The crack, the cave & the compost heap: where we look for life (and God)

 It was a joy to receive a (fairly last-minute) request to contribute to Derby diocese's annual clergy conference, this October. Their overall theme was 'kintsugi: beauty in our brokenness', which brought for me profound resonances, both deeply personal and in my wider church-based, neighbourhood-focused and theological work. So I was very grateful for the opportunity to do some more in-depth reflection on this. What follows weaves together some reflections on composting that I have explored elsewhere (including in a jointly-authored chapter on feminist theology and 'masculinities' with Simon Sutcliffe, which will be published next year), and some newer wonderings on 'cracks', inspired in large part by the breath-taking, mind-blowing work of Bayo Akomolafe (whom I reference in this piece repeatedly).

The Crack

There is a
crack
jagged and
long and
very deep.
The crack
is bleeding
having been torn
a howl
comes from its
heart
how to get back
together
with the proper fit
in right
relationship
the sides will not dovetail             neatly into place
too much of the edges             having crumbled away
nor can they           be forced together
without killing the fragile            flowers that cling to them
the crack           is permanent
one must, however, stand                on either side 
             as if it were not there               (although it is)      
   (knowing it is)            within the good
loving the other           in its absence
whichever side it is              embracing it
  without that                crucial, agonizing coupling
there is             only
the barren landscape of despair              the blackened territory of madness
trust the crack
it wants to be
a wild luxuriant valley
with waterfalls
a river running through
and on either side
fertile                  fruitful
lands.

(Kathy Galloway)

What I bring to you today comes in pieces, in fragments. Fragments of poetry. Fragments of story. Fragments of experience. Fragments of Scripture. Fragments of wisdom. It doesn’t all fit together neatly, as nice as that might be. You might find yourself wanting to stay with just one fragment, hold onto it, and let the rest go. But I also want to invite you to pay attention to the cracks: to the gaps, the silences, the not-fitting-togethers, the questions (spoken and unspoken), the invitations to play, wrestle, weep, wait or wonder.

* * *

A story with Yoruba roots, from the Nigerian-born thinker, writer and teacher, Bayo Akomolafe:

There is a father in the village, who’s about to die, and he calls his son home from the city, for the two of them to build a house together. Along the way, the old man becomes too weak to continue, and he retires to his bed while the son faithfully finishes the job. He puts on the thatched roof, sweeps the compound, and then rushes with gusto to his father’s bedside, and says, “Father, I have completed the work, I just wanted you to know that.” “Are you sure it’s complete?” the father asks. “Yes,” the boy says, “it is complete.” And with surprising strength, the father jumps up from the bed, picks up a mallet, walks to the new house, inspects the walls, looks around… and then all of a sudden, with a mighty swing of the mallet, he smashes a hole into one of the walls. “What are you doing?” the son exclaims, “Why did you do that?” And the old man answers, “You see what just happened? Now our neighbours will pass by, and they will point to the hole and say, ‘What happened there?’, and they will come around and they will greet you and they will ask for your name and you will tell them, and you will ask for their name and they will tell you theirs, and you will invite them for tea or for pounded yam and then you will become neighbours.” “Where is this going?”, asks the son. And the father replies, “You are not complete until you are wounded in some way”…[1]

* * *

I invite you to notice what this story isn’t, as well as what it is. It is not a story of restoration, healing or mending. It is a story of holes, cracks, brokenness, wounds… and of the suggestion that hope, possibility, encounter, life even, might be found precisely in those places. In the brokenness. In the cracks. In the holes. In the wounds. I invite you to dare to journey together with that suggestion, and to see where it might take us.

This journey might be particularly significant if, as some people are suggesting, we are living in a time of endings. A time when once-apparently-unshakable structures and systems seem to be faltering. When familiar stories told to make sense of the world seem to be running out of steam. When the world as we know it seems to be increasingly in ruins (metaphorically, and in some places tragically, very literally) – or if not yet in ruins, then desperately trying to shore up its crumbling walls. And I include the Church in this. The Church that is inextricably entangled in what the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde named ‘the Master’s House’, with all its racist, colonialist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, ecocidal power – power even in its death throes, even in its crumbling.

One sign of the ending of a world is that the concept of ‘the future’ no longer works. It’s no longer possible to take the familiar story of the world as we know it and extend it forward beyond the present. The familiar story no longer does it job of helping us make sense of what’s going on, or what might happen next.[2]

As Christians we might recognise this as a Holy Saturday space. A space where there is absolutely no sense of a ‘tomorrow’ that might be different from ‘today’. A space where all we can do is abide in the crack, attend to what remains, hold each other tenderly (as Mary and Judas’ mother are in this beautiful painting of Nicolas Mynheer’s), make ‘good ruins’ (as someone has recently put it), fragments that might just possibly contribute to whatever might come next.[3]

* * *

But what kind of light – and I think this is my question for us today – what kind of light might, just possibly, as Leonard Cohen famously sang, get in through the cracks? Through the holes, the breaks, the wounds? And what might that involve of us? My initial hunch is that, at the very least, it needs us to tarry with the cracks, to linger with them… it needs us not to rush into attempts at premature mending, but to hold them open. Or if it is not us doing the holding, then it needs us to pause in the cracks, to stand, sit or lie in them… and my initial hunch is that if we dare to do that, then we at least sometimes discover them as places not necessarily of restoration, but of encounter, of opening up and opening out.

That seems to be what is happening in the stories in the Hebrew scriptures of both Elijah and Job. Both are broken men when they encounter God.

Elijah’s euphoria from his apparently ‘successful’ fire-fight on Mount Carmel has rapidly drained away, and with it any sense of self-worth, purpose, or hope for the future: his own or that of his people. His story, of his zeal for the Lord, of the failure of his people, of how it’s only him left and he’s being hunted down, is a cracked record, on continuous repeat. And hidden in a cleft of the rock of Mount Horeb, he meets with a God who is… “the sound of sheer silence”… And if God gives him a new story here, it is a story in which Elijah is radically de-centred. There are faithful others out there, he is told, and Elijah’s job from here is to let go, hand over, pass on.

* * *

Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet (1924 – 2000). He was born in Germany, then emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He fought in the Israeli War of Independence as a young man, but became an advocate of peace and reconciliation in the region, working with Palestinian writers.

‘the place where we are right’

(Yehuda Amichai)

* * *

Job, who we see early on sitting on the ash heap, scraping his sores with a broken piece of pottery (2:8), has lost everything: livelihood, possessions, home, loved ones, bodily health. Hardly comforted by his so-called ‘friends’, Job grieves his losses, curses the day he was born, protests his innocence, at length. And is finally silenced as the Creator confronts him with the vastness, the complexity, the wonder of a universe of myriad creatures and more-than-human agency, within which Job (and, by extension, all his fellow humans) is of ‘small account’, and realises he’s been trying to speak of things beyond his understanding. To the ash heap he returns, in repentance and in silent awe (chs. 38-42). From assuming he was somewhere near the centre of the universe, he has discovered himself marginal to a world (and a God) so much bigger, stranger, wilder than he could have possibly imagined, a wonderful, magical world teeming with abundant, excessive, ‘promiscuous’ life (as Bayo Akomolafe puts it). And it is through the cracks, through his losses and wounds – however unjust they may be – that Job has been opened to this world-changing discovery.

