Lessons from the garden

CMM, Cape Town / / Epiphany, Sunday Letter

Photograph: Jenn Forman Orth (Flickr)

 

Friends,

Once a year over Christmas and New Year I go on an all-out gardening binge. A real bender. As with most binges there are some not so lekker consequences. Like getting up in the morning. Every year I am stiffly reminded that gardening is gym by another name. It is all lunges and squats, in the mud rather than the mirror.

My binge gardening consists mainly of pulling things out the ground. It always seems that the stuff I do not want to grow – grows obsessively. Without assistance at all – popping up here there and everywhere. Attaching to this and that and basically taking over everything in their path – including the path. Growing and going where they know they are not supposed to grow and go. All without a care in the world. Trespassing anarchists.

So, I pull them out and cut them back – hacking and chopping and digging – snipping and pruning just don’t cut it. Overwhelmed and impatient, I hire someone with a weed-eater thingy to mow the “invasives” down. But a week or so later they respond with revenge, spawning a 100 fold more. I multiply what I try to defeat. These plants demand to be respected enough to be removed at their root or not at all.

Conversely, almost everything that I want to grow, grows so s-l-o-w-l-y. Sloth-like. I wish the creepers would hurry up and creep up to provide shade, but they stubbornly refuse to stretch skyward. Why are they so slow to do what they are born to do and what their label promises they will do? Surely they can’t be afraid of heights. 

And it is these plants – the ones I hope to hurry up and grow, rather than the others that attract dodgy company. Parasitic company. This then demands loads of my time and attention. Gloves-off attention. Finicky-finger attention. The worst is the exceedingly passionate and persistent parasite called dodder laurel that goes by the common and disarming name, love vine. No doubt because it clings so tightly to the host plant. Each string-like-strand curling round the stems or branches of the host must be individually removed by gently undoing their sticky twines. There is no other way to do it without harming the host. There are no short cuts. Uncurling. Unlearning. Undoing attachments. Ultimately liberating and healing.

Finally, planting never fails to feel foolish. I look at the size of the tomato seeds with suspicion. Each seed simply looks too small to carry their promised nourishment. So, every season I must fight the temptation to not sprinkle a couple of seeds into each finger-poked-bed of soil. Living in a more-is-better-world, my planting mantra becomes: One is enough. One is enough. One is enough.

I am not sure if Paul was a gardener, but I have a feeling he may have been, after all he wrote about planting with Apollos watering and God making it grow [1 Corinthians 3:6]. More to the point in the light of my own gardening experience, Paul wrote: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” [Romans 7:19]. There are few words in all of literature that so acutely describe our human condition as these. I invite you to consider the truth of them in your own life. If gardening doesn’t fit, what is the metaphor you would use to describe how this plays out for you?

Grace,
Alan

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

New Year’s Eve: A Time for Reflection

CMM, Cape Town / / New Year's Eve, Reflection

Dear God,

We pray for another way of being:
another way of knowing.

Across the difficult terrain of our existence
we have attempted to build a highway
and in so doing have lost our footpath.

God lead us to our footpath:
Lead us there where in simplicity
we may move at the speed
of natural creatures and feel the earth’s love
beneath our feet.

Lead us there where step-by-step we may
feel the movement of creation in our hearts.

And lead us there where side-by-side
we may feel the embrace of the common soul.

Nothing can be loved at speed.

God, lead us to the slow path;
to the joyous insights of the pilgrim;
another way of knowing:
another way of being.
Amen.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Christmas: The Original Defiance Campaign

CMM, Cape Town / / Christmas Day

Friends,

On 26 June 1952 the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in SA was launched. Until then in South Africa it was the largest non-violent resistance campaign with more than 8 000 people going to jail for defying apartheid laws and regulations.

Defiance Campaign Volunteers signed the following pledge:

I, the undersigned, Volunteer of the National Volunteer Corps, do hereby solemnly pledge and bind myself … to participate fully and without reservations to the best of my ability in the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws. … “

Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe were two Defiance Campaign Volunteers. Elizabeth Mafekeng was born in 1918 in Tarkastad. Living conditions in her birthplace forced her to leave for Paarl in the early 1930s. Mafekeng left school at the age of 15 to support the family. Her first job was at a “canning factory where she cleaned fruit and vegetables for 75 cents a week”. She married a fellow factory worker in 1941 and joined the trade union in the same year. She became a shop steward and then served, between 1954 and 1959 “as President of the African Food and Canning Workers Union (AFCWU) and branch secretary in Paarl”. Mafekeng was known as “Rocky” among the workers in Paarl. A striking woman, she always began ”her speeches with a song or two, singing in a clear, rich and well-organised voice”. Her speeches were “fiery, militant and witty.”

