Robert Kitson informs us in the Guardian that nineteen chaplains are in attendance on the teams at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/sep/20/rugby-world-cup-2011-chaplains)
I don’t know where to start. Are they all Christian chaplains, or is there a spread of Moslem, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist? What about an atheist chaplain or two? Or do atheists not suffer the same despair and loss when things go wrong? Among the Christians, do we have a proper range of Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist...? Sorry about all the questions, but Robert Kitson does not clarify these things.
Nineteen chaplains...? That’s one-nine, 19. Have these chaps nothing to do back home? It sounds to me like a nice little travel item. Then, one should ask, any female chaplains? Robert Kitson lists the frequent sources of distress for players, and they include trouble at home, losing a game, getting injured, risking getting injured, pregnant wife or girlfriend back home. Perhaps they simply need their mums, and a soothing word from a female chaplain might be just the ticket.
The article is accompanied by a photo of the Fiji team at prayer before a game. I believe I have written on this before. It horrifies me. One of the tragedies of world Christianity is this domestication of God, co-opting God on the side of our footie game, for heaven’s sake -- the same superstition that pervades so much Christian practice, the assumption that God can be propitiated and coerced into doing what we want when we ask. This god doesn’t exist except as an idol. It is a superstition as ancient as humankind. It is not the faith of Christ.
Somehow I can’t help feeling that these 19 chaplains would be better employed back where they came from, in real Christian ministry.
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It is very difficult for anyone to say what we may be thinking about the continued laments of the families of the 29 miners killed in the Pike River disaster. You can’t walk hobnailed through grief.
But it is 10 months now. The bodies of the miners have not been recovered because the mine is deemed too dangerous to enter. The Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Pike River tragedy is proceeding.
Meanwhile the families -- at any rate, some of them -- are making the recovery of their loved ones, or what’s left of them, if anything is left, some kind of touchstone of everything else. I understand that it is some comfort to get human remains back, although I find it hard to know why. Loss is loss. Why would you want a few scraps of human tissue back? In war, many thousands had “no known grave”. Often unidentifiable remains were found, and these were dignified with the words, “Known Unto God”. Over hundreds of years people have been buried at sea.
Have the Pike River families become somehow locked into someone’s silly and unnecessary agenda -- “get our boys back or else”...? We also get constantly reminded of the West Coast mining culture, which is alleged to be different from others. Those blokes would have charged straight back into the mine to retrieve their mates. They might also have got themselves killed.
I did not lose a loved one in the mine disaster, but I find it hard to understand why this fight is necessary. If the mine is sealed and shut down, then that will be their grave. If the mine is sold and reopened eventually, presumably some remains may be found and decisions will be made then. No one is setting out to be callous and uncaring.
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An exceptional article in the Guardian Weekly of 09.09.11 by Gary Younge is entitled “Americans must learn to get over themselves”. Younge articulates what so many of us have wanted to say for a long time, one test of quality journalism.
He begins with the chilling news that Condoleezza Rice on 9.11 ordered her national security senior staff to come up with ideas on “how to capitalise on these opportunities” -- leverage immediately, to maximum political effect.
But since 9.11, ten years on, writes Younge, we are able to see the limits to enormous military power, America’s relative geopolitical decline, and its hopeless polarised political culture.
And he identifies the pervasive element of narcissism in America’s national grief. It persists to this day in the 10-year commemorations. Grief becomes a badge of existence and identity. This couldn’t happen to Americans. Revenge was the only option. “It was as though Americans were unique in their ability to feel pain, and the deaths of civilians of other nations were worth less.”
But one of the most compelling pictures for me of the 9.11 atrocity was none of that, not even the sight of the towers burning, memorable and all as that was as we watched it on the TV in our hotel room in Berlin. It was the sight of George W Bush sitting down reading with the kiddiwinkies at some infant school. Was he reading to them or were they to him? Then some aide whispers in his ear the news that the nation is under attack, and Bush sits there with his stunned mullet look.
Valiantly, like Drake continuing his game of bowls, he finished the reading lesson lest any of the kiddies got upset.
America’s response to that event has been a global disaster. We redefined a word, rendition -- it used to mean that your church choir tackled some anthem slightly beyond them, and now it means hauling suspect terrorists secretly by air to somewhere they can be tortured. America established its own atrocity, Guantanamo Bay. What happens there doesn’t matter so much if it’s not on American soil. Islamaphobia in some quarters has become pretty well compulsory.
Now we have President Obama fighting what looks like a rearguard action for sanity against the utter loonies of the Republican Party. That is what’s terrifying. It is as though these people never learn anything over the years, about race and unity, about religion and sense, about simply being kind, understanding your enemy, tackling the sources of poverty and injustice in the world... or waking up to the fact that most of the world are actually glad they are not Americans.
