Author: CMM, Cape Town

Excruciating Vulnerability

CMM, Cape Town / / Second Sunday after Easter, Sunday Letter

Grace and peace to you …

During our Three Hour Service on Good Friday the reflection entitled The Cross as Excruciating Vulnerability seems to have touched a nerve. You can find it on www.cmm.org.za if you missed it. One email response I received articulates so crisply what I think so many of us feel:

“Your sermon made me think lots today, which I try to avoid, really. Part of the numbing maybe. But when I think I tend to get to a horrible place that I don’t know how to get out of.

My biggest challenge is changing my self beliefs so that I believe I am enough, that I am worthy. I battle to connect because I feel I am not enough, that I am actually that miserable sod you mentioned! My perspective is that the relationships I have had with people are proof of that. And if anyone thinks differently it is just because they haven’t got to know me enough, got to know the real me.

I think I have backed away from some connections with people because I believe I am not enough in all sorts of ways…People deserve better or more than what I am.

So I ended up in a marriage that started when I was in an extremely stressful place. I was exhausted. I needed the connection with someone more than ever. But I still struggled with my self beliefs. Thinking I didn’t deserve better. A bad connection is better than no connection. Feeling the shame of who I am…thinking I should recognise and at least be grateful for what I do have. But then the connection never felt safe. I didn’t feel like I could be vulnerable. I wasn’t heard…I couldn’t share. If I tried it would be dismissed. So I felt like there was something wrong with me. It reinforced what I thought about myself in the first place.

The point where I get stuck is how to change my thinking, to start believing I am enough, I am worthy, I am not a miserable sod! And knowing that I need to believe it for myself, not feel that I am getting that self belief from others. If I don’t feel worthy to be loved how do I break the cycle? If we do not feel loved into worthiness and believed it to be so, what do we do?”

This is the question that propels us on our long walk to freedom,
Alan

President, do the honourable thing says Methodists

The Methodist Church of Southern Africa welcomes the unanimous judgement by the Constitutional Court on the Nkandla matter. Of crucial importance is comment by Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng that “ours is a genuine and vibrant constitutional democracy capable of self-correction and self-preservation… and that the rule of law is imperative for the survival of democracy.”

The clarification of the powers of the Public Protector is also welcome and will hopefully serve as a deterrent to any who would want to undermine any Chapter 9 institutions. The remedial action articulated in the Public Protector’s report and those expounded by the Constitutional Court must be implemented without further delay. The public resources that were wasted on unnecessary investigations are regrettable.

The judgement found that the President violated the Constitution and his oath of office in that he “failed to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution as the supreme law of the land...” Furthermore, he defied the orders by the Public Protector to pay back a portion of the money for the non-security upgrades to Nkandla, backed by the National Assembly which too was found to have acted unconstitutionally and in flagrant violation of their duty to protect the constitution.

These events call for President Zuma to do the honourable thing and resign to save himself, the ANC and the nation as a whole from further embarrassment and ruin. This will go a long way in assisting his supporters to accept his exit, without the polarisation of society. If this does not happen, we the people of South Africa must put pressure on the ANC and Parliament to ‘assist’ the President to vacate office peacefully and constitutionally. The president’s embattled term of office has been marred with too many unresolved claims and scandals including Nkandla, the Arms deal debacle, and the recent revelations of alleged State capture by the Gupta’s and the time has come to put the country first.

We further call on the South African public to learn from these unfortunate events and rally together towards the building of a future that promises hope and well-being for all. We have a duty to protect our constitutional democracy for the generations to come.

We further pray that the National Assembly will in future act in a manner that demonstrates that they put the interests of the country first, uphold the trust placed in them by the electorate and are not just blind pawns and protectors of any individual.

This is the time to soak the nation in prayer and the MCSA calls on all people of faith to join together in prayer for peaceful resolution and possible transition into the post-Nkandla era.

Statement released by Bishop Ziphozihle Siwa
Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa

The Gift of Life

CMM, Cape Town / / Resurrection Sunday, Sunday Letter

Coffee has a sweeter taste on Easter morning. The air is electric and the flowers seem to whisper, “Did you hear it? Did you? Everyone is talking about it. He is not dead. He is risen. He is ALIVE! Pass it on, pass it on, and don’t let the story die.”