* * *

And nothing in Elijah’s and Job’s encounters with God negates the significance of their moody laments and protests. Not Elijah’s retirement, or Job’s silencing. Both have still had their say, and God gives both of them ample space to do so. ‘It’s not fair!’ (and versions of that with more swear-words) is a valid, and potentially holy prayer.

Theologian Karen Bray, following the lead of political theorist Sara Ahmed, seeks to pay attention to what Ahmed calls ‘affect aliens’ – those who refuse the kinds of happiness and wholeness on offer in mainstream society (and let’s again include the Church), and who in so doing get labelled ‘awkward’, ‘queer’, ‘killjoys’, or some kind of ‘mad’. What if many forms of unhappiness – Bray cites depression, melancholy, mania, anger and anxiety – are less about an internal defect or sickness in the individual, and more an indicator, a diagnosis even, of a sickness in our society and our systems? Recent attention to ‘climate anxiety’ and ‘climate grief’ are obvious examples of this. So too would be Maya Angelou’s poem ‘Still I Rise’, or Lauryn Hill’s song ‘Black Rage’. And of course any form of physical protest where people place their bodies ‘in the way’, obstructing the flows of so-called ‘mainstream’ society.

So Bray reads Luke’s depiction of Martha’s moody protest, for example, as ‘a prophetic lament against a structure of hospitality that risked slipping into coercive obligation instead of persuasive relation’.[4] Jesus in this story commends sister Mary’s passive attentiveness over Martha’s anxious activity, but as Bray painstakingly highlights, Martha is both profoundly attentive to the material, bodily needs of the moment, but also pointing out the profoundly gendered and contradictory nature of the way of discipleship on offer, that requires the disciple to abandon their family to follow Jesus, to choose rapt attention over menial tasks, and at the same time to depend on the hospitality of others, a hospitality which, if withheld, is met with a shaking-the-dust-off-one’s-feet condemnation. Mary is the exception that proves the rule. It is primarily men who do the leaving home and following, it seems, and so Martha is speaking up, Bray suggests, for the women both left behind and expected to provide hospitality when asked. Martha refuses to fit happily into the roles on offer in Jesus’ economy of discipleship. And it is not the last time Jesus will feel the sharpness of Martha’s rough edges.

Disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson takes the conventional binary of bodily impairment and social disablement and proposes a new term that emerges when the two (bodies and social environments) come together: she talks about misfitting. With the shift in terms, everything suddenly becomes contextual, relational. The shape of this particular environment means that this particular bodies fits, or doesn’t: a round hole that won’t allow a square peg to fit in it. Misfitting can be inescapably physical, but also produced by the dominant attitudes and behaviours of a social context. Achieving a better ‘fit’ could in theory involve change in either the individual or the environment (or both), but we’re invited to consider what the cost of change on either side might be, and critically, where power might be concentrated in this relationship. To misfit in an environment is, generally, to be vulnerable: this place neither welcomes me, nor enables me to have a life here. To insist on remaining present within a misfitting space is to make that vulnerability visible, and to insist that things can, and should, be different.

* * *

But what if you have everything going for you? What if you have the privilege of living a largely well-fitting, comfortable life? What if you even have a significant level of power and control over your environment, and how you inhabit it? What if you have sophisticated defences against cracks, holes, brokenness and wounds, and can afford to pay for them to be quickly sealed up or healed up, if ever the need arises?

Take King Nebuchadnezzar the Second. Nebuchadnezzar the Great. Ruler of Babylon and its empire, ‘destroyer of nations’ (Jer 4:7), builder of cities, creator of the legendary hanging gardens, dreamer of dreams…

A great tree, he dreamt, at the centre of the earth. Reaching to heaven, visible to the ends of the earth. With beautiful foliage and abundant fruit, a shade for the animals of the field, a home for the birds of the air in its branches. A tree from which all living beings were fed.

The tree of life, no less. An ecology of goodness and fruitfulness. And yet, as Daniel, interpreter of dreams, points out, the fatal flaw in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision is that Nebuchadnezzar imagines that he is the tree of life. That he is at the centre of the universe. That it’s he who shelters, and homes, and feeds all creatures, from his abundance.

And, in the dream, a ‘holy watcher’ cries, ‘cut down the tree’ to its stump and roots, ‘let his lot be with the animals in the grass of the earth’. And just as he dreamt, so it happens: walking one day on the roof of his palace, surveying his magnificent city, the mighty king is suddenly brought to his knees, quite literally: cast out into the fields with the animals, down on all fours eating grass, little by little coming to resemble the oxen and birds whose company he now kept.

Like Job, there is eventually a restoration of the king’s fortunes, but that isn’t the interesting part of this story. What’s interesting is this bringing down of the mighty one from his throne, this bringing down to earth, this humbling to the humus, this stripping him of dominion, this decomposing of all the power-structures and defences that previously lent him an illusory sense of autonomy and control, this bringing him face to face with his own dependence, on the earth itself, and on his fellow creature-kin.

It is interesting that interpreters of this passage have often labelled Nebuchadnezzar’s plight here as ‘madness’. His experience is ‘othered’, distanced from those of us who imagine ourselves to be ‘sane’, and the supposedly ‘sane’ world that we live in. But nothing in the biblical account talks of madness, only of a time of learning. And if there is a reference towards the end of the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘reason’ returning to him, then it seems to be inextricably linked to the blessing and praising of God.

So let’s just tarry a little longer with Nebuchadnezzar in his season of learning, and let’s wonder a little at what he might have been learning there…

This learning experience is emphatically not the kind of Bear Grylls heroism of survival in the wild, much less ‘conquering’ it. But neither is it simply humiliation, punishment. As with Elijah and Job, it is perhaps more of a de-centering, an opening up to the ‘others’ who are around him – in Nebuchadnezzar’s case, to the more-than-human world of grass and oxen and dew and birds. It is, we might say, a pedagogy of interconnectedness.

Perhaps there might be a learning from trees, a leaning into trees for the shelter and shade they offer not just to humans that happen to be passing by, but to whole ecosystems of animal and plant life, in their branches, on their trunks, at their feet and among their roots (not to mention their vital entanglement with our very breathing). Perhaps Nebuchadnezzar might have begun to learn a similar lesson to the citizens of Sheffield over the last few years, in the face of council plans to fell 17,000 urban trees. That trees are our neighbours and we need them.

Perhaps there might be a learning too from the waist high forest of grasses and wildflowers, the bustling, buzzing marketplace of the pollinators and the pollinated. A learning from those plants we so often label as ‘weeds’, like the mighty dandelion, with its deep taproots that reach down and bring up minerals needed for the subterranean community.

