Category: Ordinary Days of the Spirit

It’s distressing that a march has to be organized to put before us the importance of improving education for children. Will it take another Soweto uprise to create the pressure needed for deeper engagement in the struggle? Friday afternoon, concerned citizens of Cape Town marched to the Parliament building. The march was organized by Equal Education, an NGO that describes themselves as a movement of learners, parents, and teachers striving for quality and equality in South African education through analysis and activism. They are organizers for change, working so that every child might enjoy the right due to them, simply to learn.

“Amazwi Wethu,” means our voices in isiXhosa. Where are our voices? Where are our cries? That communities have to form walking school buses to keep children safe on their way to school, that school aged children are being recruited to deal drugs on the campuses, that the infrastructures of some are in incredible disrepair, that the resources of some are limited, that the teachers of some are not resourced for the work, that young girls stay home for lack of access to feminine products in the communities of some…it is time for our voices to be heard saying, “enough!”

Edward Everett Hale is quoted as saying:

I am only one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
And I will not let what I cannot do interfere
with what I can do.

So often, when ideas are lifted up, an inordinate amount of time will be spent discussing all the reasons why a particular idea won’t work. This way of engagement is what I have come to call a symptom of the intellectualized faith of our day and age. We can become paralyzed in our action, by the thoughts that war within our minds. There is no better example of this, than the current water crisis in the Western Cape. One can spend hours debating all the things that won’t work and never leave people with the one thing they can do that will make a difference. In the end, we might allow our intellect to be on display, but what about the ground and its thirst? We cannot make a difference in every situation in the world, but each of us can do something. Can’t we work to do something for the children of this generation and the generations to come, that they might have an opportunity simply to learn in environments organized in the best possible way?

The movement being organized by Equal Education is a call for system change within the system that delivers education to children. The system is off line if it is not working for all, so it is time for engagement in the work of making it right. If we are not a system person, we sometimes want to leave system issues to system people. With no Mandela, Gandhi, or MLK Jr in our day and age, the changers of the system for the world’s children is each of us.

Oh, that every child might have such an advocate, the voice of all the people on their side! Oh, that we might witness the day when NGO’s like Equal Education are shut down not for lack of resources, but for lack of need. Where are our voices, Amazwi Whethu, for the children of this city, this country, this world? If we struggle with the leaders of this day, let us be about the business of rising up new leaders in the children of this world, that they might continue in the work of shining light upon the places where the residue of apartheid continues to divide.

To join Equal Education’s movement: https://equaleducation.org.za

With you on the journey,
Michelle

Grace and peace to you

We don’t learn how to swim by attending a lecture on swimming and similarly we don’t get fit by attending a lecture on fitness.

We get fit by going for a run or walk.

We learn how to swim by getting into the water – first in the shallow end where we can stand or with a flotation aid to hold and hopefully with someone we trust by our side. We learn to hold our breath underwater by practicing dipping our head under the water. This helps us to overcome our fear of being totally covered by the water. Ultimately if we want to learn how to swim we need to stop trying to keep as much of our body out of the water.

This is true for the deeper lessons of life. The things that really matter can only be learned by full immersion. Love can only be learnt at the risk of allowing ourselves to love and be loved. The values of compassion and justice and gentleness can only be learnt through a process of patient persistence which are values in themselves.

Wanting an immediate answer to something sometimes reveals that we have not understood the question because the answer is not the answer! The struggle with the question is the answer.

For factual questions like: “What is the legal speed limit?” the answer may simply be given. But for relational questions like: “How do I forgive my neighbour?” answers can’t be given. The “answer” to relational questions can only be discovered in the wrestling. As Mark Nepo so beautifully reveals in his poem, Behind the thunder.

Behind the thunder

I keep looking for one more teacher,
only to find that fish learn from water
and birds learn from sky.
If you want to learn about the sea,
it helps to be at sea.
If you want to learn about compassion,
it helps to be in love.
If you want to learn about healing,
it helps to know of suffering.
The strong live in the storm
without worshiping the storm.

