Unanswered prayer

I've come across few heartbreaking instances of the phenomenon of "unanswered prayers". Some surfer kids became worried after they saw middle size fish jump out of the water, and thought there might be a shark in there. So they prayed to Jesus to keep them safe. One of them got attacked by the shark that was indeed there and died half an hour later on the beach in front of his 16 year old mates. One diocese in New South Wales wanted to launch a couple of schools to keep the rumour of God alive in 21st century Australian society. For a variety of reason, including their inability to recruit able managers for those schools, they ran into so much debt that it bankrupt the diocese, with the good people in the pews now facing the prospect of losing everything (churches, church halls, rectories) and their whole notion of church as they know it. Now ummm, all of this was undertaken prayerfully enough. But how much of the "answers" we hear back are just our wishful thinking? How can we know? I'm not a fan of having to deal with horrendous confusion when I'd really like some guidance from on high. But hey, I'd rather that than delude myself I'm "hearing" anything back like the godly folks whose stories I've just retold. As time passes, I'm starting to think that this subjective "relationship with Jesus" business is kind of abusive to me. What kind of relationship have I got with someone who never talks to me, or so infrequently that it makes the long silence all the more unbearable? I don't know anybody in real life who treats me this badly, who can be so indifferent to my cries for help. Now granted, I'm all subjective here, maybe I've understood it all wrong, maybe that's not how it works. But I'd sure like to know how it works then... And I'd like to know where to get some proper guidance, and a bit of feedback too. It's so hard to handle all the decisions completely on my own, with no GPS so to speak, and to have to take so many wrong turns and detours, out of total lostness, on this road.

Gentleness and plenty

I haven't blogged for a while, more than a year or so it seems. The truth of the matter is that I haven't blogged a lot since my kids were born. Thomas was joined this last February by our daughter Madeleine and life has been, well, busy. I thought back of this blog as a spot where I used to gather the things that were little elements of the life of faith as it happens to me. A fair few things have happened but none of them I felt compelled to keep a record of. But of late a reading of Colm Tóibín's "The Testament of Mary" has been a minor cataclysm. I guess he put into words a few things I didn't know I thought. In this work of fiction he depicts the early followers of Jesus as a bunch of hysterical malcontents, each with a warped agenda of their own. The author makes this historical period and place seriously unattractive, full of heightened emotions and out-of-touch fanaticism. In this book, the narrator, Mary, heartily dislikes the various bands of zealots that seek contact with her. She ends up dropping Judaism in favour of the gentleness and plenty of a Greek Goddess because he heart yearns for calm and abundance. So now, I wish I could pinpoint exactly what it is that I absolutely loved about this novella. But at the bottom I think it is a plea for gentleness and plenty above orthodoxy and heroism. These last qualities are so demanding they make failures out of pretty much everyone. In the process we can forget how much we too yearn for calm and abundance, not just for ourselves, but for all.

Looking for a consitently good online read?

While I'm busy trying to find a few minutes a month to write in here again, you might like to go check this fantabulous resource: Enlarging the Heart.

Imperfectly transmitted

For a couple of months, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on a catholic parenting forum. Mostly this can be explained by the fact that I don't have an inordinate amount of time, just little bits of time here and there when the baby is asleep.

Still, I think I was fascinated by a certain innocent way of relating to the world and to God which I have lost entirely and will never recapture. I will never again pray to the Virgin Mary for this or that to happen. Not that I haven't tried, but the picture of squeletically thin children superimposes itself on my brain each and every time. I'm crushed and want to cry. In fact all I want to do when I attempt to pray is cry.

So, on this forum, I came across this manual of a choir boy. I browsed a few pages and could not believe my eyes. Although written in 1845, the style was timeless, for all I knew it could have been written five years ago. "This is an extraordinarily youthful, timeless voice" I thought, and really quite remarkable. I am a sucker for works written in this timeless voice, which to me is the hallmark of good style. But on that occasion it seemed to be exactly the same as the voice of the priest I grew up with.

