“Can anybody hear me?”:
Christian discipleship in Brexit Britain, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower
I
want to spend the next little while attending to some of our edges as a
society, and exploring how we might inhabit them as Christians.
At
the edge of an estate, at the edge of the city of Birmingham, underneath the
concrete pillars of the M6, lies a place that we locally call the wasteland.
Houses were built on it in the ‘60s, but it was a flood-plain, and they were
rapidly sinking into the mud. It was cleared quite quickly, and then left,
abandoned – much like the residents of the estate themselves. And it was in
that wasteland a few years ago, on a snowy Palm Sunday, that we crucified
Jesus. Our first Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play ended in the
wasteland, with the scene of crucifixion and the cry of godforsakenness. And
after the silence came some song. The song was the words of Maya Angelou set to
music:
“Now did you want to see me broken
Bowed head and lowered eyes
Shoulders fallen down like tear drops
Weakened by my soulful cries
Does my confidence upset you
Don’t you take it awful hard
Cause I walk like I’ve got a diamond mine
Breakin’ up in my front yard
So you may shoot me with your words
You may cut me with your eyes
And I’ll rise... I’ll rise... I’ll rise...
Out of the shacks of history’s shame
Up from a past rooted in pain
I’ll rise... I’ll rise... I’ll rise...”
As
the echoes of the singing resonated around the wasteland, the words of the song
resonated with the stories of my neighbours. Experiences of abandonment, of
being overlooked, and forgotten, and done-to and let down. But also of a
defiant hope that would not die, and instead insistently claimed it would rise,
and rise, and rise again.
Brexit – and precarious cliff-edges
We are living in times of profound
fragmentation. In the United Kingdom, the referendum on withdrawing from the EU
divided the country between ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ (with a wafer-thin majority to
the former), but it also exposed divisions between people from different
generations, different ethnic backgrounds, and different socio-economic
classes. Politicians’ claims that ‘the people have spoken’ immediately begged
the question, ‘which people are you
listening to?’ While Leave voters were, overall, more likely to come from
poorer than more affluent backgrounds, the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ might
well have been more decisive for Leave than the ‘left out’ (Rosenbaum 2017;
Antonucci et al 2017), and even clearer was the evidence that the Leave vote
was overwhelmingly older, and more white, than the vote for Remain.
Waking on the morning after, I remember
feeling shocked, but also unsurprised. Hodge Hill, our ward, was split just
like the country – 52% Leave, 48% Remain. Many of my neighbours (especially my
Muslim neighbours) were feeling more unsafe, less at home that morning; and yet
many of my neighbours were also feeling happy & hopeful, especially white
working-class folk locally, who felt their voice had been heard, for a change.
Further
afield, and in the days and weeks after, we saw across the country more overt racism
and attacks, and at the same time cosmopolitan middle-class people with accents
like mine blaming ‘white working-class’ people, for voting Leave, for their anti-immigration
attitudes, for their racism.
And
underneath all of this, there were deeper issues emerging. An identity issue – what the postcolonial
scholar Paul Gilroy calls a ‘post-imperial
melancholia’, summed up in the football chant “2 world wars and one world
cup, doo dah” (and yes, it is still only one!). Gilroy describes it as an ‘inability to
face, never mind actually mourn’ the ‘profound change … that followed the end
of the Empire’, the ‘loss of imperial prestige’, and ‘the shock and anxiety
that followed from a loss of any sense that the national collective was bound
by a coherent and distinctive culture’ (Gilroy 2004:98). Lurking under this
melancholia, Gilroy goes on to argue, is a further inability to ‘work through’
the feelings of ‘discomfort, shame, and perplexity’ at the horrors of that
imperial history itself, and its white supremacist ideology (Gilroy 2004:98,
102; cf also Reddie 2017).
But
this was as much (if not more) a middle- and upper-class issue as a working-class
issue. There were middle-class people blaming ‘white working class’ people for
Brexit, or for racism, but that conveniently diverted us from the middle- and
upper-class racism behind the Brexit campaign, and entrenched, and widening,
class divides themselves – structural inequalities – effects not just of
current austerity policies, but also the longer-term legacy of ‘Thatcherism,
deindustrialization [and] the rise of the super-rich’.
