Buy a book against the luxury of hopelessness

So one of the joys of Germany are the bookshops, and one of the joys of the Kirchentag is the huge bookshop. I love this poster – Faith needs books! Fortunately even with a large suitcase I cannot buy everything I would like, nor should I. But the thing I love about wandering around tables of books I’m not going to buy are the thoughts that just the titles set off, they tend not to be particularly profound.
Yesterday evening I did buy books for my faith, (more about them soon) but I stopped myself buying yet more Dorothee Sölle, though I sense I would love to have her complete poetic works ... (hint it is my 50th birthday later this year) But one title of hers really struck a chord with me “Against the luxury of hopelessness”. How dare we live without hope. Is it the affliction of the well-off to live without hope? Maybe. Perhaps affluent societies, particularly those built on the ethic of competition, with work for many being a desperate experience of social-darwinism. Yet how does telling those who cry out their hopelessness that their cries are a luxury, help them or make help progress. I have neither bought nor read the book ( I feel I ought in honesty to add – yet …) I thought of the hopeless situation in Syria. I thought of my own battles in recent years with a sense of personal hopelessness. Had that tearful and painful battle been a luxury?
Walking away from the temptations of the bookshop, I wondered about the luxury of being hopeless and thought back to that time when I had felt hopelessness so acutely and realised that in many ways I had throughout that time continued to be hope-filled and to continue to hold out hope for others – at least in my preaching. Perhaps some of what I expressed at that time was self-indulgent. 
The Kirchentag theme is “as much as you need” Soviel du brauchst ... perhaps when we indulge in hopelessness then it is a luxury. Many in the world living in truly hopeless situations are busy - getting angry, saving their children, their neighbours, protecting themselves, fleeing and looking for enough food and water to make it through the day. they do not have the luxury of hopelessness.
I suppose the cynical me wonders about the false hope sometimes marketed to us like a commodity. I don't need much of that at all thanks. Enough I am looking forward I sense to another trip to the book tables before leaving Hamburg ... luxuriating in the commodity of buy books about luxury. enough for now.

The triumph of life - a poem by Marjorie Pizer

The Triumph of Life
I am emerging from an ocean of grief,
From the sorrow of many deaths,
From the inevitability of tragedy,
From the losing of love,
From the terrible triumph of destruction.
I am seeing the living that is to be lived,
The laughter that is to be laughed,
The joy that is to be enjoyed,
The loving that is to be accomplished.
I am learning at last
The tremendous triumph of life.

Marjorie Pizer

This is one of the poems in a book called Ths too will pass which I bought in Jamaica. It's the sort of book I rather depise normally, beige tinted photos, meaningful quotes, Hallmark style homilies, a feminine rather than a feminist kind of book. Yet it has been good for me to be tempted out of my inherent snobbishness into buying this. I knew nothing of Marjorie Pizer from Australia and her poetry, or political engagement. She sounds like my kind of person.
Sometimes it's good to listen to voice of intuition and just buy what the heart says you should go with, in the end this was not a tawdry book, quite the reverse for someone wrestling with the real perils of depression like I have been. Even if I felt pathetic crying over some of the more home-spun quotes.

Reading this made me realise that yes I have been dealing with this kind of grief ... and of course what I have been confronting has been nothing like grief at all - apart from to me. As my dear friend Nyambura said to me "Nobody died ... and even if they had we believe that is not the end." It has been terribly hard for me to piece my way back to resurrection again. Perhaps I am getting there, slowly but I hope surely ...

The Triumph of life is the title of a much longer and earlier poem written by Shelley shortly before his death. It remains unfinished. Just that fact speaks to me, but also the wonderous idea that the triumph of life comes back to inspire poets across the generations. May it also finally call me away from my tears, for no one has died and even had they, then I believe that is not the end.
This too will pass ...

Mango peace building at the IEPC and beyond

One of my abiding memories of the IEPC will be of eating mangoes every day fresh from the tree, the juice, the delicous sour-sweetness, the hairy stone in the middle to be sucked. There were mango trees wherever we walked on the campus of the University of the West Indies and it was difficult to resist picking up the fallen ripe fruit from the ground. There were lovely stories of people from the local organizing turning up with bags of particularly ripe mangoes from their our trees - "you really must eat these today, they're just right". So abundant, so sensual, so sticky and glorious, and so irresistable. I even overheard a conversation where someone from India was telling a companion who was stooping down to pick one up, "You know there is a theory that the tree in the garden of Eden was a mango tree". Tempting mangoes as the forbidden fruit, honestly I don't think Adam and Eve would even have needed a serpent to whisper in their ears, the perfume of the fruit would suffice. I have a personal pet theory - completely unscientific - that the mango may contain everything that is needed to sustain life.