Perhaps there might be a learning from mosses, the most ancient of land plants, which inhabit virtually every ecosystem on earth, inhabiting the cracks, the tiny spaces too small for other species to live, not competing but cooperating in the creation of ecosystems, building soil, purifying water, cloning themselves from broken off leaves and torn fragments…[5]

And going below ground, what might a humbled Nebuchadnezzar be learning about another ancient creature, the 600 million year old earthworms, whom Aristotle called ‘the Intestines of the Earth’, who move the soil around in vast quantities, break down dead plant and animal matter, create channels for aeration and drainage and fertile environments for microbes and plants to thrive. Creatures who are, quite literally, in the words of the 5^th Mark of Mission, ‘sustaining and renewing the life of the earth’.

Some of us have learnt some of these things from a distance, from books and podcasts and Wikipedia and so on. But the gift offered to Nebuchadnezzar – and to us – is an invitation to a more intimate knowing, to the kind of knowing that indigenous peoples and others deep-rooted in the land have treasured and sustained for millennia, a radial attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human, that opens us up, draws out ‘uncanny sympathies’ in us, desires and hungers in us, moves us and invites us to ‘move with’ in mysterious ways that we don’t fully understand.[7] It is a kind of knowing that knows, as native Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, that before we loved the earth, the earth loved us.[8]

* * *

This is the wisdom of the compost heap. King Nebuchadnezzar enters into what agrarian theologian Norman Wirzba has wonderfully called ‘the dark night of the soil’. The place where strong, hard, rigid things are broken down, decomposed. Eggshells. Cardboard. Self identity. Institutions. Structures and systems. The Master’s House, in all its forms.

‘compost’

(Redwood Reider [they/them])

The compost heap is a place of thrown-togetherness. Of a necessary diversity. The magic of composting only works if there’s a coming together of different kinds of stuff. It positively welcomes the discarded. The things we count as rubbish – peelings, banana skins, mouldy fruit – waste, nobodies, that turn out to be of profound value in the composting process.

And the compost heap needs its multitude of decomposers: the creepy crawlies, the flies, the invisible microbes, the earthworms. It is not we humans who make compost. It’s them, their agency, that makes it happen. At most, we are minor partners in the process. The challenge for some of us, even in our bit-part roles, is to face and embrace some of our gut responses to our creature-kin: at best incomprehension or indifference, at worst, horror and disgust.

* * *

Sharon Betcher, a feminist theologian attentive to disability, reminds us that our understandings of beauty have been captured, and narrowed, by the Master’s House – by white capitalist hetero-patriarchy and ableism – which have shaped our instinctive responses to some bodies – often the kind of bodies for whom ‘mis-fitting’ is a daily experience. Encountering ‘somatic and cognitive variations among the human community,’ she notes, ‘can leave some persons anxious, uneasy, queasy’. An instinctive response at best of incomprehension or indifference, at worst, horror and disgust. But these are symptoms of something deeper: a reaction against the vulnerability, unpredictability, uncontrollability that are unavoidable aspects of life itself.

Betcher offers two contemplative practices as potential ‘therapy’ for these gut reactions of disgust and avoidance. The first, the Buddhist practice of ‘corpse meditation’: mindfully, nonjudgmentally “visualizing revolting aspects of the body in its death and dismemberment in order to work through and imagine differently many of the issues confronting us”. The second, Christian traditions of meditatio crucis, contemplating the dying or dead body of Christ on the cross as a thing not of beauty in any conventional sense, but of disfigurement, of what some traditions of art label ‘grotesque’ – supported, of course, by the verbal meditations offered by Scriptural texts like Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. Not to make the crucified Christ something other than ugly, in any conventional sense. But to expose ourselves, familiarise ourselves, to be more and more truly present to, that ugly, abject vulnerability that also belongs to many others in our world… and, yes, to us too.

As Brazilian feminist theologian Ivone Gebara puts it, “the beauty that will save us is, above all, not pretty”. Because this is about the kind of love which (as William Miller describes it in The Anatomy of Disgust) relaxes or suspends the rules of disgust, develops a familiarity, a solidarity, with bodies, with flesh, with all its holes and fractures, leakiness and wounds, foibles and messiness. This kind of love as a deepening familiarity, solidarity, Betcher names as forbearance: a passionate ‘roominess’, a ‘desire to stay near another’, which ‘overcomes disgust in favour of caring and concern’, mercy, receptivity, holding. It’s something, she suggests, to which disability experience brings considerable expertise, as together we seek to navigate (somatically, ethically, spiritually) the ruins of the Master’s House. ‘You might be surprised,’ she writes, ‘that there’s much joy and good laughter [along the way]. We laugh at ourselves and with one another; we’re not surprised by flesh.’

And interestingly, for our fragmented wanderings here, Betcher suggests one more small practice ‘for training the … soul in forbearance’, especially for those of use who are urbanized:

‘Let some dandelions grow, if not as a free-for-all human dietary tonic, then on behalf of another necessary species. While dandelions have been greeted as some form of urban plague, these blooms – among the first blooms of spring – have been found necessary to the survival of bees as they wake and stir, looking for food. The practice of tolerating dandelions will also surely rile up neighbours whose aesthetic sensibilities prefer a grassy monoculture: more practice in forbearance…’![9]

She reminds us too of the time dimension to forbearance. Practiced by the ancient Israelites in their 50-year cycle of Jubilee, which allowed for a year or two when domestic plants and so-called ‘weeds’ lived intermingled, undisturbed.

* * *

Among the ordination gifts I have treasured over the 2 decades since has been a communion set, a simple, blue ceramic chalice and paten – more a dish, for the communion bread. Just before Advent 2021, our church building was broken into, in the first of what was to be a spate of 5 break-ins in 6 weeks. Some doors and windows were smashed. Some of the TV screens we used for services were taken, but there wasn’t much else to take. On the floor behind the altar, below where one of the screens had been fixed to the wall, was my simple, blue ceramic chalice, still intact. But the dish had been broken into a handful of pieces. Until that moment when I discovered it, in fragments on the floor, I hadn’t realised that it had been precious to me. Both as special gift, and as holy, everyday vessel, the container which over the years had held countless pieces of bread for blessing, breaking and sharing. It wasn’t a deliberate act of desecration. Merely an accident, collateral damage that happened to be in the path to the more-obviously-desirable flat screen TV. But I felt the breakage personally: the communion dish was part of my ministry, part of this church community, part of any number of sacred stories.

And so we found someone to mend it, kintsugi-style. The pieces fused back together, the cracks lined with gold, a vessel more beautiful than it had been before, another story carved into its clay. It returned, in the post, just before Lent 2022. And at our Ash Wednesday eucharist, in conversation with Jan Richardson’s blessing-poem, it preached my sermon for me.