Grace, Alan

Water Restrictions

The dams are low in the Cape,
we are told
not to fill the swimming pool,
not to water the garden,
not to wash the car,
not to take a bath.
We’ve never –
never had a swimming pool to fill,
never had a garden to water,
never had a car to wash,
never had the privilege of taking a bath
to soak away the aches and pains
that flood our cups and bowls,
otherwise empty.
Seems the dams have been low
for us, forever.

© Athol Williams

Grace to you

This week I came across the story of Farai Chinomwe. Farai is an athlete. He runs marathons and ultra-marathons like the Comrades, which in 2014 he did in an incredible time of 7 hours 6 minutes.

“I was born and brought up in a rural area near the Great Zimbabwe Ruins surrounded by insects and nature in a musical family – in our village, everyone had some instrument to play. In 2000, I moved to Johannesburg to study and ended up playing drum and Mbira in a band – we’d perform at restaurants and other events and when I wasn’t playing, I would do running and fitness training. One day I went to the shed to collect my instruments for a performance when I discovered that a swarm of bees had moved into my favourite djembe. Everyone told me I should burn the bees out but I decided to rather find a way to remove them safely. It was only after a year that I had developed sufficient means and confidence to provide a new home to the swarm. They had literally transformed the drum into a giant honeycomb – this was the point where I became a beekeeper.”

In 2015 Farai ran the Comrades Marathon in 11 hours 31 minutes – which was slow in comparison to his previous times but the reason for this was that he was running backwards!

It all started by accident.

“It was one o’clock in the morning and I was driving on a very dark Corlett Drive on the outskirts of Alexandra in my battered old Peugeot 404. I had collected a swarm of bees from a client and they were buzzing angrily in the boot. Suddenly, the car simply sputtered and stalled and there I was in the cold and dark without any prospect of help.

I realised I’d have to push the car, which was quite heavy, to the top of the hill where I could at least coast the few km back home. I started pushing the car the normal way and immediately realised that I wouldn’t be able to make it. I turned around with my back to the car boot and realised I could push it far easier. Eventually, after 2 hours of pushing and coasting and steering, I got back home, transferred the bees to their new home and finally got to sleep. Next morning on waking, I noticed that my quads felt like they got the most amazing workover and at that moment, I suddenly realised that the bees had helped me discover a really useful training technique.”

Farai is a dedicated beekeeper and because it was through the bees that he learned backward running, he’s decided to run some of his marathons backwards to raise awareness about the importance of bees in the environment and to encourage people to love and care for bees. Farai’s business is Blessed Bee Africa.

Running the Comrades forwards is a massive achievement. Running it backwards is beyond category. But as Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”.

May the “why we live” find us and focus us.
Alan

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Albert Einstein

Grace to you

Language changes over time. A word that meant one thing at one time can mean something else at another time. Failing to understand this can have terrible consequences.

Take for example the phrase from the USA Declaration of Independence, concerning three examples of the “unalienable rights” which the Declaration says have been given to all human beings by their Creator, and which governments are created to protect: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Life and freedom make sense to me but happiness? Really? Is this an unalienable right”? I confess that when I think of the word a smiley face comes to mind ?. Today the happiness is associated with feelings and a range of positive emotions that in popular culture is closely associated with the accumulation of wealth and status. Yet none of this is what was meant in the writing of the Declaration. The roots of Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word ‘happiness’ lie in the Greek word for happiness: eudaimonia which is linked to aretê, which is the Greek word for “virtue” or “excellence.” In other words, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of the civic virtues of justice, courage, moderation, and integrity. This “social happiness” is in fact the foundation of freedom and the good life.

Another example concerns the word “soul”. This time the popular definition of the word is shaped by Greek mythology rather than its Hebrew roots. The Greeks divided the human person up into “body, mind and soul”. This three-fold division of the human person is commonplace to this day even (or especially) within religious circles. So when people speak of “saving souls” its understood as the “saving” of some special part of a person – an immortal part – the immortal soul. This is Greek thinking and is totally at odds to the biblical usage and thinking. The Hebrew word Nephesh is the word we translate into English as “soul”. Nephesh means one’s entire being or living being. In other words, to save souls is to seek the well-being of the whole person. In including every aspect of what it means to be human, it resists all the false dichotomies of spirit and flesh. No wonder John Wesley said to his preachers: “You have nothing to do but to save souls.”