And
especially in areas like mine, the lack or loss of employment (or insecure,
zero-hours contracts); poor quality, overcrowded and inadequately available housing;
unyielding and punitive welfare regimes; and variable and uncertain access to
food & healthcare; coupled with a lack or loss of voice in politics – all
made a perfect storm.
And
we might use the word precarity to
describe it: a condition of uncertainty, insecurity that affects our whole
livelihood. Feeling like you’re on a cliff edge, that at any time you could
fall off. And the truth is that in our society that precarity is unequally distributed. Many people have to deal with a hell of a lot more
precarity than others. In my bit of the West Midlands, Jaguar LandRover have
warned that if Brexit goes ahead, they could pull out of the UK. Thousands and
thousands of jobs, directly and indirectly, will be affected.
Grenfell tower – and our tragic
disconnection
And
then, in the early hours of 14th June 2017, a 24-storey tower block
in west London caught fire. The fire spread with terrifying speed and ferocity,
and despite a massive fire-fighting operation, 71 people lost their lives. The victims
came from many different nationalities, many different backgrounds, but they
were almost all poor. The helpers came almost immediately: Muslims coming back
from prayers after breaking the fast in the middle of the night; and not long
after, Christians at local churches throwing open the doors, offering
hospitality, food and water, spaces to lament and to pray… and in the days and weeks
after, brokering gatherings with politicians, and beginning to call for justice.
In the days that followed the Grenfell Tower
tragedy, we discovered that residents of the Tower, members of the Grenfell
Action Group, had been issuing repeated warnings for several years before, that
‘only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our
landlord . . . and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect
of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants’
(Grenfell Action Group 2016).
And
then slowly we discovered that the cladding was ‘insulation’ not from the cold,
not from fire (in fact quite the opposite), but visually insulating rich neighbours
in North Kensington from the poor housing and its occupants around them. It was
a symptom of a wider disconnection. Why had the Grenfell Action Group’s
warnings not been heeded? Why had their voices not been heard? In a lecture two
months after the fire, journalist Jon Snow articulated the profound and
dangerous ‘disconnect’ between those who are part of ‘the elite’ (within which
he includes himself and his journalist colleagues), and ‘the lives, concerns,
and needs of those who are not’:
“Amid the demonstrations around
the tower after the fire there were cries of “Where were you? Why didn’t you
come here before?” Why didn’t any of us see the Grenfell action blog? Why
didn’t we know? Why didn’t we have contact? Why didn’t we enable the residents
of Grenfell Tower – and indeed the other hundreds of towers like it around
Britain, to find pathways to talk to us and for us to expose their story? . . .
We can accuse the political classes for their failures, and we do. But we are
guilty of them ourselves. We are too far removed from those who lived their
lives in Grenfell and who, across the country, now live on amid the combustible
cladding, the lack of sprinklers, the absence of centralised fire alarms and
more, revealed by the Grenfell Tower.”
Jon Snow’s remarks bear more than a passing
resonance with Pope Francis’ Laudato Si:
“…many professionals, opinion
makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent
urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their
problems. … Their lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times
by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to
tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality.”
For Snow, from a profession of communicators,
the Grenfell tragedy has brought the issue of disconnection into sharp focus. Rather than seeing their role as
simply ‘communicating to’ the wider
population, journalists – as part of what Snow calls the ‘narrow elite’ –
should be bridging divides of class and background to get to know their audience – not as
two-dimensional stereotypes, as victims or villains, but in all their
three-dimensional complexity as fellow human beings. ‘So casually written off
as nameless migrants, scroungers, and the rest,’ Snow remarks, ‘actually, and
it should be no shock to us, the Tower was full
of talent’ (Snow 2017). So my question for us is this: how might he and fellow
journalists – how might all of us here in this room? How might the Church as
the body of Christ stretching from North Kensington to Swanwick and far beyond?
– have come to truly see the talent
of the Tower’s residents, how might we have thoroughly heard their voices, in those years before the devastating fire – the years of what we might call
‘ordinary time’ – before Grenfell
Tower became tragic headline news?
Poverty and edges of marginalization and
expulsion
This
question hits the ground for me in the Firs & Bromford estate where I live
and work. That Passion Play, that story of abandonment – and yet in a place that
some of us were just beginning to discover a few years ago was ‘full of talent’.
