natal.

So these ideas of joy and giving birth to a new creative future frame some of the background to what I try to share this morning, perhaps particularly as we move this week towards the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Three fragments

In a concentration camp a father stands wailing next to the body of his dead son. He came quickly when they told him, now he screams in frustration because someone else managed to take his dead son's bread ration before he could. Dehumanized by a desperate system he grieves not for his son but for missing an extra ration of bread. Kyrie eleieson

The 14th century was a time of famine in southern England. Historical documents show that when the famine was at its worst the landlords made more profit. It's a story that may sound all too familiar given speculation on food prices in our own time.

During that famine the abbot of St Alban's Abbey - no doubt worried because he was losing his part of the tythe - ordered that the small milling stones, the quirn stones, be removed from everyone's house. He then built a patio with them. While the peasants could no longer mill small amounts of grain for personal consumption at least the Abbot had a patio.

The church's preferential option for the poor came along only a few centuries later.

More recently Globethics published a book entitled "Corruption free churches are possible"… kyrie eleison

An overweight middle aged woman refugee sits in the office of a British MP, she comes back day after day until he agrees to sign the papers allowing her brother right of entry to the UK. She knows her English isn't very good, she even understands that this is "not quite the done thing", she also knows she has nothing to lose. Her only child, a daughter, had died suddenly at the age of 13 just a year earlier. Helene Hurwitz-Stranz was a determined and tenacious woman. Her brother, his wife and their two teenage children arrived in Britain in April 1939, today would have been her brother's, my grandfather's, 121st birthday. Even with feisty defenders millions like him then were not so fortunate, neither are millions today. He was a fragment. Justice and dignity just a matter of arbitrary luck. Today the UK government claims as a virtue the need to balance net immigration. Kyrie eleison.

So now perhaps for an attempt at a sermon.

Just occasionally on hot summer nights when we sleep with the windows open I am woken by an exquisite and enticing fragrance. It's not often that a smell wakes you and makes you want to get out of bed in the morning but this does. It is the smell of the baguettes baking and the croissants crisping up from our local boulangerie. And it is glorious! (Though rather dangerous for the hips!)

This morning the fragment from the gospels that we reflect on is about the stage in breadmaking that precedes the wondrous smell of baking. It's a beautiful, if for us perhaps rather old-fashioned image, not of freeze dried or industrial yeast but of natural leaven raising large quantities of flour. Leaven works more slowly than yeast or baking powder but it transforms the flavour of the loaf more thoroughly, some say it even makes the flour more digestible. The best French bakers use "levain" - leaven or sourdough for their bread and not yeast or "levure", real baguette à l’ancienne should be crisp but slightly sour on the inside.

The parable gives us an image where the kingdom of God is growing in hidden yet glorious ways, we are offered a vision of God's promise where gentleness, joy, reconciliation and respect, justice and stewardship, care and peace are the sourdough kingdom values, raising the dough with authenticity and integrity.

For those of us working in ecumenical affairs this gospel fragment offers perhaps also a glimpse of oneness in the future potential loaf, we could all share in together. A wonderful vision of the oikoumene.

And well I could end there, but I'm sorry to disappoint you, we have a little way to go yet ...

As is so often the case with the parables of Jesus the riddler there is something more complex, cryptic, playful and challenging going on than might at first seem to be the case.

The word krypto is even there in the Greek – even if modern English translations lose that sense – the woman hides the leaven in the flour. Is God’s kingdom about subterfuge, about transgression and by a woman? Is that the only way the kingdom will grow? Is Jesus simply saying: open your eyes to signs of the kingdom taking place in the everyday life of the homes around you. The kingdom is just like bread rising and that happens every day…

The bread of the Exodus, the bread of liberation, had no leaven in it. Today a Jewish household once a year will clear out all traces of old yeast and leaven, a ritual and practical break with the past.

Setting out into the desert and dependence on God's grace meant leaving the leaven of servitude and slavery behind and living with the unleavened, tooth-breaking bread of exile and with the manna which the early morning dew provided.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that amongst those desert wanderers and their descendents there were so many murmurings and yearnings about returning to the real food, the fleshpots of Egypt.

Over the centuries the spiritual unleavened bread representing liberation came to be prized above the everyday leavened bread, leaven is even judged as corrupt in parts of the biblical literature. There are warnings in the gospels and in Paul’s letters about the false or corrupt leaven of some teachers.

Yet as I return to Jesus’ clever and ambiguous parable I am struck by how it is the leavening, rising dough which symbolises God’s commonwealth. The dough rising speaks so much of hope, of the voiceless being heard, of the integration of the marginalised of the overcoming of oppression and the end of violence. The dough rising speaks of something hidden, marvellous and yet uncontrollable. This is what the kingdom is likened to - not to the baked bread.