I read a bit further and it was like trying to understand a foreign language you would have learned at school for a little bit years and years ago. Vaguely familiar, but distant and incomprehensible. How could this brand of catholicism have passed almost unchanged from the early 1800s to the mid 1990's and why did it stop with me? Why has this DNA change of some magnitude occured in my young soul which makes me unable to relate to that stuff on any further.

Actually, my metaphor of a foreign language is not the best one. What this feels like is more like waking up one day and realising you have forgotten how to speak your mother tongue. You can still live and function somehow but your mind is stunned and numb.

Since this is a state of affairs I can't really change, I tell myself "So what?" A Christian subculture thrives for a couple of hundred years in a particular time and a particular place, well that's a good thing. But if you can't relate to that one, there are plenty more to choose form, including some that haven't been thought up and codified yet. To hell with the scent of cold incense, this thing is alive, let us hear new timeless voices.

Beyond the dichotomy

In my last post, I promised to explore the concept of nice folk helping poor people, "embodying Jesus" and whatever else they think they're doing. I have touched on this before. But it might be good to delve into it some more.

In 2010, I wrote this post. Now if we spend a split minute asking ourselves which of the key protagonists is the most wretched in the eyes of God, it becomes obvious that it is not the homeless guy.

So on the one hand, we have a shelterless guy who has no access to food, water, sanitation or friendship. On the other hand we have a well catechised professed Christian. Again it might be interesting to ask which of the two is the most pitiable, or the poorest, in God's eyes.

This Faithless song lays it out quite well:

You look fresh, yeah
But all I got is dirt in my hair
My nightmares manifest,
But I can escape
Yours is in your chest
With no form or shape

The Middle Ages grasped something about this that we forget. Back then, it was the custom for whoever gave a coin to someone who was begging to request a prayer for the salvation of the giver's soul. The practice was probably very self-serving on the part of the givers, but at least the practice acknowledged that God listens to the poor, and that the salvation of the rich is in grave danger. Both the giver and the givee knew this.

Better still, in The Fear of Beggars, Kelly S. Johnson reminds us that in the Christian polity, we have supposedly surrendered our property at the feet of the apostles and from that point onward we should all become beggars, which is a stance more in keeping with our ontological dependence on God.

Nowadays we don't even recognise this, the poor are just left to be poor, both materially and spiritually. They've got nothing on us. But fortunately for all involved, progressive Christians have a bit to spare, both materially and spirirtually, and we're willing to dole out a few crumbs of it away.

Now, if the homeless guy and me were both to die and appear before God tomorrow what would God see? Probably that we were both desperately poor and miserable, desperately sad and full of unshed tears. The one coming at the end of a life deprived of earthly comforts and friendship, the other coming at the end of a life lived without a grasp and command of the most basic elements of the Christian Imagination.

But it is my hope that God would also affirm the "life, goodness, health, purity, and well-being of the dying, the sinners, the sick, the impure, and the poor" to use the words of Poserorprophet.

In my understanding of Dan's stance, life, goodness, health, purity and well-being are not simply things to be given out to people who lack them. They are primarily things to be affirmed in people who have already them. Despite all of the brokenness, God sees the life, the goodness, the health, the purity and the well-being of the homeless guy now. He sees them in me now. Maybe instead of pitying our miserableness -or the miserableness of others for that matter- we could begin by affirming these too.

But at the end of the day what I'm saying is: stop essentialising, we're all people. We're all sinners. We're all beggars for love. But despite our weaknesses (which I am not excusing or condoning) we are also beautiful and good and healthy and pure and well. Once we grasp this, there is much less scope left for any kind of condescention.

Cavanaugh's Being Consumed, a critical review

Occasionally, when reading a book on a topic that is of interest to me, I get to close the book again and think: "rats, if I want to read something good on this, it looks like I'm going to have to write it myself".

I was disappointed by this book, which reads like a rush job written for professional gain, rather than a genuine attempt at enlightening the reader. There is no depth to it and nothing I haven't read before (admittedly, this might be because I'm usually afforded a bountiful diet of good reading stuff).

