Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Mend our brother's broken heart


The other day it was sentencing time in the High Court for a former teacher, a school principal indeed, convicted of sexual abuse of pupils at a Maori school. TV gave us a look in the court, assuming that we are all voyeurs. This chap was cowering in the dock, shattered, beaten, humiliated, frightened and helpless as though at his public execution, as the judge gave him eight years.

I was impressed however with the judge, who denied himself the luxury of high moral indignation on behalf of “all right-thinking people”, and simply stuck to the legal necessities. Also, he allowed the teacher’s whanau not only to be present, but to conduct their own quite dignified karakia. Often this is a problem and an embarrassment, it seems to me, but this time we got a heartfelt prayer spoken by an elder, and the sentence that stuck in my mind was: “Mend our brother’s broken heart.”

Our culture applies a great deal of energy to punishment and retribution. An eye for an eye makes a lot of people feel better, they feel that the world is the right way up for once. If the punishment and humiliation of someone can be used as a warning and a moral deterrent, even better -- although there is precious little evidence to show it has any of those effects. People such as Garth McVicar of "Sensible" Sentencing and all his unpleasant ilk think we have a common stake in making sentences harsh. Their pet hate is judges who are “soft”. You wonder whether they would advocate state-operated tumbrils, if they knew what those were. It is incomprehensible to these people that anyone might be more interested in the reclamation and restoration of the offender.

Of course, society’s eye for an eye attitudes are also the fount of huge hypocrisy. The higher you climb on the moral ground, the more sickeningly hypocritical you get. We seem to be blind to it. Watch the feeding frenzy that results when some MP or other unfortunate, who has himself/herself taken some moral stand, is then shown to be fallible. Much of the media devotedly feeds these ugly aspects of our culture. It is as Gandhi said, An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind.

In all my CD collection, one of the best tracks of all has the two American negro sopranos, Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, singing the negro spiritual:

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.


And in all graphic art, nothing for me surpasses Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal.

A secular culture, in the end, lets people go to hell -- or remain in hell where they are already. Indeed, it is a mantra you hear people repeat these days, when someone has done something unspeakable: I’d let him rot in hell.

Worst of all, there have been instances in which such attitudes have emerged in what purports to be the christian church in NZ.

I have no knowledge of the teacher at the start of this essay, but I saw him there, and I know what grace and love can achieve. On the other hand, I recall a church colleague from years ago who was apprehended and found guilty of similar offences. The church simply didn’t want to know. He went to prison in an abyss of sorrow and depression, and there he died of a broken heart. The church still doesn’t want to know. I share in the guilt of that.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Silence ! ! !


Silence actually doesn’t exist. Anywhere. There is an insightful discussion of all this in a recent book by American writer, George Michelsen Foy: “Zero Decibels - The Quest For Absolute Silence”. Even in “the quietest place on earth”, the anechoic chamber in the Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Foy could hear things. He describes sounds that emerge when just about every other sound is eliminated -- one is what he calls the Monster Breath, and another is like a bucket dredge at work. Of course he had long known to take account of the noises of his own body at work.

One of the effects of Foy’s research over a couple of years was that he became acutely conscious of the deluge of sounds most of us scarcely notice until we consciously pay attention, from the sounds of wind and weather to the inhuman din of downtown New York. (Tourists certainly notice this shattering racket, even at 3 am, but seemingly the locals get rewired with a sort of soundwall.) Sitting at home on a quiet evening, or at the beach alone, even fully submerged in water, Foy was still receiving a barrage of sound. He writes about the panic that can ensue if for any reason we are deprived of our noise accompaniment, and he surveys ways in which we fill up silent spaces with any din that comforts us.

The thudding approach of some hoon’s vehicle with boom box is happening as I write. Foy also discusses noise, auditory damage and hearing loss.

Aspects of this take me back to university days, Philosophy I, II and III, the empiricism of blokes like Locke, Berkeley and Hume. The classical conundrum: Is there any sound anywhere if there is no one there to hear it?

Foy discusses tinnitus. He thinks most people have some degree of tinnitus. If you live in downtown Manhattan how would you know? He goes to stay with the monks at Citeaux. But contemplatives have long known that it’s pointless to try to eliminate noise. You get rid of as much of it as is practicable and sensible, and you simply accept the rest.

People who come to visit us here at Algies Bay typically comment, how quiet it is! It seems comparatively quiet for anyone who has come from Auckland I guess. That is, until the next bloke fires up some motor. There is a widespread love affair with the internal combustion engine around here, and so the blokes love to run their outboards, motor mowers, line trimmers, leaf blowers (a truly evil device, the loudest of them all up close, and almost completely pointless), chain saws, tractors, motor bikes, pressure sprayers. The air down at the boat ramp in the summer reeks of petroleum fumes, and resonates with the cries of very happy blokes.