REND YOUR HEART (Joel 2:12-13)

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering,
for trusting the breaking,
for tracing the rupture
that will return you

to the One who waits,
who watches,
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

(Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace, p.93)

So far, so good. A story of a breaking, and a mending. But…

* * *

In October 2022, at Hodge Hill Church we marked Black History Month, as we have done for several years now, with a focused attention on racial justice, across a month of Sunday services. We learnt, we reflected, we celebrated, we lamented. We heard from Black and White voices from within our congregation, sharing something of their experience of, and journey with, racism and whiteness. And we had visiting preachers and worship leaders bringing wisdom from beyond the local, including Dr Sanjee Perera, who at the time was just finishing in her role as the Archbishops’ Advisor for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns. Sanjee preached, of heartbreak and hope for a Church still riven by institutional racism. We remembered in silence the countless victims of colonialism, slavery and racism past and present. We celebrated with gratitude the stories of those who have raised their voices, and placed their bodies on the line, to resist and challenge racist discrimination and violence, and offer us glimpses of God’s rainbow kin-dom. And the service finished with dancing and joy.

And in the midst of all of this, the communion dish broke for a second time. It was an accident, again. This time, dropped in the process of the post-service washing up. But the little story surrounding that moment was one of a last-minute unsettling of established liturgical roles; of a complex interaction of race, class and gender where the power and privilege did not all sit neatly on one side; and of heightened stress and anxiety, on top of some underlying long-term trauma. But all that is quite possibly incidental to the moment of the accident: a slip, a drop, a broken dish.

I can’t show you a photo of a beautifully-mended dish, a second time. There were more fragments to work with, the repair more difficult, even for a skilled craftsperson. The mending is still a work in progress, the outcome uncertain as yet. These things take time – happen in God’s good time, perhaps.

* * *

I have my own, very personal, stories of being broken, and mended, and broken again. I wonder if you do, too. I also know that I have responded to those breakings in a whole spectrum of different ways, and that it’s often an unhelpful over-simplification of a messy complexity to try and categorise each of those responses as good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. Our responses to breakings are part of the breaking, which is also part of the mending.

I’m guessing we all have our stories, too, of our church communities offering some care and shelter from the breakings of life, stories of significant mending happening among us as church… but also stories of church communities being places where the breaking happens too, as the fissures of ‘the world outside’ also run through each of us, and the Church itself, we know all too well, has its own internal tendencies to division and brokenness. So I wonder how we’ve responded, individually and collectively, to those breakings, and how those responses, too, might be part of the breaking, and also part of the mending.

* * *

Bayo Akomolafe invites us to join with him in the discipline of ‘chasmography’: a careful study of the cracks, and what we discover there. We have barely scratched the surface. But we have noticed cracks as openings to encounter. Cracks as signs of a mis-fitting. Cracks as indicators that something bigger is wrong. Cracks as the beginning of a breaking down, that might also be an opening out. Cracks as an invitation to pay attention, to contemplation, to a forbearance, an abiding presence, that remains through and beyond our gut reactions of disgust and distancing. Cracks as endings that are also, possibly, beginnings.

So, how to end, for now? I’ll be honest with you, I really wasn’t sure how to finish this meditation on unfinishedness.

One possibility was to go with the profoundly comic punchline to King Nebuchadnezzar’s story, a punchline that isn’t delivered for 600 years or so after his death. The great, hospitable tree of his dream would be taken up by another story-teller as an image for the kingdom of God. But rather than name the tree as some great oak or cedar, this story-teller would identify it as the tiny seed of a renowned, rampant weed: wild mustard, the bane of farmers, gardeners and anyone who likes to imagine they’re in control. The kind of seed that just needs a tiny hole, a hairline crack, in which it can spring to life and start to spread. A species of plant often named ‘pioneer’ or ‘invasive’, that nevertheless resists empire-building in its own image, but instead re-wilds and re-fertilises barren or toxified soil, and gradually makes space for a diverse ecosystem to re-establish itself. A kind of resurrection, if you like – but one that emphatically doesn’t re-centre us human beings, let alone we who call ourselves ‘Church’.

* * *

Another option for an ending was to point you towards some films to watch, or to remember. To reflect on the markedly different endings of two classic Disney films, perhaps:

…the neat happy ending of Beauty and the Beast, in which Belle finally loves the Beast despite his ugliness, and in that moment of dawning love he is both saved from death and restored to his former handsome princeness.

…or the rather less tidy Hunchback of Notre Dame, who is not transformed, and risks rejection yet again when he shows his face to the gathered crowd. And it takes a little child to approach him, nervously, tentatively; to reach up and hug him; and to lead him into the crowd, who are, in turn, led by this little child to move through their horror and disgust, to be able to embrace Quasimodo, just as he is, as one of them.

…or maybe, if you’re less Disney and more Ken Loach, how about his most recent film, The Old Oak, set in an ex-mining village in the North East of England, in the context of intergenerational economic suffocation. A village which receive a minibus of Syrian refugees with an understandable mix of welcome and hostility. A story which, unsurprisingly, has no neat happy ending (given that the UK’s political climate of austerity and xenophobia has had no Disney-style resolution). And yet, in the midst of ongoing struggle and tragedy, solidarities and friendships are forged, and we are reminded, repeatedly, that ‘those who eat together, stick together’.

* * *

We’re reaching for good news, for gospel, not for the end times, but for the mean time. Where the language is perhaps less of ‘transformation’ and more of ‘presence’. Of abiding. Of companionship on the road. Of eucharistic breaking and sharing, giving and holding.

Many have suggested, recently, that Mother Julian of Norwich is the saint for our times. A woman who lived through a time of deadly pandemic, of social unrest, rebellion, and brutal suppression of dissent by the powers that be. A seer of visions in the midst of profound illness, her most famous ‘shewing’ was of a little, round thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of her hand, which, she is told, is all that is made – the whole universe. And what does she learn about it? That God made it. That God loves it. That God keeps it. A divine keeping. A forbearance, perhaps. A holding. Where those who have so often ‘mis-fitted’ find a fitting embrace that feels like home, feels like love, feels like sustenance, feels like rest.

I've certainly known something of that personally. Just after Christmas 2020, the day before the second major COVID lockdown began, my now 12-year-old daughter was in a life-threatening accident, sledging in the snow. She was in hospital for a few days, and over those first few hours we weren't sure whether or not she would make it through, or if life would be changed utterly for her, and for us. Over those days, and in the weeks of recovery that followed, as a family we were surrounded, held, upheld by the profoundly tangible love, care and prayers of our church community, as well as family and friends both nearby and across the world. In the midst of huge shock, anxiety and unresolved trauma, we were held in God's keeping in ways that were both immensely practical, and mysteriously spiritual.

This story could be another way of us ending today - another ending which is anything but an ending.

* * *

But maybe we should finish in the way we began: with a poem. Another of Jan Richardson’s blessings…

Blessing the Fragments

Cup your hands together,
and you will see the shape
this blessing wants to take.
Basket, bowl, vessel:
it cannot help but
hold itself open
to welcome
what comes.

This blessing
knows the secret
of the fragments
that find their way
into its keeping,
the wholeness
that may hide
in what has been
left behind,
the persistence of plenty
where there seemed
only lack.

Look into the hollows
of your hands
and ask
what wants to be
gathered there,
what abundance waits
among the scraps
that come to you,
what feast
will offer itself
from the fragments
that remain.

―Jan Richardson

---

[1] Bayo Akomolafe, ‘These Monsters in Perpetual Exile’, The Mythic Masculine podcast #16, June 2020 [clip starts at 30:02]

[2] Drawing on the work of Dougald Hine, here paraphrasing Federico Campagna.

