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.
* * *
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 5th 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.
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
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