Seriously, compare this meagre 100 pages rehash of things the blogosphere has been saying for yonks, with the early work of the likes of Mark McIntosh, and it leads me to think that there are early career monographs that are true labours of love, and early career monographs that are not. It reads like a long rant, supported by maybe fifteen sources, most of them are big hitters to be found on any first year undergraduate's reading list. I really hope that Cavanaugh got tenure and that he'll start writing good stuff again.

The thing that annoys me with authors who go on and on about something needing to be done about the poor is that they take money for granted. My thinking (and I suspect that was Peter Maurin's thinking too) is that you'd be better off trying to operate as much as you can outside money. It is not fully possible of course, not even for the likes of Jesus and his band of followers, but I think that this should be intented when possible.

This is my reading of giving back to Caesar what is Caesar's. It might be a way-out-there interpretation but it is mine and I own it. To me Christ's answer ammounts to saying: "Don't you see that by asking this question and using those coins you already are a part of Empire, and that Empire has got its grip on you through this".

Increasingly, I don't think money can ever be kosher, because no matter what kind of ethical job you do, it's all funded by profit made elsewhere and quite unethically. The same goes for being on the dole, since dole money was raised through taxes, and guess who got taxed. So my solution is do as much as you can outside of it. As I say, it is not always possible. But it is no surprise that alternative currencies are flourishing in Greece or is it?

Thus, it would be a good idea to go beyond Cavanaugh's recommendations of letting Communion wean you of your own desires for more stuff and towards giving more away. And when you do buy things, buy fairtrade and support companies with a triple bottom line. No shit Sherlock!? And if someone desperately poor gives you a present keep it and bring it back to your home in the first world as a reminder of what real sharing looks like.

So now, the concept of Christian desire is quite interesting, but I can't think of anyone that has treated it well (apart from me that is :-)). Even this dissertation on Augustine was a bit of a let down.

Additionally, I don't think that talking or writing about the poor as "the others" is all that constructive. To hell with Noblesse Oblige in all its forms. We would be well inspired to ditch the dichotomies of "the poor" and "the nice people who are in charge of benevolently helping them out by empowering them". But more on this in a next post.

Still the heart of the matter is that I'm tired of reading guilt-infused exhortatory stuff by liberal academics. I just want to read the "how tos" of people who have done it, and done it well.

Check out this website please

One of my quaker friends pointed me towards a website intended to document the testimonies of members of the Israeli army. A whole lot of reasons why I won't be caught dead in the Holy Land fueling that regime.
http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database

Nobody cares about you but I do

Last week, I got invited to a fund raising dinner in which a very famous Australian activist for homeless youth was giving a talk.

To be honest, I hated it. I found it voyeuristic on the part of the assembled diners to come and have a look at the guy. What is this? Weeknight entertainment? A one man freak show?

I still tried to get something out of it, and I was surprised to be able to distill the guy's whole stance in just one half line: "nobody cares about you but I do".

I haven't had a chance to fully think about it any further. My first reaction was: what an annoying populist brat. Thank you very much for depicting all of the world except yourself as the bad people who don't care. As if that's going to help.

At the end of the day, I still don't know how constructive or unconstructive that stance is. It sure is appealing to a strand of adolescent angst. But then again, so was National Socialist fascism.

I'm uneasy about that stance, but I can't pinpoint why...

Here we go...

A little over six months ago, I wrote the following:

I've picked up some seriously good, incrediby pastoral flyers in my time backpacking around in these countries. Some of them were nothing short of life-changing, the work of local priests explaining in 15 lines that God loves you and that you're not "going to hell", how to make a confession, how to pray for someone who is sick, how to pray when you're not even sure that there is a God.

So I wonder if one of my next endeavours will be to retrieve some of them, translate them into English, get them printed on some gritty A4 paper, and see if the parish council wants to let me put them on a small wooden table near the entrance.

And then, a few weeks ago, while I was attending a playgroup at the RC church and had just asked what bits of "volunteering" needed to be done around the place, I was asked to do just that. I.e. to write booklets about Baptism, Confirmation and the other sacraments.

