Category: Trinity Sunday

Grace to you

The wind blows where it wills. We cannot make the wind blow. Not even a becalmed sailor can make the wind blow. At best, a sailor can hoist the sails so that when the wind does blow, their boat is moved to fresh destinations. We can do things to catch the wind but we cannot do anything to move the wind.

This is equally true and mysterious about the Holy Spirit which is nothing less than the Wind of God which is nothing less that the Wind of Love.

We cannot make the Holy Spirit come. We cannot make the Wind of Love show up. All we can do is prepare to receive her when she does. All we can do is hoist the sails of our lives so that when the Wind of Love blows, our lives will be resurrected and returned to us, and our living will be moved to fresh destinations.

We hoist the sails of our lives by surrendering control.

Surrendering control is at the heart of any and all authentic spiritual journeys. Surrendering control is the journey of Jesus: “If you want to follow me take up your cross…” It is ‘The Way’ that leads to New-Life-Now that cannot be taken away even though we may die.

It is completely counter-cultural to surrender control. In fact for many of us, control is what our whole life is either consciously or unconsciously directed towards.

Therefore to surrender control is painfully difficult, but deep down we long for it because deep down (beneath our defense mechanisms) we know that nothing we control can save us (our lives prove this). We also know that we need to be saved from control itself and therefore it stands to reason that it is impossible to control that which is to save us from control.

Salvation cannot be controlled because salvation is not a machine that can be programmed or a magic trick that can be performed or a commodity that can be purchased. Salvation is a gift and it can only be freely received as it is freely given. More specifically, salvation is the free gift of Love. Control suffocates love.

We surrender control by grace. The grace of spiritual practice – especially SILENCE (for those who keep control through words), SOLITUDE (for those who keep control through crowds / relationships) STILLNESS (for those who keep control through work and deeds).

If not through these intentional means of grace – then we will learn to surrender control through being humbled by our ageing and failing bodies (sickness) or through humiliation as a result of our hidden selves spilling out publicly.

Perhaps we will only surrender control through a mixture of silence, solitude, stillness, sickness and spilled selves…but all are precious if we are able to welcome and feel the Wind of Love.
Grace,
Alan

Grace and peace to you and through you

In the face of so much that is going on at the moment, the question is often asked: What difference can one person make? We ask ourselves this question when trying to gage whether anything we do will make a difference for good in the world. Sometimes just asking the question becomes the basis for us to not do a thing – because after all, why do something that we are not sure is going to make any difference?

Yet, have you noticed that we are less inclined to question the difference one person can make when that person is acting against the common good. We see it here and abroad, one person in one position wreaking havoc. I am sure a couple of leaders come to mind.

I realise that one of the explanations for this may be because it is easier to break something down than it is to build something up; which makes the “breakers” arguably more effective than the “builders”, or at least so it seems. It is also obvious that things take longer to build than they do to destroy. It can take a few minutes to chop down a tree of many years. The breakers are camera-grabbing sprinters who can fit their destruction into a tweet, while the builders are ultra-marathon plodders needing a full-length documentary to tell their story. The “breakers” also tend to use extremely blunt, yet very effective motivating tools like fear and selective favour.

Nevertheless it’s interesting that we are more inclined to question the difference a person can make when they set out to do good than we are for one bent on doing harm. As Rebecca Solnit says in her fantastic book, Hope in the Dark: “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”

But there may be other reasons that we need to take more responsibility for. Fearing the burden of responsibility upon us, we sometimes convince ourselves to the point of certainty that nothing good can be achieved. We make statements like: “But that will never happen.” “They will never change …” “They will always …” In this we become certain of our own futility by a made-up story that is filled with insurmountable stumbling blocks making the hope for change impossible. As Solnit says: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is … the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”

Sometimes the “builders” are more like sustainers who don’t do anything other than preserve what is and therefore the results of their work are not easily seen or valued until what is, is no longer. A bit like a riverbank that for the longest time faithfully channels the waters responsibly, only to be noticed when broken. Because nobody is tweeting about a riverbank doing its job today, let us honour the unnoticed and under-appreciated river-bankers who humbly channel life among us.

Grace, Alan

The Road to Namaqualand

Grace and Peace to you …

Last week we heard that unemployment rose to 26.7%. This figure however, does not tell the whole story because it does not include those who have not looked for work within the last month. So the real unemployment figure is more like 37%. This is a national average figure, meaning that some communities have a much higher unemployment rate. The stress and strain for mere survival for millions of people in our land is frightening and making social stability impossible.

Not surprising many people under these conditions turn to micro-lenders for salvation. I remember a few months ago when I was in Paarl seeing a long line of people queuing up outside a micro-lending office every morning. Here the poor and low-income earners pay more for money than the wealthy. So instead of being a means of salvation it becomes a quick route to damning debt.

According to one micro-lender’s website, I can borrow R1 000 for 30 days and repay the loan with R1 288.56 at the end of the month. But if my life ran into a speed bump and I was unable to pay the R288.56 interest at the end of the first month, within four months my interest bill would be up at R1 000, to be paid within 30 days. Imagine buying something and within four months the interest on whatever we bought was equal to what we paid for it!

With the pensioners from the Eastern Cape living in the Sanctuary we have been reminded first hand how some people are treated as invisible, like they do not matter. Marginalised and excluded without fair means to live. I hope this situation among us has prodded our consciences to work for the day when all people have enough to eat and live and flourish.

Last Sunday was Pentecost. Pentecost takes place 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus. 50 is the biblical symbol for Jubilee. Jubilee is the biblical concept of economic justice that includes the redistribution of wealth making sure that those who have much do not have too much and those who have little do not have too little. A community that seeks economic fairness is a Pentecostal community. This is what we are called to be.

Grace,
Alan

P.S. If anyone has any contacts with the city to secure public toilets (at least some of them) to be open 24/7 please speak to me. The fact that homeless people have nowhere to go to toilet after 5 p.m. is criminal. This structural criminality turns the homeless into criminals when they are forced to go to the toilet in public.

“The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change;
everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality,
want of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearances nobody follows them,
yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows
it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat. The community cannot get
that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone
so long as the real A is kept sounding.”

~ John Jay Chapman (1862-1933)