In the left of the picture, the Roman centurion, is a man called Phil. Phil was
a few years ago one of our ‘unsung heroes’ in Hodge Hill. We found him because
some of his neighbours had nominated him as someone who had made a contribution
to our neighbourhood. And when we gathered together our unsung heroes, we asked
them, “if you could find a couple of people to join you, what would you start
in your neighbourhood, what would you give a go?”. And Phil said “I want to
start a theatre group”. The Bromford Theatre Group – it did its first Christmas
panto a few months before the first Community Passion Play, that Phil sat down
and dictated to me in my front room. A different story of our estate was
beginning to be told.
Why
does this matter? The Church Urban Fund has developed something it calls the ‘web
of poverty’. It talks about not just poverty of resources, but also poverty of relationships,
and poverty of identity – the kind of
stories that are told about us, the kind of stories we absorb and believe and
live out for ourselves, because others have said this is how we are.
It’s
the kind of poverty that brings us to a different kind of edge. Less a
cliff-edge, and more the edge of what counts as “normal”, what counts as
“mainstream”. Pushed to the edge, we experience blame, demonization, marginalization
and even expulsion.
The
Scottish writer Alastair McIntosh reminds us that poverty is “structural,
being systemic to the distribution of power, resources and educational
opportunities in society. Second, it is a form of violence that comes
from a deficit of empathy between those who have much and those who have
little… [and] sustained by blindness to the full humanity of one another… a
pathology of the rich and not just a deficit of the poor.” (Alastair McIntosh, Poverty
Truth Commission commissioner)
And
its within a wider Wester society that the philosopher of language Gemma
Corradi Fiumara calls our ‘non-listening culture’: “the logos we inhabit
is ‘halved’ … we know how to speak but have forgotten how to listen’.
Our ‘non-listening culture …
divides itself into separate discourses, which are free from the desire or
obligation to listen to others’, and where ‘powerful’ discourses ‘seek to expand
[their] territory through the silencing of others’ (and defining what
counts as ‘truth’). And in such a culture, a common temptation is to what Fiumara
names ‘benumbment’: the ‘refusal to listen or be listened to, as a means
of defending one’s own discursive space against the predatory invasion of other
discourses’.
Two common Christian responses: charity and
advocacy
In
that context, I want to suggest that there are two common Christian responses
that both fall short.
The
first is the response of charity –
of ‘giving to’. It can reduce suffering, it can sometimes save lives, yes. But
it treats people as individuals – and it keeps their ‘problems’ individualised
too. It doesn’t address the causes that keep
people in poverty, that keep pushing people to the edges and off the edges (cf
Dom Helder Camara).
And
so a second response is advocacy – ‘speaking
for’. Public statements, protest, lobbying, organizing & marching in the
streets… I took my 10-year-old down to London last Friday – his teachers were
proud he took a day off school! It’s concerned with the causes, and not just
the symptoms. It’s rooted in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew bible. And
yet, ‘too many advocates assume that they are somehow above or unaffected by
the problem, merely seeking to help others who are less fortunate… the
privileged supporting the underprivileged…’ (Rieger 2018).
And
within both charity and advocacy I think we have an imagination of a particular
kind of flow going on: from God, through the church, into the world. The church receives something from God to give to those needy outside it. We’re sent
to serve, to wash feet, to grow the kingdom. We’re fed in the eucharist to feed
others.
The words of Teresa
of Avila:
“Christ
has no body now
but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes
with which he looks
with compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.”
Or
in more evangelical language, and found on wrist-bands for many years (although
I think they’re fading in popularity now), ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ At one end of
the axis, we imagine that we are the ones that are Christ to others. Or at the
other end of the axis we might cite Matthew 25, and imagine Jesus in the
hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked – in the needy, facing us with
open, empty hands.
And
all of that is good, but it can be seductive.
Temptations in the wasteland
I
want us to think for a minute about the story of the temptations in the
wilderness. Journey with me, with Jesus, into the desert. The temptations raise
the question, “who are you?” Remember Jesus has just been baptised. He’s just
heard the voice of God ringing in his ears, “you are my beloved Son, with you I
am well pleased”. And now, he’s slung into the desert, and the tempter says to
him, “if you are… if you are the Son
of God…” And that identity crisis is one that afflicts the Church today as
well, and the temptations are similar.