I've had a ball writing these in the most luminous, liberal way I thought I could get away with. They've been used with parents and even with angsty teenagers and went down really well.

If anything though, I thought this task was too easy. For, of course, my stated ambition is to sort out the global economic and cultural mess and to make some whopper difference. Everything else feels a bit cosmetic and ritualistic. I keep dismissing it as a displacement activity. Still, it was nice to flex those muscles again.

All void please

It's been one of those periods. I thought that I was so immune to the feeling of God being absent that it did not really bother me. God tangibly present? That's awesome. God seemingly not there at all? Not much of an issue. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

But this one was bad, as I didn't even have myself to fall back on. Lots of nice subject positions dissolving into thin air. Lots of new and empty subject positions clamouring to fill the void. All I could do was resist and think: actually I'll have the void. The void is my friend.

And I know it sounds sort of smug, but I've got the spiritual resources to handle this. Just because others do not have them does not mean that mine are merely a self-soothing delusion. I enjoy the void, I enjoy it when my mental constructs are crumbling apart, I enjoy not knowing where this is going.

You make no sense to us. We don't believe in a six-day creation and don't believe in the seas opening up and don't believe in supernatural miracles. We find it hard to inhabit these fairy tales as our identity. Our dead are being eaten up by worms as we speak. There was no empty tomb for the people we loved. And it's hard for us to "get" you at all.

Our mistake was to be born in this disenchanted age, with a global capitalist empire that seems to big for us to change. It's not fair. We 're not worse people than the previous generations. We are a lot more confused. We'd love to make sense of you just a bit. Just that bit which would enable us to be your people for now, and enable our children to be that too.

Joy to the world, Christmas is over !!!

Beth Anne, over at Heir to Blair wrote the following on December 19th:

I hate that for the past six years, the holidays had become a burden because of my previous employment. We pulled out dusty Christmas trees & bins of ornaments, thousands to take inventory. A week later, my day was spent decorating three, four, sometimes five Christmas trees & hanging garland until I trudged home exhausted & filthy. Then I would stand in my living room, staring at my fresh tree & wonder how I could muster another string of lights. I felt dull putting the pieces of my beloved nativity up, a present from Doug, because I had already set up two similar stables around my office. I wondered how I could bake cookies with my child when the sight of the piles of sweets, gifts from other companies, made my blood sugar & pressure rise. Last year, I did not plan or throw my traditional tacky sweater party because after two company gatherings & three resident parties, I was partied out. (& not in the exhilerated way we all remember from our twenties.)

I know the feeling. Christmas this year has been hectic, and at my 10th Christmas service in one week (all followed by socialising and answering the same dumb questions by total strangers), I thought my mind was going to explode. I'm sad to say that this has become a real drudge. We're so Chritmassed out we haven't even bothered to open our presents yet, or the kid's. I can't ever be with my family again at this time of the year because then my husband would have to be on his own. Must find a way to keep it real next year.

Quand l'enfant viendra

Moi je ferai le tour de mon quartier
Pour annoncer son arrivée
Mon enfant est né
Mon enfant est là

Et je brûlerai la nuit une dernière fois
Et les amis des jours d'éclat
Boiront à tomber
Quand l'enfant viendra

Mais j'irai dire aux hommes du monde entier
Laissez grandir en liberté
Laissez le courir à nos genoux
Laissez le partir au bout de nous

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce lit de bois que j'ai fait pour lui

Et devant ce bonhomme de rien du tout
Serrant ses poings contre ses joues
Je dirai merci à ma femme aussi

Mais tous les chants d'amour toutes les chansons
Chanteront toujours à l'unisson
Laissez le grandir en liberté
Laissez le choisir sa vérité

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce monde là qui n'est pas fini

Laissez le grandir en liberté
Laissez le choisir sa vérité

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce monde là qui n'est pas fini

Another advent pic while you're all waiting...

"Story behind this? Her dad was leaving on a 2 year deployment. She was crying, and wouldn’t let go of her dad’s hand, even when he stood in line, saluting. No one had the heart to break them apart."

