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.