Today a neighbour got a very large poplar tree hewn down. It took most of the day, and others showed up to hear the music of chain saws and the hideous huge mulcher which turns tonnes of wood into chips. Never mind the local bird life. The tui and the kokako will no longer sing from that tree in the mornings.

I have come to value silence above most other things. But it is always a relative silence -- like everything else in this bent world, never perfect, at best approximate. The din of the church is one noise I have escaped, rather as the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries fled the racket of priests and preachers, and theologians, into the wastelands of Syria, Sinai and Egypt.

But also, as far as possible, the clamorous culture that wants to turn us all into happy mindless consumers. Soon it will be necessary to flee the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

Some have thought that silence is God’s language. Well certainly, it’s hard to hear any word of God without the best silence we can manage. Interior silence is best, and essential. That takes time and some wise teaching. Interior silence has a lot to do with having faced and recognised one’s personal demons, having learned to let go of what is destructive or unnecessary, having no enemies, and having quelled the voracious ego. There is always further to travel along this road.

External silence is more like a gift, as coming to Algies Bay has been for me.

Church Inanities - September post 2010

Yesterday, a week following the Christchurch earthquake of 4 September 2010, Anglicans held a morning service in Cathedral Square. It had to be alfresco -- bits were still dropping off the cathedral with aftershocks. We got to see a tiny bit of the service on TV news, and that bit featured a woman called the Cathedral Theologian, preaching. Cathedral Theologian...? Aren’t they all supposed to be theologians? Do they have this woman vicariously think about God for them?

Anyway, to my horror, this is what she plainly told us on national TV: “God was good to us. No one was killed...” I am not making this up, and I have not misquoted. And this is pernicious pietistic claptrap. Was God not good to the Haitians or the Chileans, when they had their earthquakes with many fatalities, or to the tsunami victims of Sumatra or Samoa? Or was that some other God? Where did they get this woman? And who thought this level of humbug was adequate for a service as important as this one was? Anyone who wants to know what a real Christian response to such disaster sounds like might read Archbishop Rowan Williams's teaching following the assault on the World Trade Centre in New York.

Embarrassing is what this was. It panders yet again to superstition and credulity. It exemplifies why so many thoughtful and perceptive people are conspicuous by their absence from the church. It might have made some sense to take the view of I Kings 19:11 -- “The Lord was not in the earthquake.” The earthquake happened not because God was sitting up there doing things, but because tectonic plates were in collision, as they always have been.

..................................

Since I last had anything much to do with public worship, some meddler has invented a new Liturgical Season. It comes right in the middle of the Season of Pentecost, and it’s called Creation. Well that’s OK, I suppose. It does give a good chance to feature major ecological concerns.

But yesterday, at Snells and in Warkworth, there was a Litany of Creation which makes me wonder if we urgently need a Mahurangi Resident Theologian (an intellectually honest one). First we got:

We gather our animal family of Creation to worship with us,
All our kin living on this planet,
from the busiest bee to the tallest giraffe.


It’s well meant, of course, but it’s the kind of stuff which makes me grind my teeth and wonder if anyone has formed an escape committee. Our kin include also the cockroaches, wetas and great white sharks, but of course they’re not “busy” or cuddly. This is the dumbing down of worship, and one longs for Cranmer or Knox. But then came:

We remember our ancient relatives who became extinct,
Dinosaurs, dodos and the moa,
giant marsupials and the woolly mammoths.


I got into some trouble at breakfast this morning for venturing that that might indeed be an accurate description of my ancient relatives. But seriously, who writes this stuff? Is it for grown-ups? I am thankful I never actually met any of my ancient relatives on a dark night. (I did, now I come to think of it, have an aunt called Dodo.)

And so the litany continued, getting worse if anything. Well I’m sorry, but it’s too twee, too cute. And I don’t think it is worship.

Monday, September 06, 2010

The portaloos are coming

One fine moment in this evening’s TV coverage of the Canterbury earthquake... The residents of some badly hit street are standing at their gates watching the TV crew. Some are complaining bitterly about what they see to be local council neglect of them in their plight. They are sans water, sans sewerage system, sans electricity, and everything around is broken. Some of their houses are snapped in half.

...and as we speak a big lorry comes into view, rumbling up the road, laden with portaloos. It’s like the Berlin Airlift, only at a different pace and without the elegance of the DC3s banking down towards Tempelhof. Cheers rise from every gate, and the queues start to form. Using a bucket, I guess, has been just a little too reminiscent of the facilities in the railway cattle vans heading eastward to Auschwitz.