We breathe in the news with breath that reaches our depth and Mary Oliver’s question seems an important one, “Tell me,” she beckons, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The news that Jesus lives is invitation for us to live too!

It was about a year ago that I was selling all my possessions and preparing to move to South Africa. It was a beautiful process of examination. My sister had almost died with Dengue Fever in a remote village in Tanzania. After hearing the news that she had been airlifted to Kenya and would survive, I found myself reflecting on the fragility of life. In the midst of my reflection, I asked myself “If you were to die tomorrow, what is it that you would regret?” The whisper that rose up was not new; I had heard that hope in the recess of my mind many times. Following the faithful next steps in the wake of that whisper is what led me to serving at CMM with all of you. No one in my life was shocked when I named I wanted to serve in South Africa. Almost everyone said, “It seems exactly the thing for you to do.” Yet, what a leap it was. The only things I have in storage in the US are my theology books.

I had not been in South Africa long before I heard of a Healing of Memories talk that would be held at the District Six Homecoming Centre. In that talk, I heard a man speaking of my grand-father’s people – the Lakota Indians in Canada. He shared about the practice they have of naming everyone they meet a relative. Tears welled in my eyes, for I was sitting in the country I wanted to be in and learning about a truth my grandfather lived faithfully. It was a beautiful moment.

Father Lapsley, the director of the Healing of Memories Institute, is someone whose work I have followed for years. He utilizes circle processes that trace back to Native American practices to help communities who have experienced collective trauma begin the process of healing. I have never formally been trained in circle processes, but I have participated in them. I leave to experience a circle process led by Father Lapsley in one of the communities here and to receive training in that work in just four days. There is something in the elemental part of who I am, my blood, which recognizes this as a gift that will go on giving in my life and ministry. I am thankful.

After this training, I will be in the US visiting with family and with the communities who are supporting my salary. So, I wanted to take time to share with all of you that I am truly grateful for this time here in South Africa, for the journey of each moment of struggle towards the next faithful step, and for the gift of standing witness to what God will unveil in each of our lives as we continue to answer the question “How do I live the life I have been gifted with boldly, generously, graciously, courageously in a way that gives testimony to the belief that Jesus lives?”

I invite you to reflect on questions that have been alive in our community with new Easter light:

  1. What about the world around you evokes a sense of holy discontent?
  2. How might you engage in these areas of discontent with your one precious life?
  3. If nothing held you back, how would you live?

Easter reminds us to release our fears and live!

With you on the journey,
Michelle

To kill or be killed?

CMM, Cape Town / / Good Friday

When most people say they are willing to die for this or that, they really mean that they are willing to kill for it.

But when Jesus said it, he meant it.

Faced with the choice to kill or be killed – Jesus chose to be killed. That is not to say that he wanted to die or that he needed to die for any Divine plan to be fulfilled. No. Jesus being killed was the consequence of Jesus choosing not to kill. Jesus chose not to kill because he had already chosen to love. To love without limit. Jesus chose to love without limit because he came to represent God in the world – and that is who God is – love without limit.

According to Jesus, the only way to live life in full abundance is to live life lovingly. To love is to live. To refuse to love (or to kill) is to die. Jesus taught that we couldn’t live lovingly and kill (contrary to what so many in Jesus’ name have taught through the ages). But it is one or the other. There is life and death before us and we cannot choose both! For Jesus to kill was for him to die. This is the topsy-turvy stuff of the Gospel. Call it crazy stuff if we like, but we shouldn’t be surprised because the prophets of old reminded us that, “My ways are not your ways,” says the Lord.

In the world in which we live it is going to take some crazy stuff to save us because the logic of our age and ages past that force can carve out a peaceful future is just causing the rivers of blood to run deeper. Violence (be it international conflict or within our own families) promises what it never ever delivers yet we keep giving it another chance to try. Our addiction to violence is killing us all.