[3] Hine on Campagna, again.

[4] Karen Bray, Grave Attending, p.125

[5] Kimmerer & Tippett, ‘The intelligence of plants’, 24:00

[7] Drawing on Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism, p.97

[8] Kimmerer, ‘Epiphany of Beans’, in Braiding Sweetgrass.

[9] Betcher, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh, p.134

Re-wilding the 5 Marks of Mission

 I was honoured to be invited to contribute to USPG's annual conference in June this year, which had the theme of 'Justice and the Church'. My talk was titled:

'have we got time for justice? re-wilding the 5 marks of mission'

The times are urgent. Let us slow down. 

* * *

Have we got time for a story?

A story from West Africa, I think, via Ireland, and Wolverhampton… I wonder what wisdom you hear in it…

A village had been hit by a crisis that was threatening to overwhelm it.

The village elders got together, and decided that what they needed to do was go and ask the wise woman for help. So a delegation went to the wise woman's hut, a short walk from the village itself, and asked her to help them. She agreed, and told the elders to gather the whole village together under the big tree. And so the elders hurried back, and did as she told them.

When the wise woman arrived, she looked around at all the villagers, and then spoke. "I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know," she said to them. "Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"

The villagers were a bit puzzled, and one by one they shook their heads and said, "No. No, we don't know. That's why we asked you to come here."

"Well," said the wise woman, "then I'm afraid I can't help you." And she went away.

The elders were frustrated. This was not what they'd been expecting. They put their heads together again, and decided to try again. So the delegation went back to the wise woman, and asked her to please come back and address the village again. "We really need your help," they told her. And so she agreed.

Again, the elders went back, and gathered the whole village together under the big tree, and the wise woman came and spoke to them again. "I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know," she said again. "Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"

Now this time, the elders had given the villagers a stern talking to. "This time, give her the right answer!" they had said. And although the villagers were still pretty sure the answer was "No", they guessed the right answer must be "Yes". So with a mixture of shakes and nods of their heads, they replied to the wise woman, "Yes. Yes we do!"

"Well in that case," replied the wise woman, "you don't need my help!" And she went away again.

By this time, the elders were pulling out whatever remained of their hair. The crisis was big, and urgent, and they desperately needed help. What were they going to do?

Eventually, one of them came up with a cunning plan. And a third time, the delegation went back to beg the wise woman to return to the village. And a third time she agreed. And a third time she came and addressed the whole village under the big tree.

"I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know. Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"

And this time, the villagers had all been thoroughly briefed on the cunning plan. So half the village said "No". And the other half of the village said "Yes".

And the wise woman paused, and looked around, and a smile came over her face. And slowly, quietly, she spoke.

"Well in that case," she said, "listen to each other!" And she went away, and was never seen again.

I wonder what wisdom you hear in that story…                  

* * * [space for responses] * * *

‘The times are urgent. Let us slow down…’

A warning. An invitation. A contradiction? A paradox, perhaps… they are the words of ‘trans-public intellectual’ Bayo Akomolafe, translating the wisdom of his Yoruba ancestors. Born into a Christian home in Nigeria, he writes of ‘giv[ing] up his longing for the “end-time” and [of] learning to live in the “meantime”… in the middle, where we must live with confusion and make do with partial answers.’[1]

Which strikes me as an immensely helpful place to locate ourselves, as we think together about Justice and the Church, in a world, and a Church, afflicted by what has recently been named ‘permacrisis’. From the democratic meltdowns in the UK from Brexit to Partygate, from the global COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, from the cost-of-living / cost-of-capitalism crisis, through the deadly racist legacies of White Western colonialism, to catastrophic climate breakdown and species extinction, the times are certainly urgent, overwhelming even. And within the Church – and I can only really talk well of the Church of England, acknowledging that that is a relatively small boat within a wide ocean of other churches, provinces and denominations across the globe – within the Church of England there is a crisis of profound institutional anxiety about our survival, our future, our theology, and our purpose. And so in the midst of the multiple anxieties, fears and overwhelmings of this permacrisis, we search desperately for the wise one who is going to help us, and it feels far from easy to heed the wisdom of her and her fellow elders: to slow down, to learn to live in the ‘meantime’, and to discern what kind of listening we should be doing…

But that is exactly what I want to attempt here.

And to do so it is important also for me to take a moment to locate myself. I am a white, English, middle-class, non-disabled-ish, straight-ish cis-man, for 21 years now an ordained priest in the Church of England, an institution formed and deformed – like many other institutions – by what bell hooks names ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’,[2] and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls ‘modernity/coloniality’.[3]

And in my ‘I’ is also an imagined ‘we’. Of course, I’m hoping there’s something in what I say here that might connect with each of you. But I think I’m probably especially addressing those of you who are somewhat like me: who are still, willingly or unwillingly, invested in the systemic status quo, because we benefit from it in at least some ways. So when I use the word ‘we’ in what follows, that will usually be the kind of ‘we’ I have in mind – and yes, I’m very conscious that that ‘we’ applies very unevenly, even amongst those of us gathered in this room. To those of you who have always been excluded (to some extent) from that ‘we’: to you I seek to make myself accountable for what I say here.

* * *

So here’s the question I want us to ask ourselves today: Have we got time… for justice?

Many of you will be familiar with ‘the 5 Marks of Mission’, developed by the Anglican Consultative Council in 1984, and widely adopted since then, including by USPG, as a rich description of what contemporary mission is about:

1. To proclaim the good news of the kingdom (‘TELL’)
2. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers (‘TEACH’)
3. To respond to human need by loving service (‘TEND’)
4. To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation (‘TRANSFORM’)
5. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth (‘TREASURE’)

Now, the story was told to me, of an encounter between someone who worked for Christian Aid, and a national officer in the Church of England. “Isn’t it a shame,” said the latter, that we (the Church of England) never seem to get around to your marks of mission”. What did they mean, I wonder? I think we can guess at at least four assumptions going on here.

First, that of the five marks of mission, there was – is – not necessarily a conscious resistance to the ‘later’ marks (those about justice and creation, particularly), but a more-or-less conscious hierarchy of importance, or perhaps urgency, with a prioritising of the ‘earlier’ marks (those about proclaiming the good news and baptising and nurturing new believers), as the more worthy recipients of ‘our’ (presumably relatively scarce) resources, personnel, energy, and yes, time.

Second, there’s an implicit assumption that some of the marks (particularly the ‘later’ ones) are the province or special interest of certain groups or individuals, and not the Church as a whole.

Third, there might also be an assumption of a kind of linear, logical, step-by-step process through the marks: that we begin with proclaiming the good news of the kingdom; that precipitates ‘new believers’ that need to be taught, baptised and nurtured; and then those growing disciples discover their various callings to loving service, transforming unjust structures, and caring for creation.

And so fourthly, we might notice a thread explicitly running through all five marks: that mission is something that we do. Whether or not we use the missio dei language of ‘seeing what God is doing and joining in’, each of the five marks is about human agency, human actions, and therefore things that we can do more or less effectively, things we can – and perhaps need to – plan and strategise for, with the assumption that if we do those things well, they will have a positive impact on our neighbours, and on the world.