As soon as the dough is baked – and those delicious smells come from the bakery - it becomes more fragmentary, less complete. Of course the bread actually feeds and nourishes but the rising dough is the subversive promise of all that potential feeding and sharing … all that might be possible.

Sometimes, very often even, I feel caught between promise and practicalities between the demands of the gospel and what I am able to do.

The French will vote with their feet, or tastebuds when it comes to buying baguette, preferring the bread of one boulangerie over that of another, though globalisation and the supermarkets are even eating away at this traditional discernment! I know I need to discern between the leaven of integrity and the leaven of corruption in my own life, in the life of the world. I know too that, however promising and full of possibility the rising dough may seem, the eschatological sourdough needs to be baked, the flavour of it needs to become real on peoples tongues.

And of course as soon as the hope filled dough is baked it becomes a fragment, bread that needs not to be hidden but to be shared, bringing straightforward nourishment, satisfaction and perhaps fellowship, justice or even life. Fragments of the flat liberating bread of exile, of mouldy prison rations or of fine brioche from the tables of the rich all have the potential to carry such hope.

Christ the leaven of our life offers the promise of liberation from cruelty and slavery of all kinds – the cruelty of famine, the slavery of materialism, or of abuse of power. That liberation is offered for both the oppressor and the oppressed.

The wholeness, vitality and natality of the rising dough, calls us to hold on to hope for all that is natal and joyful and hopeful as we try to bear witness and to live in such a way as to reconcile the fragments.

Perhaps the hidden leaven of God's kingdom will help us to develop an ecumenism of fragments which overcomes fragmentation; an ecumenism which believes in the sourdough values of the commonwealth, a bread which takes longer to rise, lasts longer and tastes better. A bread of true joy and not of manufactured bland niceness. The bread of tomorrow which feeds us today; its taste and texture speak to our hearts of life before death and of being one, if not at our divided earthly altars then surely at heavenly ones.

Jesus will not always put the fragments back together for us but he will say:

This is my body, broken, for you

This is my body, in fragments, for you

May the scales fall from our eyes and may all that is hidden and authentic within us bear the fruit of peace, joy and love which the Spirit wills for humankind and for the whole inhabited earth. Let us concentrate on that which creates and engenders.

Amen

Copyright (c) Jane Stranz/WCC

A good death ... ?

I had been going to spend part of these few days in Crete with a friend. At the beginning of September she took her own life.
Others have been writing about suicide recently and the weight of loss and helplessness it leaves behind. Rarely have I felt the weight of a friend's death so clearly as for my friend Suzanne, yet I wouldn't want to claim particular closeness, others were closer, knew her better. I sense it has hit many of us similarly and comes over us in waves. We just miss her dreadfully and we also realise that we are never really going to fully understand, even if some pieces of the puzzle are clearer.

As we met to remember and weep for Suzanne on that first day we learned of her death I offered the whole of this prayer by John Bell which I've posted before:

I will do it only once, Lord,
though my whole life moves towards it.
So I pray for a good death
when the time is right,
when I have finished my business,
when I have come to terms with my mortality.

A "good death" is a term that the founder of the hospice movement, Cicely Saunders, often spoke of. Sheila Cassidy who carries on Saunders' work speaks of "a good death feeding out into society".
Yet it is only some of us in a few privileged societies who will have access to such a good death. So much of what happens as a result of someone dying is desperately painful, messy and difficult, even when they have had good pain management of their final illness. Relationships that were already strained can reach fever pitch, people need time to even dare to find the space and courage to talk about their real feelings.
Yet even as some of the arguments on pain control and caring for the dying being a natural and good thing to do seem to at be being won, it is still hard to push resources towards care and treatment of depression and mental illness. In many ways that would also feed out into society and help to put the issue further up the public health agenda.
Writing about "a good death" also makes me uncomfortable at other levels. I know that if I died tonight my own life is far from in order and that the disorder will make things difficult for those who love me. I've written quite a bit in recent months about Grace Jantzen's idea of us being natal rather than mortal. I'm not sure how this translates into practical theological terms but perhaps it means preparing funerals, wills and writing letters a long time in advance ... though maybe that adds too much of a layer of Calvinistic guilt to everything. Perhaps being able to die a trusting death at whatever time, knowing that one is loved enough for such things to be dealt with is also a natal approach.
And it is such a privilege to even think about a good death as an ideal - for most human beings dying today this will not be the case as disaster, war, tyranny and famine rob them also of that last comfort as of life itself. Perhaps having a good death can never exactly be a human right but human physical and mental well-being and health are definitely questions of justice.

Others have been thinking about different themes linked to the issue of suicide and as a result Kurk Gayle (he is I am delighted to say back on the blog) left the following quote in a comment. It's an extraordinary example of palliative mental health care in extreme circumstance, in any other context I might issue a warning about suffering not being redemptive.