In 1952 Mafekeng participated in the Defiance Campaign and the South African Congress Trade Unions’ (SACTU’s) 1957 ‘Pound a Day’ Campaign. In 1955, she skipped the country without legal papers to represent the Food Workers Union at a trade union conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria. She was met with police brutality upon her return. In 1959, the Government banished her from Paarl, to a remote government farm in the Kuruman district. Her banishment papers said it was ‘injurious for the peace, order and good administration of Natives in the district of Paarl’ if Mrs Mafekeng remained there. She was given five days (later extended to twelve) to say goodbye to her family, make arrangements for their care, (and) wind up her work … There was, of course, no trial, no public hearing and no possibility of appeal.

She refused to take her 11 children to that desolate place. On the night of her deportation the union leadership organised a large number of workers to bid her a safe journey. She got onto a train and started waving farewell and then quietly walked through two coaches and jumped off the train unnoticed. Rather than being banished to Southey and to “a future of nothingness,” Mafekeng fled to Lesotho with her two-month old baby, Uhuru, and sought refuge at a Roman Catholic Mission at Makhaleng. She was granted asylum and lived in a two-room home with her nine children in the small village of Mafeteng. With the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990, she returned to Paarl. The FCWU built her a home in Mbekweni Township in Paarl. Elizabeth Mafekeng died on 28 May 2009, at the age of 90, due to ill health.

Mary Thipe was born in 1917 in a village called Ramhlakoane in the Matatiele district. She later moved to Umkhumbane and joined the liberation struggle in 1952, the year of the Defiance Campaign. She was arrested, detained and banned for five years for her political activities.

Thipe took part in the 1959 Potato Boycott – a consumer boycott to end the slave-like conditions of farm labourers in Bethal (Mpumalanga). She was involved in the Cato Manor Beer Hall March in 1960 – a women-led national campaign of boycotting municipal beer halls because their men were drinking sorghum beer while their children and wives starved.

Her activities attracted the wrath of the police. She was put under house arrest for 10 years which meant she could not attend church services, funeral services of her loved ones and was not allowed to be in the company of more than three people.

Every Monday morning, Thipe was required to report at the Cato Manor police station. This did not stop the security branch from harassing her even in her house arrest.

She had trained her children that each time police came in the middle of the night, they would wake up and stand behind her. She had also trained them to look at the police in the eye and not flinch. When one of her grandsons went into exile, the police intensified their terror on Thipe and her family. When the police threatened to find her grandson and kill him, she retorted by requesting that they bring his head back to her. She refused to show fear and flinch at their threats. In 1986 the police used a gang which was known as the A-team to burn Thipe’s house down. Thipe died of a stroke but not before voting for what would be her first and last time in 1994.

All information about Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe are from South African History Online.

– – –

Now, long before Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe volunteered to solemnly pledge and bind themselves to participate fully and without reservations to the best of their ability in the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, there were two others who shared their spirit of defiance, as well as their first names. The Gospels tell us that the Spirit of God had come upon Elizabeth and Mary, and what is the Spirit of God if it is not the Spirit of defiance against all that is unjust in the world?

Christmas is the original Defiance Campaign against inequality and injustice: Divinely inspired, complete with surprising strategy… subversive recruitment… angelic agitation… stabled safe-house… star-guiding civil dis-obedience… shepherding allies… all set to song – Mary’s Redemption song… that still sounds: Won’t you help to sing / these songs of freedom / Cause all I ever have / Redemption Songs…

May the courageous lives of Elizabeth Mafekeng and Mary Thipe give us insight into the courageous lives of Elizabeth and Mary of long ago.

In grace,
Alan

 

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Angelic Liberators

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

Friends,

A few weeks ago I referred you to The Red Hand Files. The Red Hand Files are Nick Caves’ public reply to questions / letters sent to him. Here is his latest that I think tandems today’s Gospel reading rather well. For were it not for angelic intervention a socially “disgraced” Mary would have been dismissed by a so-called religiously “righteous” Joseph and no Gospel would have followed. Throughout the ages men have often been deaf to the truth of angelic liberators. With righteousness weaponised, the rejection of women have followed. These rejections are the real disgrace!