But our history says otherwise. Have we got time, I wonder, for naming, and sitting with, the multitude of ways in which Western Christian mission, historically, has been entangled, inseparably, with class, Empire, colonialism, slavery – bell hooks’ ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ – with all its deadly effects on bodies that have been deemed not to meet the ideals of hegemonic white, hetero-masculinity, on human and more-than-human bodies that our economic systems have exploited, impoverished and discarded, on bodies of land that have been invaded, colonised, enclosed, commodified, extracted and destroyed… all this, in the name of, or with the collusion of, the Church which claims to be the community of followers of Jesus of Nazareth, God-made-flesh-and-blood, Child of earth and air and living water. Have we got time to stay with this, our deadly entanglement, past and present?

* * * [silence] * * *

When I first arrived in Hodge Hill, in the parish on the east edge of Birmingham where I’ve been vicar since 2010, and in the Firs & Bromford estate that is home for me and my family, I tried to listen hard to the stories of my new neighbours. A recurring theme, again and again, was that this was a shit place to live, that people couldn’t wait to be able to move elsewhere, that this was a community who had endured decades of having their local assets stripped away, of underinvestment, of having the ‘problems’ of elsewhere ‘dumped’ on them, of being stigmatised and blamed by politicians and the media, and of having organisations – including the Church – come into their neighbourhoods, promise them all kinds of ‘transformation’, do things to them or for them for a time, and then retreat when it got too difficult or the funding ran out or their attention simply got drawn elsewhere. When our new community theatre group led us in the first ever Bromford Passion Play, and we crucified Jesus under the concrete pillars of the M6 motorway, the roar of the passing traffic couldn’t quite drown out Jesus’ dying cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

My initial response to those stories of my new neighbours – a response first instilled in me as a young, enthusiastic, energetic member of a USPG ‘root group’ in Salford 13 years earlier – was to resist the urge to talk, to do, to try to help or fix… and to shut up, slow down, pay attention, listen, and learn, slowly, painstakingly, how to entrust myself into the hands of these neighbours that I so dearly wanted to become my friends. That USPG training was profoundly formative, and has served me well, and has – hopefully – mitigated at least some of the harm I might have done otherwise over the years.

The times are urgent. Let us slow down.

* * *

Have we got time to fall in love?

"To love means dealing with persons in the concrete rather than in the abstract... To speak of love for humanity is meaningless... What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need... There can be no love apart from suffering. Love demands that we expose ourselves at our most vulnerable point by keeping the heart open." (Howard Thurman)

"The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimonyu of love as the practice of freedom." (bell hooks)

In bringing love into a conversation about justice, I am following a well-trodden path. From Mother Teresa to Martin Luther King, justice and love have often been described as needing each other, ‘correcting’ each other, holding together the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular, in necessary, creative tension at different scales – from the interpersonal to the public and global. Here, I want more modestly to remember with you two gospel stories, about love, that are also about justice – and are directed at people like me, people who our social, cultural and economic structures deem part of the ‘in-group’.

Remember the rich young man who wanted to know what he needed do to enter into fullness of life?[4] Who claimed he’d kept all the commandments, including loving his neighbour as himself? And Jesus said to him: “if you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor… then come, follow me.” So far, so familiar? But notice what Jesus is suggesting: if he sells and gives away all he has, he becomes poor too. He has nothing left to call his own. And Jesus’ invites him into a community which is utterly dependent on what they receive from others and share between them.

This goes way beyond charity, then. It goes further even than Zacchaeus’ extensive reparations to those from whom he extorted money, while collecting taxes for the Roman Empire. The call to love here is to the giving up, the renouncing, of the very idea of ownership, full stop. It’s a radical reimagining of a world where nothing is private property, and all is shared. It’s too much for the rich young man to get his head round. Is it too much for us too?

And then, remember the expert in the law who wanted to test Jesus?[5] He too wanted to know what he must do to enter into fullness of life. He too gravitated to the commandments to love God and love his neighbour as himself. But this time, it’s who the neighbour might be that becomes the challenge. And Jesus tells him a story about a victim of robbery; and a priest and a Levite who pass by; and then who turns out to be the embodiment of mercy, love and justice? None other than a Samaritan: a figure so enveloped in popular disgust and contempt that the lawyer can’t even say the word ‘Samaritan’ when he answers Jesus. It sticks in his throat. The divine command to love your neighbour earths itself here as having to face, and wrestle with, and somehow get through the disgust and contempt and fear that your social conditioning has instilled in you. Not just to love, but to receive love and care from someone you’ve been socialised to see as your inferior, your enemy.

Both of these gospel encounters bring together at least three things: the question of what we need to ‘do’ to enter into fullness of life, the command to love your neighbour as yourself, and the breaking down of economic and socio-political lines of division, territory and property – a radical vision of justice. But they do more. From the questioner’s desire, in each case, to ‘do something’, Jesus invites them into new forms of belonging, and receiving, and sharing. He reframes love not just as action, as giving out, but also as a radical receptivity to our ‘others’, unlikely neighbours who present themselves to us in surprising bodies not like ours, from close at hand and from far away. And within this wider, richer horizon Jesus seems to be seeking to broaden and deepen the questioner’s desire for such relationships – this is eros as well as agape. He wants us to want to be in relationship with such a motley crew of neighbour-creature-kin. We’re not told in the gospels if either of the two questioners in these stories do discover that desire – but the gospels do testify to many others who did find that desire: women and men who wanted, deeply, whole-heartedly and whole-bodily, to be part of the belonging and receiving and sharing that Jesus was convening around himself.

* * *

Another story.

A group of pre-school children have formed an intimate community with a multitude of earthworms. They encounter each other all the time. In the gardens the children tend, the forests they visit every week, the compost bin they care for, on the pavements they walk after the rain. The children are fascinated by the worms’ slimy bodies and wriggly movements, and often get as close as they can to look and touch them. Some of the adults, who supervise the children from a distance, struggle to contain their disgust. But the children are captivated by the worms, wonder at their responses to each other. Sometimes the children jump and giggle. Other times they are determined to find the earthworms a ‘home’, or bring them to what they imagine is ‘safety’. Other times again, they give the worms names, or simply take time to enjoy their movements in their hands as they softly share their own stories with them. At ‘Worm River’, wearing their colourful wellies, the children walk around in the water very carefully to ensure they don’t tread on the worms there. But sometimes accidents happen. One child picks up a worm with a long stick to prevent other children from squashing it. As it’s being carried, the worm falls from the stick. The child tries to pick it up again, but this time, the unlucky worm breaks in two, upsetting the child who was trying so hard to care for it.[6]

The researchers who observed and describe in detail this complex human-child-worm community point us towards a radically different kind of ethics, of justice, from that which dominates the conversations around ecological crisis. Rather than bold and heroic human action to avert, or mitigate, the disaster that is upon us, rather than a strenuous ‘striving’ to ‘safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth’, here at Worm River we are invited to notice an ethics of mutual vulnerability. Yes, the worms are vulnerable to the children’s carelessness and clumsiness; yes, the children are learning ways in which they might reduce their harmful impact on the worms; but they are also falling in love with them as creature-kin; and they are discovering just some of the many ways in which they – and all of us humans – are radically dependent on the worms of the world. Those creatures whom Aristotle called ‘the Intestines of the Earth’, who predate us by 600 million years and will likely outlive us, who break down dead plant and animal matter in soils, move the soil around in vast quantities, create channels for aeration and drainage and fertile environments for microbes and plants to thrive. We adult humans (especially us so-called ‘civilized’ Westerners) may often choose to keep our distance from them, driven by our gut responses of discomfort and disgust. But we literally cannot live without them, and the agency of a myriad of other microscopic lifeforms we can either not see, or choose not to see. We are profoundly vulnerable to them, and their ongoing existence (or not). They are, quite literally, ‘sustain[ing] and renew[ing] the life of the earth’.