"... Victor Frankl [was] an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who in 1942 was deported to Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp that housed Jews in transit to Auschwitz. While in the camp, and later in Auschwitz, Frankl studied and journaled about his and others' conditions of despondency. He was separated from his wife and lost his parents in the ghetto, yet he still worked to prevent suicide among his fellow prisoners among fellow prisoners. Interfering with suicides was prohibited by Nazi guards, but Frankl whispered in people's ears all the same. The essence of his whispers were that life, even amid the absurdity of human suffering, still had meaning. Suffering, as absurd as it seemed, pointed to a greater story in which, if one would only construe himself [or herself] as a character within, [she or] he could find fulfillment in his [or her] tragic role, knowing the plot was headed toward redemption. Such an understanding would take immense humility and immeasurable faith, a perspective perhaps achieved only in the context of near hopelessness.
Frankl's papers, written after surviving the camps, and even after losing his wife to the Nazis, indicated a philosophical conclusion that misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning. Contrary to Freud's posit that man[kind]'s greatest pursuit is of pleasure ... For the prisoners Frankl helped in the concentration camps, a chance for survival was increased by a person's ability to dwell in a spiritual domain, a place where the SS could not intrude."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, pp 195-96

The problem of evil ...

As always over on Ben Myers Faith and Theology blog there is an excellent discussion on the question of evil beginning as a result of Kim Fabricius posting his vote of thanks following a lecture on “Horrendous Evils: A Theological Problem of Evil and its Solution” at the University of Swansea by Marilyn McCord Adams.
I've been thinking alot about evil recently, its banality, its horrendousness, its attractiveness. That terrible phrase "for evil to triumph all it takes is for the good to say nothing" rings too often in my ears. Evil requires countering.
I don't believe in a theology of meaning in suffering - certainly not in a theology which imposes meaning on those who suffer. I also don't at all believe there is meaning in either banal or horrendous evil.
One of those commenting on Kim's post mentions Hans Jonas' Theology after Auschwitz. This made me once more remember the work on a similar theme of my friend Alain Blancy, the tentative final version of his paper (written a few days before he died) on theology after Auschwitz seemed to indicate it might be possible to blame God as the only theological way through impossible, unthinkable evil.
I'm still not sure about this, though the Psalms often have no such qualms!
But as I think this evening of news received in recent days from Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, the local women's refuge ... I somehow do not feel it is "enough" to simply blame God and so get over the problems of evil.
After all in the play God on trial, after God has indeed been found guilty, those who have judged God turn around and say the morning prayer.
What I sense I may be groping towards myself has something to do with grace existing powerfully despite horrendous violence and the silence that imposes. I can see what is meant by McCord encouraging a reaquaintance with mortality outlined in the second quote below. But I wonder about the sometimes prurient focus on evil. Is it possible to find a Grace Jantzen way through the minefield of horrendous evil, a way of of valuing natality and creativity despite evil? Perhaps a narrative theology that takes both evil and resistance to it seriously would be one possibility, a way of honouring that "suffering is without explanation or compensation" but is still part of our human and divine story. After all Jesus the Riddler threw down questioning, parabolic stories of hope, which did not offer simplistic answers to the ambiguities of life in first century Palestine. The complexity of the narrative of our lives linked to the divine may be my way towards living despite evil.

Anyway here is an extract from Kim's original post and from one of his comments in the discussion, and Bishop Alan's thoughts triggered by the same post:

Professor Adams, firstly, fully acknowledges the irreducible horrendousness of horrendous evils, the meaninglessness as well as the pain. Second, she knows that a moral taxonomy is insufficient to account for the sheer intensity and scale of suffering, and she knows that the free-will defence fails because of its overblown account of human agency (not to mention its competitive account of divine and human freedom). Third, if Professor Adams speaks of the participatory suffering of God, it is, quite unlike the process theologians, only in connection with a robust two-natures Christology: it is the crucified and risen Jesus who is the horror-bearer and-defeater. Finally, Professor Adams consummates her theodicy with a robust faith in universal salvation, not because all must win prizes but because God is good and resourceful, the maker and re-maker of meaning, and because the penal options (as she puts it) of “liquidation or quarantine” are hardly a satisfactory quid pro quo for hell on earth. And all so tightly argued: Professor Adams is, after all, a philosopher in the analytical tradition.

"Perhaps it is time for philosophers of religion to look away from theodicy - not to appeal blandly to the mysterious purposes of God, not to appeal to any putative justification at all, but to put the question of how we remain faithful to human ways of seeing suffering, even and especially when we are thinking from a religious perspective. Part of the task of a good theology and a candid religious philosophy is, I believe, to reacquaint us with our materiality and mortality. And part of that is the knowledge of suffering as without explanation and compensation" ("Redeeming sorrows: Marilyn McCord Adams and the defeat of evil", in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, pp. 271-72).