Source: http://beautifulwhatsyourhurry.tumblr.com/
Click for larger picture

Faithful to the wind, the hills, the olive groves...

There is an image that is often in my head. Unfortunately I can't seem to locate who first put it there. Something I read somewhere and can't remember where.

The idea is that the gospel isn't full of cities, grand buildings, red, gold, crowns, judges, priests, kings... It is full of domestic homes, gardens, green, dirt, fields, sheep, sparrows, mustard, fishermen, labourers.

I first got a tangible feel for it when camping out in Corsica years ago. We camped out in an olive grove with a friend, and because we were not lugging a fridge along, we carried food that didn't go off in the heat. Mostly dried cheese, dried meats bread and oil-based pesto. Each night we opened a bottle of red wine or two.

There was nothing to do but to look at the rolling landscape and daydream. That and find some respite from the heat under the not very efficient shade of the olive trees. I sat there one afternoon and I've rarely been this happy.

On some level, I thought that it was incredibly poetic. It felt like we were living in Virgil's bucolics, or in the early gospel narratives, out in Gallilea. On another level the heat dulled my thoughts and the hilly landscape opened my mind. I was operating on another level. Far removed from the petty moment-to-moment rattle which is my usual mental fare.

It all felt bigger. It all felt freer. Sitting under an olive tree with some bread and some cheese, and not even a book to read, I was happy. I could read the wind, read the hills, read the song of the cicadas, read the smell of warm scorched dirt, of pine trees in the distance.

Since then, I've always loved green as a liturgical color. Green like the hills, green like the fields, green grass where the newborn foals first learn to stand hesitantly and where sheep graze safely.

And when my thoughts get too oppressive and my life gets too small, I pause for a moment asking: is it faithfull to the hills? Not faithful to this or that bit of the Bible, just faithful to the rolling hills, to the smell of wild lilies and of thyme, to the clumsy new lambs, to the wind.

Clergy wife 201

After the spectacular debacle of the introduction course, we did make it to year two. What I've learnt this week:

I must be some congenial easy-to-access type of gal. I have never managed to scare anyone off. Hell, some days I can even pat the wildlife: squirels, birds, wild cats and field mice. I am just non-threatening in the best sort of way.

A lot of people who I am tempted to dismiss as not my type of Christian have huge pastoral issues. I should probably cut them some slack and be careful before saying no to their invitation to paddle in their indoor swimming pool.

I should be careful who (and when) I ask about what is going on on the community service front. If I ask the overworked busybody who is desperate for help, she would sign me up this minute while I was just enquiring and giving myself a week or two to see what I would indeed like to sign up for.

What happened to the wedding dress?

Well, I am on my way towards donating the cost of a real wedding dress to a charity that digs wells in Tanzania.

Meanwhile, I caught up with my old Arts teacher. She had been clinically depressed for years but her teannaged pupils called her out. They knew she had run a theatre club in the past and they wanted a theatre group too so they kept asking until she gave in and ran it once gain. This year they will be playing some Moliere. That's as fabulous a future as I could dream for my wedding dress, so there happily it goes, along with a couple of over-the-top formal dresses I bought in England.

At the same time, I was visiting someone at the nursing home, where my three months old baby was the star of the show among residents and staff alike and was getting lots of cuddles. One afternoon, some sinapses connected in my busybody brain and I called my arts teacher once more. Any way she could bring her theatre club to play Moliere at the nursing home too?

I know that in the grand scheme of things, these are tiny little gestures. I call them "cosmetic gestures". They take no effort and they don't change the world. Compared to some of the other things we might be trying to be as Christians, these are easy, fun and almost relaxing.

They remind me of the wisdom of the guy who was leading the marriage preparation weekend we went to. He said "Sure, you go set up charities and go change the world, but in the meantime remember that nobody can love YOUR family and YOUR friends better than YOU can".