Grace,
Alan

—

“Yesterday, I was listening to your BBC interview, and the interviewer asked you to discuss the distinction you make between spirituality and religion – I’m interested in this distinction too, and it’s something I wrestle with.

What do you do when you’re a woman who would like the kind of spirituality with rigour that religion affords, but your faith, and much of its rigour is stacked against your sex? What to do, when the faith you were raised in continues to make decisions that isolate women, and prevents women from being fully themselves in the church and the world?

I haven’t been to church, or even prayed for a long time. I’ve been angry at my church because women continue to be discriminated against, and because not all of us were safe there.

Christ is still compelling for me – and while congregations are still mostly made up of women – how do the rest of us practice within a church that we know hates us.”

CLAIRE, SOUTH GOLDEN BEACH, NSW

“Dear Claire,
In many ways, the figure of Jesus is the radical and mystical embodiment of female energy. It is there in the blood thread of suffering that runs from his birth to his death, his emergence bereft of male seed, the mercy and forgiveness he displays and teaches, his nurturing, shepherding love – all of this feels female in its essence. I think perhaps the biggest mistake the church made was to distrust, dismiss and undermine this implicit female energy that pours through the gospels and the idea of spiritual belief itself.
 
I can see why you would reject a theology that seems to have taken that free-flowing spirituality and imprisoned it within an intolerant and hostile masculine construct.
 
Even though I go to church when I can, I am by no means an advocate of organised religion. Like you, I struggle with it. However, I feel the church I attend allows me a lasting structure that can contain my unbelief and belief both – that is to say, my love for the motion, direction and energy of faith, albeit nested in a certain skepticism of its ultimate destination.
 
Certainly church has its challenges, and it may be the last place you might find Christ, if that’s what you’re looking for. But, for me, a church service affords me a place where I can, for an hour or so, put aside my uncertainty and sit within a gathering space – a place of communal and timeless yearning, imperfect though it may be. There are times when my rational mind clamours in and I wonder what I am doing there, yet there are other times when I am genuinely lifted up by its mothering energy – the words and music and liturgy – and I find those ever-present whispers and intimations of spiritual activity, that both haunt my life and give it meaning, to be quite beautifully affirmed. There within that institution I feel the sacred and feminine essence to be revealed.
 
Claire, as I said, I am not an advocate for the church one way or the other, and I wish I had a better answer for you. Sometimes it feels as though part of the work of a spiritual life is to discover a way to transcend the imperfections of the religion itself and attune oneself to its essential nature. This is what I try to do. In any event, I wish you all the best and thank you for your letter. I am sure many will relate to it.
 
Love, Nick”
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The Liberating Spirit of Mary

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

Five years ago on 17 October Yasaman Aryani dared to take off her hijab
and practice her civil disobedience as part of #WhiteWednesdays campaign.

 

Friends,

Every year on the third week of Advent we are invited to sing Mary’s liberation song with her. Few words have ever been spoken that are more radical. Few words have ever been spoken that are a greater threat to the status quo of Empire. Say them aloud if you dare…

And Mary said,

‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48 for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him from
generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has
scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our
ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants
for ever.’ (Luke 1:46-55)

Proof of the power of these words is how the powers of Empire responded to them. Empire’s Herod fearfully and lovelessly responded with the systematic state sponsored murder of the innocents. Unjust and oppressive regimes rule by fear and therefore the one thing they fear more than anything else is that people will no longer fear them. Brutal clamp downs of uprisings are clear proof of this fear. We see this in Iran at the moment. Brave and courageous Mary-like-women no longer afraid to reveal their faces and sing of their freedom while the spirit/wind blows through their hair. This terrifies regimes of terror. This freedom campaign against #ForcedHijab in particular and oppression of women in general will be overcome one day.

Five years ago on 17 October Yasaman Aryani, dared to take off her hijab and practice her civil disobedience as part of #WhiteWednesdays campaign. She is paying a heavy price in prison. Even from jail she issued a statement to support Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who on 16 September 2022, died in a hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances. The Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police of Iran’s government, arrested Amini for not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards.

One exiled journalist and activist from Iran, Masih Alinejad says: “The truth is I am not the one they are scared of. They‘re scared of us drops becoming a river … You’re scared that people are no longer scared of you and they can rise up. Whichever woman hears me she sees that our voice is heard worldwide. She feels powerful because she can become a state in her own right. Because Islamic Republic isn’t the real choice of Iranians. Because our elections are a sham.”

Long live the liberating spirit of Mary – long live.

Grace,
Alan

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email