As we walked and hurried and sweated from one event to the next, this image of abundance, nourishment and refreshment was all around us. In many of the workshops and meetings we were hearing stories of terrible suffering and pain. People spoke sometimes from a sense of helplessness, demands were made for someone to do something, the Church, the world, the UN ... The final message tried to weave some of all of this together.

Many of us from the Peace Convocation have already left Jamaica, I shall leave myself tomorrow. What do we take away with us? Extraordinary stories from often desperate situations, questions more than answers, ideas for ways forwards evoked rather than set in stone, but true expressions also of real pain and frustration, and of embodied tangible hope.

As each of us returns to our own contexts we try to take the fruits of the IEPC back with us. some of us may even pack a mango or two into our suitcases. Perhaps the perfume, generosity and juiciness of the mangoes all around us in Kingston will inspire our continued peace-making. A promise that peace can become as abundant as war-mongering and violence seems to be; a promise that peace can be shared by all; a promise that things don't quite taste the same at home as they did here but that we can share hope and experience.

I'm looking forward to sharing some abundant sweet and sensual mango peacebuilding. The fruits we have to share are less about knowledge and more about perfume. The time is ripe for peace with justice.

The darkness is also holy ...

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
Because you are precious in my sight,
and honoured, and I love you ...

A year ago I was quoting that passage from Isaiah after a mainly sleepless night in the hospital with Dr B. Tonight I came home to a gourmet meal he prepared and we have gently celebrated the fact that one year on he is alive, very well and looking to the future.

Meanwhile at the end of the working day today a good friend visited me on her way home. We talked about spirituality, prayer and wisdom. Sometimes I feel as if my own recent pain has torn not only hope but also wisdom out of my soul, so it was good to have a conversation about the darkness also being holy, about wilderness spirituality.

My friend spoke to me about the book Dear Heart Come Home - midlife spirituality. As we exchanged pain and hope, frustrations at the excesses of patriarchy and much laughter besides I began to piece together some small piece of hope and I switched off my computer and came home. Work will still be there in the morning. As a walked out the strong Geneva icy "bise" nearly took my breath away, a reminder winter is still very much here even if the recent week has seemed almost springlike.

Today truly I have so much to give thanks for. Sometimes gratitude is a hard and stony path of darkness, but it is a holy way and I trust it may at last lead to something that looks like hope.

Daydreaming and sinfulness ... understanding through the labyrinth and Simone Weil

It has been good for me to lead the retreat over the weekend to travel out and back and have time to think of different things. Travelling helped me get some distance from my recent pointless pain as well. The labyrinth, both the idea and the practice of it, helped alot with this.

I suppose one way I might now understand what I have been feeling and how I have been reacting to events beyond my control would be to say that rather than losing the plot I have got lost in my own story.
While preparing for the weekend in Lübbecke I re-read parts of For Lovers of God Everywhere which has so many wonderful fragments of wisdom and came across the passage below from Simone Weil, which I mentioned last week. It made me realise that I have perhaps indulged in a daydreaming of grief over the past two months.
Last week I found myself quoting Weil to someone who may yet become a friend while apologizing for seeming to have lost hope. These weeks have been a strange experience for me and I found myself deeply challenged while reading Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky and realising that I was finding it very hard to find hope. My facebook entry read:

Feels a little pathetic that a passage on hope in a piece of detective ficton moves me to tears ... "Me, I don't believe in God, let alone the coming of the Messiah. But I did learn from my Zeyde that you must live in hope, the hope that your work can make a difference in the world."

The only way back towards hope will be in the iterative labyrinth of pain and joy.

For a woman who loves daydreaming as much as I do it will be hard to give up getting lost in my own story of inner pain, but I suppose if I don't I really will lose the plot ... as the Bible says perfect love casts out fear. Love is not about daydreaming.

I believe that the root of evil, in everybody perhaps,

but certainly in those whom affliction has touched, is daydreaming.

It is the sole consolation, the unique resource of the afflicted;

the one solace that helps them bear the fearful burden of time;

and a very innocent one, besides being indispensable.

So how could it be possible to renounce it?

It has only one disadvantaage, which is that it is unreal.

To renounce it for the love of truth is really to abandon all one's possessions in a mad excess of love and to follow Him who is the personification of Truth.

And it is really to bear the cross;

because time is the cross.

In all its forms, without exception,

daydreaming is falsehood.

It excludes love. Love is real.