Jesus’ way of unlimited love – the way of the Cross – invites us to live life in a way that brings life … even though it may demand the giving of our life. It is this mystery that the Cross calls us to explore and ultimately give ourselves to. Of course there are huge parts of us that recoil in terror at the thought of this … but if we are still and attentive we may also hear a still small but strong voice whisper to us: “For this you were made. Do not be afraid. Love again. Love some more and more. Give yourself away and you will find yourself. Die and you will live. Trust …

Love some more, Alan

Carve out a holy space

CMM, Cape Town / / Palm Sunday, Sunday Letter

Grace and Peace to you

This is a sacred week. A Holy Week. This week invites deep attentiveness from each of us. Attentiveness to what it means to be human for in this week we witness the heights and depths of the human person. In Jesus we see the heights and in the crowds, rulers and scattered followers we see the depths. In Jesus we see who each of us is called to be and who we were originally designed to be. In the others we see our brokenness and waywardness – the people we too often are. In Jesus we see strength and courage against oppressive power. In the others we see expediency – a fickleness of character and the crucifixion that inevitably follows from such cowardice. In Jesus we witness a fullness of life even in his dying as he lives for something greater than himself. In those who surround him we smell decay – their humanity has died even as they continue to breathe.

I invite you to read Luke 22 – 23 every day this week. Allow the story to seep into your inner being. Go deep into each of the characters. Each character is a mirror into our own lives. To be attentive – really attentive – we need to carve out space – un-cluttered space. Turn the TV off for the week. Ditch social media. Be still. Be quiet. Go for a slow walk. Muse! Turn off your lights and light a candle. Honour this Holy Week with your attention. In our busyness our mind becomes “dull and domesticated”. So we should fight for free space and free time. As Rebeca Solnit writes:

“Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use… Time spent is not work time yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space – for wilderness and public space – must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.”

~ Rebeca Solnit: Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

Grace, Alan

We are not perfect. We need forgiveness.

There is no perfect family. We don’t have perfect parents, we are not perfect, we don’t get married with a perfect person nor do we have perfect kids. We have complaints of each other. We were disappointed in each other.

Therefore, there is no healthy marriage or healthy family without the exercise of forgiveness. Forgiveness is vital to our emotional health and spiritual survival.

Without forgiveness the family becomes a theatre of conflict and a bastion of grievances. Without forgiveness the family gets sick. Forgiveness is the sterilization of the soul, the cleaning of the mind and the liberation of the heart.

Who does not forgive has no peace of soul nor communion with God. The pain is a poison that intoxicates and kills. Having a wound of the heart is a self-destructive gesture. It is autophagy [a self-degradative process]. Who does not forgive sickens physically, emotionally and spiritually. That’s why the family has to be a place of life and not of death; territory of healing and not of disease; stage of forgiveness and not of guilt.

Forgiveness brings joy where sorrow produced pain; and healing, where pain caused disease.

~ Pope Francis

“I am not perfect …
I rely on the forgiveness of others.

Others are not perfect …
they rely on my forgiveness.”

 

Do not be afraid

CMM, Cape Town / / Fifth Sunday in Lent, Sunday Letter

Grace and peace to you

The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is: “Be not be afraid!” It is most often repeated because it is most often broken. Furthermore it is most often repeated because fear is the source of so many other commandments being broken. Which ones? Everyone that has to do with loving because fear casts out love.

Now obviously there is fear that is healthy. The fear that makes us look left and right and left again before crossing the road. This act of caution keeps us alive and it is highly developed within us. However when fear is internalised preventing us from exploring the people we were divinely created to be then our lives become severely impoverished and God must grieve our loss of abundant life.

Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame, has just written a book called: Big Magic  – Creative Living Beyond Fear.

She says fear is boring:

Around the age of fifteen, I somehow figured out that my fear had no variety to it, no depth, no substance, no texture. I noticed that my fear never changed, never delighted, never offered a surprise twist or an unexpected ending. My fear was a song with only one note – only one word, actually – and that word was “STOP!” My fear never had anything more interesting or subtle to offer than that one emphatic word, repeated at full volume on an endless loop: “STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!” Which means that my fear always made predictably boring decisions…