What if we earthed our thinking about justice, then, somewhere in the dark soil beneath our feet? What if we paid attention to the missio dei – the flow of God’s life and activity – literally through the guts of the humble earthworm? What might that do to the way we see and live in the world? Might it perhaps look something like the wisdom offered by indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass?

‘Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.’[7]

The times are urgent, let us slow down.

* * *

Have we got time to turn things around?

Or perhaps better: have we got time to be turned around? Because we are talking, aren’t we, about a metanoia, a Great Turning (as the Buddhist ecologist Joanna Macy has described it), that is not our great idea, our innovative initiative, our well-developed strategy. We are talking about a metanoia that is happening to us from beyond us: certainly from beyond ‘us’ the ‘overconsumers’ of our world,[8] and ultimately, from beyond us human beings. As the book of Jonah reminds us (a book which has a lot to say about turnings), even worms have significant divine vocations within the ecology of God’s creation.[9]

So let’s revisit those 5 Marks of Mission, from the ground up, turned around, and see what might look different…[10]

1. Listen to creation, and fall in love
(because “creation first loved us”)

Let us:

Listen for the songs of our more-than-human world, let them seduce us into falling in love with it, encountering our others in our mutual vulnerability.

In their book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone describe the spiral journey of active hope as beginning with gratitude. They invite us to play with finishing the sentence: ‘some things I love about being alive on Earth are…’.[11] Practices as simple as saying grace at meal-times, walking barefoot, hugging a tree, breathing mindfully, cradling a worm – these and other practices can remind us of our entanglement and interdependence with our creature-kin in the great web of life, and help us pay fresh, careful attention to the many ways in which they continue to make Earth home for us, as well as for themselves. Let us renounce our anxious need to ‘fix’ them, and open ourselves up to be affected by them, to be loved by them, to fall in love with them.

Which leads us, secondly to…

2. Listen, and attend to the wounds
(because “this shit is killing us too”)

Being grounded in gratitude, Macy and Johnstone suggest, can strengthen our capacity to face, rather than turn away from, the painful realities of the world. This is their second step in the spiral of active hope – and it is also the second of our ‘re-wilded marks’. Listening for the songs of the more-than-human world means:

Listen[ing, too,] to the groaning of creation, to the cries of the oppressed, exploited and excluded…

In doing so, we will begin to see more clearly:

…to discern the harm caused by the structures and practices of Empire (in which we may well be complicit).

But in that seeing, let us not try to rush too quickly towards a ‘solution’, remembering that our response to the crisis is all too often a contributor to the crisis itself.[12] Let us stay with the slow work of paying attention:

Attend[ing] and tend[ing] to the wounds of those harmed by systems of domination, in all their forms (economic, racial, gendered, sexual, ableist) and to all who are grieving, wearied and unwell (including attending to our own pain).

That last point is critical. As Black theorist Fred Moten puts it, unapologetically, genuine solidarities will come not from people like me attempting to ‘help’, but:

‘out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly…’[13]

We’re returned, with a necessary bluntness, to that uncomfortable ethics of mutual vulnerability, that we had begun to learn among children and worms and other wise elders.

Bayo Akomolafe tells the story, from his Nigerian roots, of ‘a father in the village, who’s about to die, and calls his son home from the city to build a house together. Along the way, the old man becomes too weak to continue, and he retires to his bed while the son faithfully finishes the job. He puts on the thatched roof, sweeps the compound, and then rushes with gusto to his father’s bedside, and says, “Father, I have completed the work, I just wanted you to know that.” “Are you sure it’s complete?” the father asks. “Yes,” the boy says, “it is complete.” And with surprising strength, the father jumps up from the bed, picks up a mallet, walks to the new house, inspects the walls, looks around… and then all of a sudden, with a mighty swing of the mallet, he smashes a hole into one of the walls. “What are you doing?” the son exclaims, “Why did you do that?” And the old man answers, “You see what just happened? Now our neighbours will pass by, and they will point to the hole and say, ‘What happened there?’, and they will come around and they will greet you and they will ask for your name and you will tell them, and you will ask for their name and they will tell you theirs, and you will invite them for tea or for pounded yam and then you will become neighbours.” “Where is this going?”, asks the son. And the father replies, “You are not complete until you are wounded in some way”…’[14]

Attending and tending to each other’s wounds, and to our own, creates a place of encounter. And every encounter holds within it the possibility of a transformation with ripples as wide as the world. So here is our third step in our reversed, re-wilded marks of mission:

3. Open ourselves to decomposition
(because “there’s no such thing as ‘away’”)

Open ourselves to be shaken by those cries, brought to our limits, and drawn deeper into encounter, challenge and change. Let down our defences, to allow ourselves to participate in processes of dismantling and decomposing the unjust structures within and around us.

This is our re-working of the 4^th Mark – of transforming unjust structures, challenging violence and pursuing peace and reconciliation. But its re-working acknowledges at least two things. Firstly, that those unjust structures of domination and violence are within us as well as around us. They shape our habits of perception, thinking, speaking and acting, and so the challenge and transformation needs to come from beyond us. Secondly, that pursuing peace and reconciliation can often be the preferential shortcut of the privileged, to avoid facing and dealing with our own complicity and power. But there are no shortcuts. For us the overconsumers of the world, especially, these urgent times we’re in demand of us nothing less than slowing down, being brought up short, coming to a dead end, entering what farmer-poet-theologian Wendell Berry has named ‘the dark night of the soil’. The place where all that is familiar, robust and securing begins to break down. Where the structures of what womanist philosopher-activist-poet Audre Lorde called ‘the Master’s House’ – the walls of ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ – begin to crumble, around us and within us. Where the ideas of private property and border-guarded nation states no longer imprison our imaginations and possess our souls. Where we dare to kneel down among the earthworms – and our many other human and more-than-human kin whose bodies have too often been ground down into the dirt – and discover them afresh as our life-support, our carers and the decomposers of our defences, our prejudices, our individualistic identities dreamt up in our imagined isolation. These decomposers are our Good Samaritans, as we struggle to even speak their names. They invite us to ‘stay with the trouble’,[15] as feminist eco-philosopher Donna Haraway puts it, to hold space for the uncomfortable, own up to our complicities, resist our compulsions to fight or flee or fix, and cultivate new kinds of ‘response-ability’.[16]