L'amour en héritage

J'ai reçu l'amour en héritage
Un matin au pays des cigales
La folie et le génie voyagent
Bien au-delà du temps
Bien par dessus des océans
J'en ai lu j'en ai tourné des pages
Pendant mes années folles ou sages
Pour quelqu'un qu'on met pas en cage
C'est un beau cadeau
L'amour en héritage.

Et si ma vie se traduit en je t'aime
Si mes chemins ont croisé des torrents
On est toujours un oiseau de bohème
Une enfant de printemps.

J'ai reçu l'amour en héritage
Un matin au pays des cigales
La folie et le génie voyagent
Bien au delà du temps
Bien par dessus des océans
J'en ai lu j'en ai écrit des pages
Avant de poser mes bagages
J'en ai vu tomber des pluies d'orage
Avant de trouver
L'amour en héritage

Et si ma vie se traduit en je t'aime
Si mes chemins ont croisé des torrents
On est toujours un oiseau de bohème
Une enfant de printemps.

Omer Wells are us

I'm living my own version of the Cider House Rules these days. The going back part. The part where Omer puts his steps in those in those of his "father" while the father figure has just died and will never again hold his hand. This Sunday will be my last in the only church I knew while growing up in Alsace. The Sunday after that will be my first in H.'s parish, somewhere in rural Australia.

Unreservedly your servant

I remember my reaction when I first came across a sco-ld's bridle. This was a medieval device used to punish goss-ips, a metal contraption that fits inside someone's mouth to prevent them from talking. My thoughts were: oh God I need one of those, I wish someone fitted that in my mouth until all I was ever able to utter was praise for you. I meant it too. It scared me to think this and I didn't tell anyone. Gosh I'm weird, I thought, who thinks things like that? Am I sick?

Then one day we took a friend to visit the ruins of a Scottish castle, and again my thoughts scared me. God, I'm so disempowered that I wish someone locked me up inside some damp medieval cell until, through tears and shivering and sickness, I was able to promise to do nothing but serve you forever. I meant it too.

No chance of that happening either... Instead, I would always fail and no one would help me, no one would discipline me, and my life would be spent sliding further and further away from my heart's deepest desire, because they are too weird for the time I live in.

It didn't go away. I wondered what it was that had got its nasty grip on me and was disempowering me? Why was I so in despair that shivering in a medieval castle would be the only thing that could rid me of this shapeless thing? I felt like a seabird caught in a oil spill, my wings and entire body caught into a tarry black stuff that was asphyxiating me, with nothing but spiritual death to look forward to.

The only way out I could see was to embrace the weirdness. My thoughts might be weird but I meant them. However, procuring a sco-ld's bridle or being shut away in some damp dungeon was not a very realistic option. So I thought up a 21st century variant. I put a soft hairband on my wrist and spent all of my free time and lunchtimes sitting on the floor with my wrists joined together in it. I'd refuse to read a book or watch a movie. I'd say nothing and think nothing except ask God for mercy.

The only time off was when I was at work, or volunteering, or spending time with my fiancé. At the jail where I was volunteering, I served tea and coffee while trying to remain humbler than my clients and serve them with deference. It might have been a tad artificial, but I didn't know any better.

A year and a half went by and the disempowering back tar did not go away. I just didn't know what to do. I was starting to see sense in some of the op-us dei self harm stuff but my intelligence drew the line. Barely. And only because I was pregnant. I kept doing what I was doing on the volunteering front. I kept begging God for help.

Bit by bit, the right things began to happen through me. All the stuff I'd felt disempowered to do. These occasions were brilliant and almost flawless. I could hardly believe that these were occuring through my body. All I knew is that I still wanted to be God's servant. And I was terrified that they'd stop.

I think that I have an inkling about what the guys at Emmaus meant when they said: were not our hearts burning within us while he was with us? A lot of my weirdest thoughts and decisions boil down to the fact that this foggy inkling is also my most valued possession. Whithout it I would feel like jumping into the next river and filling my lungs with water.

First follower

I've thought a lot about this little video since coming across it. I'm not sure if I fit in as the initial nutcase, or the first follower of the initial nutcase. It depends on the occasion I suppose, but I'm often early to join in the nutcasery.