I also realised that my fear was boring because it was identical to everyone else’s fear. I figured out that everyone’s song of fear has exactly that same tedious lyric: “STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!” True the volume may vary from person to person, but the song itself never changes, because all of us humans were equipped with the same basic fear package when we were being knitted in our mothers’ wombs. And not just humans: If you pass your hand over a petri dish containing a tadpole, the tadpole will flinch beneath your shadow. That tadpole cannot write poetry, and it cannot sing, and it will never know love or jealousy or triumph, and it has a brain the size of a punctuation mark, but it damn sure knows how to be afraid of the unknown. …. So do we all. But there is nothing particularly compelling about that. Do you see what I mean? You don’t get any special credit, is what I’m saying, for knowing how to be afraid of the unknown … For the entirety of my young and skittish life, I had fixated upon my fear as if it were the most interesting thing about me, when actually it was the most mundane. In fact, my fear was probably the only 100 percent mundane thing about me. I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original. But my fear was not original in the least. My fear wasn’t some kind of rare artisanal object; it was just a mass-produced item, available on the shelves of any generic box store. And that’s the thing I wanted to build my entire identity around? The most boring instinct I possessed? The panic reflex of my dumbest inner tadpole? No.

Be not be afraid …
Alan

Coming Home

CMM, Cape Town / / Fourth Sunday in Lent, Sunday Letter

Seven Degrees of Separation

What does it mean to come home? Literally, for me, it means walking across the street to the Market House building and riding the elevator to the seventh floor. Yet, the question is deeper than the logistics of my steps. Living where I live is a wonderful gift and a privilege that keeps my mind awhirl with questions. So many around me in the world do not sleep in their own room, nor do they have the luxury of living alone. My flat is small, but it is also more than I need. There are seven degrees of separation between myself and so many in this world. Coming home, I have learned, is what I do when I ride the elevator down and walk out and see the world for what it really is. It is a home we are called to share in beloved community.

How amazing is Table Mountain? How alive is the sea here? There are trees that demonstrate the notion of resting under the shadow of so brilliantly. These truths can draw from us a common united sigh in our recognition of God’s handiwork. Yet, please don’t invite a move closer to the ground to see the beauty in the others that live under our feet. I wish the answer to coming home to beloved community were as easy as where we live. It makes a difference where we locate ourselves, but it is not as easy as moving from the seventh floor to the first. I wish it were. Privilege is a tricky thing. It is not something we can erase. We can shed it a bit at a time, but the more privileged you are, the more access you have to always return.

Jesus was questioned about who he shared meals with, who he spent time with, and he was known to always be on the move. So, coming home for Jesus was a weaving sort of thing. His heart was always with those who live closer to the bottom floor, the poor. His voice shook the halls of places where the powerful make their beds. His presence was for all. Jesus’ life was about weaving together a people into beloved community. We find our way home when we learn to truly live into the privilege of our humanity. What a gift it is to be full of breath, life, and the gift of opportunity to live life in ways that begin to erase the seven degrees and create circles where our eyes truly see the others in God’s community. Coming home is when we learn to live God’s dream as if it were the very air we breathe.

Desmond Tutu shared this in his book God’s Dream, “I have a dream God said. Please help me to realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness, squalor, and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into the glorious counterparts, where there will be more laughter, joy and peace, where there will be more justice, goodness, compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that my children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family. My family.” The view from the seventh floor is stunning, but life on the ground, it is where we learn how to come home to God’s dream.

With you on the journey,
Michelle

Many ways to learn

CMM, Cape Town / / Sunday Letter, Third Sunday in Lent

Grace and Peace to you …

This past week we witnessed more conflict on some of our campuses. This time students exchanged blows and police needed to separate white students from black students. The violent scenes were distressing.

My niece is in her first year at TUKS and she expressed her sense of anxiety and despair on our family WhatsApp group. My brother responded with what I thought was wise advice. This is what he wrote:

Tough and confusing times Jess. My advice for what it’s worth:

  1. Learn as much as you can about all sides before making your own mind up.
  2. Distinguish between principles and actions — believing in one doesn’t mean condoning the other.
  3. Know that you are living a segment of a problem which precedes you and will live on long after you leave TUKS.
  4. Be grateful that you are young enough to ride the change and old enough to learn from it.
  5. Front seats on history can be a terrifying privilege but that’s what it is. At your age your father and Uncle were given a gun and sent north. Your other Uncle faced 6 years in jail. Your Pops was nearly assassinated. Your Granny lived everyday with fear for her family and boss. South Africa forces you to grow up fast. Seems too fast but it’s also what makes us stronger.
  6. In between it all make new friends, embrace new experiences and see it all as important.