The
first is to what Bishop John V Taylor of the Church Mission Society [in his
book The Christlike God] called “the power of the provider”. We hear language around us
in Christian circles around the “golden opportunities” of the state
withdrawing, of the invitation to the Church to “fill the gaps”. Providing for
our neighbours is not a bad thing – but it construes our neighbour as lacking. And it can make us feel good, and useful and valuable, to
provide for those who need – and that can be seductive.
The
“power of the performer” is one that
certainly in my denomination, the Church of England, where all the graphs are
going in the wrong direction and the numbers and the money seem to be leeching
away – the power of the performer can be tempting. “We must do something! We must demonstrate our
impact. People should see what we’re
doing, and maybe they’ll change their minds about us!” It can be seductive, and
it construes our neighbour as a spectator to our performance, as a consumer of
our product.
And
lastly, the third temptation is to the “power of the possessor”. We hear talk of the importance of the church having “a
place at the table”, of “the Christian voice being heard”, of remembering “the
Christian heritage” of our society and “the Christian values” which underly
things. And all of that is valid, maybe, but again, it’s the seduction of being
in charge, of being in control of “our project”, “our activity”, “our justice
movement”. And at its worst it construes our neighbour as being the one
possessed, controlled.
(I’m
sorry, this is going to get worse before it gets better, but I promise, it’ll
end on a high!)
I’ve
found over the last couple of years that there are, in the States particularly,
a small but growing number of people who call themselves ‘critical white
theologians’. White Christians who are beginning to be conscious of their
whiteness and the damage that uncritical
whiteness can inflict. Jennifer Harvey is one of them, and I want you, having
seen that axis of where we put Jesus, to listen to these words:
“It just so happens that identifying with or
as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of
being toward which white people are prone. It just so happens that being
inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged
side-effect of white racialization. And it just so happens that these
tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central
power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up
to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering
others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf
of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of
being toward which white people are already inclined are likely to be
triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply
put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a white person whose
life is embedded in white-supremacist structures should be doing.” (Jennifer
Harvey, ‘What Would Zacchaeus Do?’, 2012)
I
am thankful to Donald Trump for just one thing. That he has highlighted, beyond
reasonable doubt, that we live within white supremacist structures. In our
society here in the UK as much within the United States.
But…
how might these words be if we also translate them into the language of gender?
“Simply put, identifying with the divine is
about the last thing that a man,
whose life is embedded within patriarchal
structures should be doing.”
And
for good measure – and I can say this, as someone who is white, male and middle-class…
“simply put, identifying with the divine is
about the last thing that a middle-class Christian,
whose life is embedded within unjust
economic structures should be doing.”
Do
you see where I’m going with this?
I’ve
found it helpful again, in recent times, to come up against the definition of
what I suspect will be used more and more in the next few years as a helpful
lens: white fragility. Again, it
comes from North America but I think it applies to us too.
“White fragility is a state in which even a
minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of
defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as
anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and
leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to
reinstate white racial equilibrium.” (Robin DiAngelo, ‘White Fragility’,
2011)
I
think those of us in the room who are white may well recognise some of those
descriptions, as something we don’t want
to do, but something inside us does automatically. And I think again, we can
probably translate quite easily into the language of gender, and the language
of class. That defensiveness that those of us who are comfortable with
privilege find welling up inside us when challenged.
So
what do we do with the habits and seductions of privilege, with our fragile but
fiercely defended identities? I think we need to go back to the wasteland, back
to the wilderness, and remember that at the end of the temptations story there
were angels, and Jesus let them
minister to him.
A third response: ‘deep solidarity’,
listening and being interrupted
And
so, after charity and advocacy, I want to suggest (with Joerg Rieger) a third
response, one of deep solidarity, one of ‘standing with’, ‘living with’… “Deep
solidarity … describes a situation where the 99% of us who have to work for a
living develop some understanding that we are in the same boat. … Deep
solidarity not only thrives on differences, it also brings to light otherwise
hidden privileges and helps deconstruct them. … as we [develop power by]
put[ting] our differences to [productive] use, we begin to realise that those
who are forced to endure the greatest pressures might have the most valuable
lessons to teach [us].”
So
how do we do it? I think those of us in positions of multiple privilege need to
learn to let go of our ‘centralness’, and move to the edges, perhaps literally,
physically. We need to learn to resist those temptations – the power of the
provider, the performer, the possessor. We need to learn to embrace real,
intimate, mutual relationships, where we become open to challenge, learning and
transformation.