In these two examples the understandings ascribed to the words mentioned have shrunk the original meaning to something small, private and selfish from what was originally large, all encompassing and interconnected with the whole. Words and their meanings matter, so best we watch our language.

Grace,
Alan

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
Albert Einstein

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Albert Einstein

We live today in the midst of a great divorce. There is a divorce between the people and God, the people and each other, and the people and the Creation that we are called to care for. The divorce is evidenced through the thirst of the very land beneath our feet. The land carries the wounds of the divorce, just as each of us, when injured carry the wounds from the others who have wronged us. The story of the murder of Able by his brother Cain illustrates the connection of the land to the people, “What did you do?” God asks Cain. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground that opened its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand” (Genesis 4:10-11). The cycles of life for the Earth are rhythmic. When we, the caretakers of creation, cease to understand our great connection to the earth, we miss an elemental truth. We are beings that were created for the very relationships we are divorcing ourselves from.

It is as if we have forgotten the nature of our origins. It is from dust we have come and from dust we shall return. The prophet Micah reminds us, “He has told you O mortal what is good: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God” (6:8). The Latin origin of the word humble is humilus–lowly–to the ground. The ancients of the Earth, recognized the gift of interdependency with creation and the gift of walking close to the roots of our origins. Wendell Berry quotes a version of a Native American ancient proverb as he explains life as it should be, “I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children.”

Environmental activist, Kumi Naidoo argues with those who believe our work is to save the planet, he says, “the good news is, the planet is just fine, we don’t need to worry about the planet, but if we continue on the path that we are on (referring to burning of fossil fuels causing global warming) we will warm up the planet to the point where our water resources will be destroyed, our soil will be destroyed, and both of those things give the toxic reality of food being constrained. So, the end result is that we will be gone, but the planet will still be here. Once we become extinct as a species, the forests will recover and the oceans will replenish.” He argues that environmental activism should not be about saving the planet as much it should be about, “ensuring that humanity can passion a new way to coexist with nature in a mutually interdependent relationship for centuries and centuries to come. For differently, this struggle is fundamentally about our children and their future.”

Gus Speth, Professor of Environmental studies at Yale shares, “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation, and ecosystem collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science, but I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items but greed, selfishness, and apathy. And for that we need spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that, we need your help.” 

Speth’s comments were directed towards a gathered group of religious leaders. This upcoming week, Methodist leaders from around the connection (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique) will be gathering in Conference to discern the leadership of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa under the theme “Being together with God’s Creation.” Through our connection, one with each other, we have strength. Please be in prayer this week that this time of deliberation by our leaders will bring wisdom, discernment, and ways forward that lead to transformation for Africa and all the world.

With you on the journey,
Michelle

Grace and peace to you and through you

I was at Theewaterskloof Dam the other day. The stretched out sand surrounded the water like an army surrounding a city waiting for it to surrender. If this drought is drastic in winter we can be sure it will be deadly in summer.

As it was with the power / electricity “load-shedding” a few years ago we will probably only learn the true value of water and our dependence on water when the taps defy our touch and turn. Perhaps only then will we realise how much water we waste and never think of “catching”. In the future every rooftop will have to harvest rainwater for sure.

A life-giving world-view or spirituality humbly moves us to a truly reverent relationship with all of creation. To this end we would do well to learn from the faith traditions of those whom Christendom over the centuries have dismissively named ‘pagans’. I invite you to reflect on the following “confession of faith” from a fantasy novel called “The Fifth Sacred Thing”:

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water and earth.

Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. Not one of us stands higher or lower than any other.

Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honour the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honour the sacred is to make love possible.

To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

I am sure Jesus would say amen to this, aren’t you?

Grace,
Alan

“We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain? We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another… …But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.”

– The Fifth Sacred Thing, Stawhawk