Notice that he did not dive in and give a “piece of his mind” about who was right and who was wrong. Instead he invited her to be fully present to the moment and to open herself to learn and grow from what was unfolding before her. Without denying the tough and troubling nature of the situation there is the comforting and hopeful belief that it is a privilege to be part of this moment.

I think these words are good advice for all of us at this time and not just my niece. But furthermore I believe that here we are given a healthy example of how we can assist people around us to grow by giving them a framework in which to process their own experience instead of simply telling them what to believe. This is education at its best and none of us are too young or old to  promote and participate in such methods of learning.

Grace, Alan

St. Peter and the Angel

Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom he was chained –

unchained, and led
past the sleepers,
door after door silently opening – out!
And along a long street’s
Majestic emptiness under the moon:
one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one
feeling the air before him,
eyes open but fixed …

And not till he saw the angel had left him,
Alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what he had still to do,
not till then did he recognize
this was no dream. More frightening
than arrest, than being chained to his warders:
he could hear his own footsteps suddenly.
Had the angel’s feet

made any sound? He could not recall.
No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit.
He himself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.

~ Denise Levertov

Be brave and trust in the word of God

CMM, Cape Town / / Second Sunday in Lent, Sunday Letter

Held in the Spirit …

A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a youth retreat. After I was done preaching, I shared I would be outside at the picnic tables should anyone want to talk. I will never forget a young woman coming up to me and sharing that she had a secret she needed to share. She was dressed in black from head to toe and seemed to be hiding within the hoodie she was wearing. Her secret she told me was that she was being physically abused. She didn’t know what to do and she had been cutting her wrists, not to die, but in order that she might feel alive. She had lost the ability to feel her life she said. At least ten other young people shared their stories of pain and the reasons why they too were cutting themselves in order that they might feel alive.

The journey I went on with the youth at that retreat and the youth pastors that served them was one I never could have prepared for. It was painful, laborious, and held so utterly in response to the work of the Spirit that I was left feeling overwhelmed with a sense of certainty that holiness was in the ground. Now years later, I see that same young woman wearing pink, flowers even, and it makes me smile. She shares her story with others and has asked me to share it as well. Yet, underneath the surface of the colors she has allowed back in her life will always be the story of her pain that runs deep. She has learned to make friends with it, but it will always be there.

Trevor Hudson has shared that “everyone has a pool of tears.” There is such truth in these words. We all carry a hidden pain, insecurity, or a truth we hope for others never to know. During our first Wednesday in Lent, Alan spoke about the importance of confession. It is important to share our stories with others, to release some of the pain we carry in order that our brokenness does not become the gift we give to others. Yet, I want to challenge us all during this Lenten season to reflect on the holiness of sharing life together. Life together is a precious gift.

In order to be a confessing community, we have to understand the holiness that exists when someone shares with us. Are we a people who can hold a story and not breathe it into the wind for all the others in our circle to hear? Are we a people who witness the pain in others and hold it gently recognizing the fragility of their reality and the fragility of trust? Are we willing to be available? I must confess that I have always loved young people, but in small numbers. Had I known twenty of them would come to me that night, there is a strong possibility I might not have availed myself. Yet, I was blessed in a way that changed me that night. I can still catch the holiness of it in my breath.

When I think of confession, listening, and being real, those young people were heroes. They were brave enough to trust in the word of God I spoke of that night and brave enough to share their particular pool of tears. They were brave enough to do the hard work it takes to begin the journey towards wholeness, healing, and life. Let us in our life together be people that help each other along on the journey by listening, confessing, and holding each other in the light and love of the Spirit of God.

With you on the journey, Michelle

Mountains and Valleys

CMM, Cape Town / / First Sunday in Lent, Sunday Letter

Grace and peace to you …

Following on from last week’s sermon about mountains and valleys being joined at the hip we noted that because they shared the same landscape that we couldn’t have one without the other. After last week’s service I had a number of people use the metaphor of mountains and valleys to let me know where they are in their life or at least in which direction they felt their life was moving.

I have been thinking about this mountain and valley stuff in the last few days. I wonder if the following statement holds any water for you: It may not be obvious to us that we are moving from the mountain into the valley or from the valley up the mountain. Why not?