That
means learning to listen. Otto Scharmer suggests that there are four levels of
listening, and often we don’t get to the fourth. The first is, well, just
listening to hear what we were expecting to hear. The second is to hear and
maybe noticing something that’s interesting, and maybe different to what we’ve
heard before, to what we were expecting. The third is listening to inhabit the
shoes of the other. But the fourth level, what he calls generative listening,
is a listening that enables something genuine new to emerge. A ‘hearing to
speech’.
— ‘Hearing
to speech is political
— Hearing
to speech is never one-sided. Once a person is heard to speech, she becomes a
hearing person.
— Speaking
first to be heard is power-over. Hearing to bring forth speech is empowering’
(Nelle
Morton, The Journey is Home)
(I’m
sorry the way this talk works that doesn’t quite work in practice!)
Jim
Perkinson, another critical white theologian, suggests that those of us who are
white need an ‘exorcism’, a ‘shaking of our being to the core’ which we can’t
do on our own. We have to be open to a ‘grace from without’, we have to be
‘dis-located’, pushed to the edges so that we can learn from others.
Like
Jesus with the Syro-Phoenician woman. At the very edges of his travelling, in
the region of Tyre and Sidon, a women challenges him and he says No and she will not give up. ‘Yes, but…’ she
says. And for her ‘Yes, but’ Jesus is changed and turned around – a metanoia goes on. He heads back home,
different. His mission expanded.
Jennifer
Harvey suggests, that again, those of us who are white, maybe need to let go of
the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, and find ourselves on the other end of the finger
of the black Christ who points and denounces, and invites us to work out ways
of becoming ‘race- and class-traitors’, choosing the path of radical
conversion, embodied in humility, repentance and reparation. Instead we should
ask, she says, ‘What Would Zacchaeus Do?’
In
Hodge Hill Church a couple of years ago, Phil and a couple of members of
Bromford Theatre Group came and performed on Remembrance Sunday. It was
profoundly uncomfortable for some in the church because the performance
reminded us of the class divides of war. It unsettled the cosy nationalism that
glosses over those divisions. It refused a ‘glory story’, to look tragedy
squarely in the face.
And
Phil in that Passion Play, playing the Roman centurion, asked us as the crowd,
“Is this the Son of God? This man who turned over the tables in the temple, who
turned the other cheek, who forgives his persecutors, is this the Son of God?”
Phil asked us. It was a challenge to us, the Christians there, as much as to
anyone else.
‘Tabling’: finding eucharistic spaces in
our neighbourhoods
Later
on in Mark’s gospel, 7 chapters after the Syro-Phoenician woman, another
unknown woman breaks into the gathering where Jesus is, interrupts the flow of
proceedings and pours costly ointment all over Jesus’ head. And Jesus receives
it as a gift. She, the prophetic stranger, makes him the Messiah, the ‘anointed
one’. She, the prophetic stranger, sends him on his journey to the cross.
In
our eucharists, we may imagine we are being fed to feed others. We imagine that
we are uniting spiritually and virtually [with those in need], in a crucible of
passion, where we’re empowered to go out and speak for our neighbours. But what
might a ‘deep solidarity’ that is eucharistically formed look like?
In
Hodge Hill, the Real Junk Food Kitchen gathers food every week that is
intercepted from supermarkets and restaurants who otherwise would throw it
away, and turns it into a 3-course meal that every week around 100 people in
our neighbourhood come together to enjoy. It’s not a soup kitchen, it’s a
shared meal. It’s ‘pay as you feel’, so if you have money you can stick some
money in the tin. If you don’t have money or don’t want to put money in the tin
you can give your time or your talents or your gifts.
A
couple of years after our first community Passion Play we did our first Street
Nativity, and Soni (in the middle of the picture, wearing the King Herod
costume) runs Atlantis Fish Bar. When we got to Atlantis Fish Bar with our
three wise men following the star, Soni gave them a lecture about going to
Bethlehem to find the child, and then coming back to report to him, and then he
stripped off his robes and said, “free food for everybody!”. At that point, I
get out my mobile phone and hastily tell the ladies at church, brewing the
mulled wine, that we might be 45 minutes late! Soni’s generosity interrupted
the church’s plans with an agenda that was straight from the Kingdom of heaven.