Simone Weil

Nothing can separate us from the love of God - solidarity in depression

A good friend phoned me on my mobile, she's never phoned me before, I didn't recognise the number but as soon as I heard her voice I knew she was getting in touch to offer consolation. I have been crying in recent days, feeling sad and as if the future has drifted out of my grasp. I'm normally rather noisy and upbeat, I suppose people get worried when this British woman can't control her tears.
My friend is a wiser woman than I am, she listened to my as usual incoherent pain and then warned me she was going to be unfair, "this is mean what I'm going to say you know, but really Jane, nobody has died and you know even if they had we believe that death will not conquer or have the last word."
My friend did not offer this tritely, I know her story and the death and loss she continues to bear. But she offered it out of deep compassion, her way of calling me back to life. It reminded me of the words I have read next to countless graves:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:37-38

Meanwhile as I return to blogging and reading I also came across this prayer on Steve Taylor's blog and found it quietly inspiring and reassuring.

Father God,
it is hard to hope each morning,
to look forward to new treasures and mercies,
discovered when we are alive to your presence in all that we encounter.

Open our minds to the endless possibilities of life and power and thought.
Help us to meet you in our everyday life, in our anxieties and difficulties,
for you are there with us in our pain and sorrow.

Lift us from despair to new hope. Restore and renew us each returning day,
so that we may find joy in our journey with you.

Amen

A prayer from the Mozarabic Sacramentary (10th century) (Hat tip)

Hope ... the difficult vocation

I have just posted the liturgy from this morning's service to the the docs sections and also my colleague Angela Schnepel's meditation on hope from which this is an extract:

To have hope is not a personal decision but a vocation. God tells us to have hope. So we have no other choice. That is why hope is so important. Hope is like a motor which takes us forward. Hope tells us to carry on, to continue our work in spite of the financial crisis and all other difficulties.

Called to one hope ...

Three weeks today I shall be in Lyon attending the Conference of European Churches 13th Assembly. The theme of the assembly is hope and a good deal of ground work has gone in to trying to prepare this assembly in a more interactive way with CEC's member churches.
Thoughts and expressions of hope, either in written or picture form have been gathered. You can also download a film with study resources called "Hope - European voices crossing borders":

The film has four sequences:
- A brief introduction (4:50 min).
- Hope for Humanity (11:30 min).
- Hope for Europe and the World (16:40 min).
- Hope for the Churches (17:00 min).

The four sequences in the film aim to set up a dialogue and debate around the theme of hope. They are therefore best viewed in groups to share thoughts and discussions after each sequence.

A spirituality for combat, of hope and of communion

God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; Give me the courage to change things which must be changed; And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

As we reflected at work on how to prioritise and also how to communicate our work; how to choose the one right thing, we read these three quotes and they spoke deeply to me today:

A spirituality for combat
"All liberation movements are prone to collective self-justification and self-righteousness, and are likely to en in seeing themselves as the Messiah or Saviour; the self-idolatry becomes the source of a new oppression ... But we should find a spirituality which can keep people in the power struggle without their turning corrupt and oppressor. Here the gospel of forgiveness or jusitification by faith has great relevance to collective liberation movements, in moulding their spirituality for struggle."
M.M. Thomas, in Religion and the Revolt of the Oppressed.

A spirituality of hope
"At Uppsala the mood was one of Exodus, going out to change the structures of society and the perspectives of races. Now we find ourselves in teh wilderness. A pilgrim people in conflict and penury, we have discovered a need for spirituality, a spirituality of penitence and hope." Phillip Potter in his closing address at the WCC Nairobi Assembly, 1975, Breaking Barriers, p.208.

A spirituality of communion
"The process of a book's birth reminds the author of Paul's insight that we are but members of one body and as such are indebted to other members." Walter Altmann, at the end of the preface of his Luther and Liberation.

Biribi Wo Soro - There's something in the heavens

Biribi Wo Soro (There is Something in the Heavens)

Extracts from a poem by Mercy Amba Odoyuye


We know it.
There is something in the heavens
God, let it reach us.
Our hands are stretched out in supplication
For we know it.
There is something in the heavens
God, let it reach us.
Peace with justice
Sharing the earth’s bounties
Justice for peace
People with compassion for the fallen
We know it.
God, there is something in the heavens
Let it reach us.
We sow the seeds of hope
We expect a harvest of love
We sow the seeds of justice
We expect a harvest of peace
We sow the seeds of compassion
We expect a harvest of solidarity
God, rain upon our efforts
The rain that transforms is from you.
We know there is something in the heavens
God, let it reach our hands.
Our hope is real.


Mercy Amba Oduyoye, ‘Biribi Wo Soro’, Voices from the Third World in
Living in Hope, by Ezra Chitando.