Well you see, when we walk down a mountain our head is normally held high as we breathe in the breadth of the view stretching to the horizon. As we marvelling at the view we may not notice that we are actually walking down and down into the valley – until of course we have no more vision of a glorious view and only then do we suddenly realise we are off the mountain and in the valley. Equally, when we are walking out of the valley up the mountain our heads are often down and our view is of the soil and rock a meter in front of us. Nothing changes step after step, until all of a sudden a single step settles us on the summit or if not summit then at least some lookout area on which we can turn around and see how far we have come and how high we have climbed.

When I lived in Johannesburg I would leave early in the morning and drive to work along Oxford Road turning into Corlett Drive and the sun would pierce my morning eyes. As I drove down into the valley of Corlett Drive before turning onto the M1 highway the sun would have disappeared and I would sometimes have to put on my headlights because of how dark it was. This reminded me that just because I was in the dark, it didn’t mean that the sun had stopped shining. This really is the challenge during the mountain and valley experiences of our living: To remember the light in the darkness and to hold onto the vision in the valley.

This Lent we are invited to contemplate the Light that it may guide us even when we only see darkness.

Grace, Alan

These two quotes were referred to during Alan’s sermon on February 7, 2016:

“When we are young and hear longing and
sadness in love songs, we think that the sadness
and disappointment are a prelude to the
experience of love and not really the result of its
experience. Later, with a deeper experience,
we realise that the sadness, longing, and
disappointment ultimately originate not from the
fact that love has not taken place but that human
love is finite. This insight helps us realise that the
first task in any love, whether in a marriage or in
a deep friendship, is for the two persons to console
each other for the limits of their love, for the fact
that they cannot not disappoint each other.”
~ Ronald Rolheiser

“A relationship is like a long trip and there’s
bound to be some long dull stretches.
Don’t travel with someone who expects
you to be exciting all the time.”
~ Daniel Berrigan

Let us be still

CMM, Cape Town / / Harvest Festival, Sunday Letter, Transfiguration Sunday

Grace and Peace to you,

Along with fasting from wasting water this Lent we may consider fasting from wasting words. Yes, a water and word fast!

Barbara Brown Taylor in her book: When God is silent writes: “How shall I break the silence? What word is more eloquent than the silence itself? In the moments before a word is spoken, anything is possible. The empty air is a formless void waiting to be addressed.”

Such is the power of words. Anything is possible.

She continues, “…the most dangerous word God ever says is Adam. All by itself it is no more than a pile of dust – nothing to be concerned about, really – but by following it with the words for image and dominion, God sifts divinity into that dust, endowing it with things that belong to God alone. When God is through with it, this dust will bear the divine likeness. When God is through with it, this dust will exercise God’s own dominion – not by flexing its muscles but by using its tongue. Up to this point in the story, God has owned the monopoly on speech. Only God has had the power to make something out of nothing by saying it is so. Now, in this act of shocking generosity God’s stock goes public… human beings endowed by God with the power of the Word… This power of ours has no safety catch on it. We are as likely to make nothing out of something as the other way around…”

We all know how words can bring life or death because we have had such words spoken to us. This Lent let us watch our words. Let us not waste our words on trivialities and gossip. May we only speak words that bring life and fast from all words that bring death. If our words will not improve on the silence let us be still…

Grace, Alan

LENT 2016: Water Fast

In LENT we are invited to fast. To fast is to live with limits. The first fast was given as Divine instruction for daily living in the Garden of Eden: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” To live without limits is to die. To fast is to live. To fast is to bring life.

This LENT, in the year of one of South Africa’s worst droughts, let us fast – live with limits – in relation to water. Perhaps our water fast will help us to hear Jesus’ crucifying cry: “I thirst” more acutely. This is the cry of an ever-increasing number of people.

This is how we generally use water on a daily basis: about a third is for toilet-flushing, a third for body hygiene and another third for laundering, washing the dishes, cooking and drinking. For cooking and drinking we need about 5 litres per day.

This LENT let’s limit ourselves to a maximum of 50 litres of water per day – remembering that there are many in our land who are forced to live on much less.

A Few Water Saving Tips

  1. Turn the tap off when you brush your teeth – this can save 6 litres of water per minute.
  2. Place a cistern displacement device in your toilet cistern to reduce the amount of water used in each flush (a one litre bottle filled with water works well).
  3. Take a shorter shower. Showering can use anything between 6 and 45 litres per minute.