4.      Join in nurturing kinship, community & commoning
(because “common ground is holy ground”)

So where does that leave ‘teaching, baptising and nurturing new believers’? Or what we have been used to calling ‘Church’? To what kinds of community does God invite us, in the company of children and earthworms and Samaritans? Probably not congregations of creatures that we can categorise, control or count. Probably not bounded parishes or other kinds of enclosed territory that we can act as gate-keepers for, or strategise for the expansion of. Instead, we’re invited into the ecotones, those betwixt-and-between edge-spaces between habitats where a multitude of creatures bump into each other and intermingle, where life is at its most generative, fertile, diverse and uncontrollable. We’re invited to (re)discover common ground – wild spaces of encounter and radical sharing – as holy ground, as we:

Join with others in nurturing human and more-than-human kinship and community – ‘communities of compost’, in which we discover together new ways of commoning, and alternative solidarities, that have room for all.

Which takes us back to where we started. With the question of what, in these times of urgency and crisis, we might recognise as good news worth proclaiming.

5.      Practise ‘sensing life’ & witnessing to it
(because “the kin-dom of God is close at hand”)

And it is, literally, right in front of our noses. And dirtying the fingertips of our outstretched hands. And under the bare soles of our feet. It is the treasure hidden in the field. The yeast hidden in the dough. The mustard seed growing rampant through the cracks in the concrete. The new life germinating in the rich, dark humus of the compost heap. The subterranean ‘undercommons’ of roots and fungal networks that carry and share the nutrients of life. The kin-dom of God is close at hand, in your midst. Stop! Look! Listen!

We are back to the wisdom to which the wise woman pointed us, under the big tree: Slow down. Pay attention. Listen to each other.

The trauma theologian Shelly Rambo suggests that theologies of resurrection as triumphant overcoming don’t do justice to our experiences of trauma, or to the gospel narratives. Instead, she encourages us the two-fold work of, on the one hand, ‘tracking the undertow’, the powerful currents that continue to submerge truth and hope and life; and on the other hand, the work of ‘sensing life’, reorienting ourselves towards that which is not immediately familiar, following after that which is elusive, not fully recognizable, caught only in glimpses. So here is our final re-wilded mark of mission:

Practise ‘sensing life’ and witnessing to these alternative communities and solidarities as signs of God’s kin-dom, God’s holy anarchy, in our midst, through the ways we celebrate, the stories we tell, believing in the good news of Empire’s decomposition through God’s Spirit’s movement in and through all things.

I’m hoping we’ve got time for one last story, and then a prayer…

The unjust arrangements of work and income, housing and food, that weigh heavily on neighbourhoods like my own, were a key factor in the setting up of a community food pantry in the middle of the COVID pandemic – a collaborative labour of love between various neighbours and local organisations, including the church. Over the last couple of years, the pantry has become a place where local people have been able to come together, as members, to access affordable food with dignity and choice – and also to eat together, listen to each other, make friends, share with one another our passions and skills, and learn new things from each other too.

One Spring Thursday, 'Grace' and her daughter came along to the pantry, having connected a few weeks previously at a little community street party event. After doing their weekly shop, they were drawn out into the church garden just next to the pantry café, to add some food waste to the compost bins, plant some seedlings in the raised beds, and take away some sunflowers to give to some neighbours. 'Grace' left with a commitment to return the next week, to get more involved in the gardening. She was amazed at the welcome they received, without labels or hierarchies; at the friendships they had begun to form; at the little microcosm of life they had discovered – planting, harvesting, sharing, eating, composting; and at the dignity, love and joy which seeped through the pores, through the soil of this little expression of commoning, composting and community. On its own, it may not be world-changing. But it is anything but on its own.

* * *

The times are urgent. Let us slow down.

One of the many other precious treasures of my local community is Genny, a long-term resident of one of our Community Houses, a priest who retired early from ministry with the energy- and capacity-sapping effects of ME. Genny moves slowly. And in that slowness, she gently helps some of the rest of us to slow down too, to pay attention to those things that would easily go unnoticed. Every Wednesday, Genny leads us in Morning Prayer as we gently tread the paths of Hodge Hill Common. Genny knows about trees and bees, mosses and birds. In prayer and in action, we regularly join with the earth in lament, even as our words are frequently drowned out by the planes from nearby Birmingham airport and the non-stop roar of the M6 motorway. But Genny continues to lead us in prayer, rooted in our fragility, but also in persistence, and wonder, and love, and in solidarity with those who pray and persist and wonder and love the world over. And that, we trust, is a beginning.

So a prayer, to end. A version of what we usually call the Lord’s Prayer, written by the white English theologian and liturgist Steven Shakespeare in his book The Earth Cries Glory: Daily Prayer with Creation. There are body-actions with it, and if you would like to join in with those, as much as is comfortable for you, then please do…

 

Divine mother,

[hands down, round in circle to top, together down to middle]

Divine father:                                     [repeat, as above]

to be in you is to be in heaven.         [repeat, as above]

May we hear the wonder that echoes in your name.

[hands to ears, rippling outwards]

May we accept no rule but the rule of love.

[hands out to front, to cross over heart]

May we never tolerate the evil of hunger.

[hands cupped upwards]

May the hurts we cause be forgiven

[hands stretched out wide]

and the hurts we receive be healed.

[hands in to cross over heart]

May we remember that we are fragile

[fists together in front of face]

and cherish the life we share with all.

[palms open, facing upwards, in front]

For all love, and life and power

[hands down, round in circle to top, together]

is the gift of the Spirit. Amen.

[hands ‘flowing’ down over head and shoulders, back together in middle][17]

 

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[1] https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/about

[2] bell hooks, REF.

[3] Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity

[4] Matthew 19:16-30

[5] Luke 10:25-37

[6] Adapted from ethnographic observations in Affrica Taylor & Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives, pp.53-4.

[7] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, pp. REF.?

[8] The term is Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s, in her book Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation, pp.169-87, 203-31.

[9] Jonah 4:7

[10] The words of the ‘re-wilded marks’ that follow build on Graham Adams’ ‘Five Marks of Anti-Imperial Mission’ in Holy Anarchy: Dismantling Domination, Embodying Community, Loving Strangeness, p.121.

[11] Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power, p.47.

[12] This is an oft-repeated mantra in the spoken work of Bayo Akomolafe.

[13] Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pp.140-1.

[14] Bayo Akomolafe, ‘These Monsters in Perpetual Exile’, The Mythic Masculine podcast #16, June 2020 [clip starts at 30:02]

[15] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

[16] See Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s ‘COMPOSTing shit’, Hospicing Modernity, pp.243-4.

[17] A version of the Lord’s Prayer, written by Steven Shakespeare, in The Earth Cries Glory: Daily Prayer with Creation. The ‘body prayer’ actions were developed by Soobie Whitfield, a member of Contemplative Fire, and the Common Ground Community in Hodge Hill.