Christchurch, and places such as Darfield, Kaiapoi, Hororata, are going to take years to recover from this. Out in Bexley, too close to the settling ponds, whole streets of houses around five years old are now having to be demolished. Each house, some family’s dream, is not only damaged beyond repair, but is sitting on wretched terrain which has simply bubbled and jellified into a deep sludge of sewage and sand and heaven knows what. Who gave planning permission for this particular catastrophe?

The wooden structures seem to have fared best. The rather large stone Anglican church at Hororata lost the whole top of its bell tower, which fell through the roof and destroyed the organ. The organ is in a million pieces, says the vicar, a woman who seems to have trained in the Dibley college of pastoral theology. Never mind, she said, for right across the road is their previous church, an old wooden one, and that’s just fine for now. I’m sorry about the organ though.

A lot of churches have been badly damaged. Some of those Christchurch churches are fine even lovely buildings, but there are a few redolent mainly of cheap brass and formica, and a thin theology of worship. So it’s not all bad. Of course, some of the uglier ones, by some perversity, are the best loved. I’m thinking of one church which has all the charm and worshipful ambience of an electricity substation, and if there is any justice it will go.

It’s interesting I think, and a sign of the times, that the media coverage over three days now has had scarcely any mention of the churches. One or two photos, but that’s all. Other heritage buildings have had coverage. But even their two cathedrals seem to have escaped notice by the media. Both have been recently earthquake strengthened (at public expense, I may say), and have got by with little damage.

There were no fatalities, which is astonishing, and no rush of bad injuries. The housing has been the biggest casualty, I think, and small business premises. There are a lot of broken hearts. A lot of people now mortgaged for sums far beyond anything their properties are now worth.

I heard one laconic police officer say they had apprehended in the middle of the night two well known local criminals trying to get into the cordoned area under the guise of being council staff. ‘Ullo, ‘ullo, ‘ullo, what ’ave we ‘ere then...? It would have been interesting to hear the actual conversation.

Saturday, September 04, 2010

He should have kept his big mouth shut

It was the local church’s annual congregational meeting. I have lost count of the number of these I chaired or otherwise attended over the years. The congregational AGM is a little like going shopping in downtown Ramallah or Baghdad -- you are never sure what’s going to happen, even blood and guts flying around. A congregational meeting can go smoothly and without injury right through to the tepid coffee and ginger nuts -- or it can melt down right in front of you.

In the Parish of Carfin in Lanarkshire, Scotland, where I was minister for a couple of years long ago, the last AGM before I arrived had been broken up by the police.

I don’t attend the local church. But it seems they had yet another instalment of the perennial debate about whether real wine should be served at Holy Communion. My personal view is that the minute that subject appeared on the agenda, everyone with any sense should have risen up and gone home. But no, you don’t do that. What you do is proceed with a pointless, fruitless, largely ignorant wrangle no one wants, in which you absolutely know that someone is going to get badly hurt about ten minutes from now.

And so it was. One of their best senior members, Trev, a bloke of experience and perception, found himself getting pecked to death and vilified for his views, and later decided that was all he was prepared to take of that church. When subsequently his departure was reported to one of the attackers, Fred, the attacker’s response was, “Well, he should have kept his big mouth shut.”

Now, hold it right there... It’s worth pausing to ponder Fred’s remark before we consign it to the oblivion of contempt. This is the Christian Church. It is committed to peace and understanding. It is supposed to be inhabited by mature believers no longer threatened by difference of opinion, creed, race or whatever. It is supposed to have found ways to deal with conflict without rancour or abuse, or alienation of anyone. It is supposed to have learned that every person is fallible, sinful, wounded -- and to have developed the consequent humility.

It is ironic, I think, that Trev’s view on the use of proper wine in Holy Communion was that hospitality requires it to be there, along with non-alcoholic “wine”. The point about hospitality is that it is inclusive. So it is a simple organisational problem to solve, but it is the hospitality that matters, and I entirely agree with that. Hospitality is a major biblical theme, and is most certainly part of our understanding of the Lord’s Table and Holy Communion -- "Eucharistic Hospitality".

It seems that Fred brusquely dismissed this because he is ignorant of it. He thought “hospitality” was something like generously providing booze at some gathering of blokes to watch the footie. Fred assumed Holy Communion was nothing to do with hospitality. It’s religious, don't you know. Hospitality is just generous-minded blokes. Later, Fred seemed unimpressed that his attitude had cost the fellowship dearly -- “Well, he should have kept his big mouth shut.”

Well, sorry Fred. That remark is counter to all that the church might mean. It connotes for me so much of the reason I rarely now go near. The last church I attended regularly prided itself on a large decorative glass screen at the entrance on which was etched: “A house of prayer for all people”. But in the end it wasn’t. Not for some.