Over
recent years, our Muslim neighbours have invited us to share Iftar with them –
breaking the fast during Ramadan – and have shown us so much about what prayer,
fasting and hospitality look like.
And
in our neighbourhood most recently we have begun to reflect together on our
journey of community-building over the years, of which the Passion Play was an
early milestone. And in some of those reflective gatherings, the level of
sharing and honesty that has happened, the level of excitement about what is
happening in community, and wanting to tell others about it and invite others
into it, has exceeded what most of the time I see in church.
So
I want to suggest finally, that we need to ‘flip’ the christological axis: from
‘What Would Jesus Do?’ to ‘What Would Zacchaeus Do?’, and from seeing Jesus
only in our neighbour as hungry, thirsty, stranger to seeing Jesus in those who
come with abundant gifts and abundant challenges to us. And maybe identifying,
if we must, with a Jesus who is receptive
to the abundant gifts and abundant challenges in the women who come to him and
change him.
A
few weeks ago, we had our first community talent show. There was some real
talent, and if you knew them, each who performed on stage also had real
fragility – it took a lot to get them up there, to perform, not just on the
night but in the years before of confidence-building, encouraging, nurturing,
tending relationships and wounds and anxieties and stresses. And there was a
quality about the audience: family members and close friends of each of the
acts were there, but so were many others in the community. And it wasn’t really
a competition – everyone cheered for everyone and encouraged them if they
faltered and looked for the shining light even when the voices cracked or the
nerves got shaky. Where ‘attending’ did not just mean showing up, but looking
for something deeply hidden sometimes. Seeing the glory in the flesh – in the
broken, imperfect, fragile flesh of those who were there, who put their bodies
up on the stage.
The
writer Gillian Ahlgren suggests that this process might be called
‘incarnation’:
“a way of life constantly sensitized to the
presence of God within the human community, a recognition and affirmation of
the presence of God in our midst that helps us deliberately orient ourselves to
becoming the kind of human community that God wants.” (Gillian Ahlgren, The
Tenderness of God)
Returning to the edge(s): discovering Christ
in the ‘ecotone’
I
want to introduce you to one last kind of edge. We’ve seen the cliff edge of
precarity. We’ve seen the edges that people are pushed to through
marginalization. I want to introduce you to the ecotone: it names that little stretch of earth between habitats, where immense fertility happens. The vital places
where difference meet. We find them in our cities too, but we often don’t
attend to them. Differences in race and class, of wealth and culture. Our
cities are shot through with such edges, but they need tending and attending
to.
I
wonder, could it ultimately be profoundly unhelpful, in these times of deep
fragmentation, to locate Christ on one ‘side’ or the other of our divides?
Perhaps we are invited neither to ‘perform Christ’ nor to identify Christ with
the neighbours who challenge us most acutely – but to discover Christ as
‘taking place’ in the space of encounter between
us and our neighbours. It is Christ who draws
us to our neighbours, and it is Christ whom we discover – both creative and unsettling – in the encounters with
them. Christ in the ‘ecotone’ – in the edges between us.
And
so perhaps we as the church should be concerned less with ‘expanding the
territory’ of the body of Christ, and more with ‘extending the flesh of Jesus’
in those ‘contact-zones’, in those edges. Extending those places where we
encounter each other across our
differences, and discover that God is there.
I
want to finish with some more words of Gillian Ahlgren, resonant with much that
Pope Francis has been saying in recent years.
“For [St] Francis and [St] Clare, encounter
became an arresting way of life, open to all. In their experience, there was no
one whose life would not be deeply enriched by deeper dedication to the way of
encounter. Engaging the other with the intention to listen, to learn, and to
connect is a mutually transformative practice that slowly changes everything.
Encounter teaches us to honour the fragility and sacredness of our own
humanity, especially as we come to know our common humanity together. When done
in the conscious presence of the love of God, encounter creates sacred space in
the human community. Encounter moves us from observers of life to
collaborators, with God, in the building up of the human community, the
creation of a common home.” (Gillian Ahlgren, The Tenderness of God)
Questions for further reflection:
What ecotones/edge-places are we being called to share in tending?
Where are we being called to attend more deeply to the gifts & challenges that come to us from our neighbours?
In what contact-zones might we be invited to share in extending?
