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Blessed art thou,
O Christmas Christ,
that thy cradle was so low
that shepherds,
poorest and simplest of earthly folk,
could yet kneel beside it,
and look level-eyed into the face of God. (Anon)
From a story told by a colleague working with churches in Latin America. One farmer said: ‘A single star for the well born and wealthy wise men compared with a whole host of glorious singing angels on the hillside to warm and welcome the poor and scruffy shepherds. That’s how we know how much God loves the poor. He gives them his very best.’
Written on 24th December 1974 by Oscar Romero: ‘No-one can celebrate Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God with us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.’
Seen for the first time 24th December 1968 from Apollo 8 as the spacecraft looked for possible future landing sites, and giving us something to marvel at, and something to worry about. ‘The most important environmental picture ever taken.’
Now playing Barry Louis Polisar: All I Want
Easter was early this year and a busy time and there was no space to post very much at all.
I did come across The Creative View’s coverage of God’s Eye View according to Google earth. (Big cheer to Mark Berry for the link.)
This was one of of how Calvary might look from that high up and fitted with the reflection we did on Good Friday on the cross. (Both the high up and the lowdown at the same time.)
I wrote one on the perspective of the centurion and afterwards was asked to pass it on. So here it is.
Jesus and the centurion. The centurion remembers.
What kind of death was this?
Killing can be an art. The empire has worked hard to perfect an artful way of executing its enemies. Crucifixion. It is public, humiliating, degrading and efficient – the dying even carry the means of their death to the place of their execution. The Roman Empire reserves crucifixion for those it wants to make a particular example of. Roman citizens are not crucified. It is kept as the special preserve of the defeated, the occupied and the crushed – for those who are not Romans; for those who are not one of us.
Crucifixion works. It makes a spectacle out of the enemy. It is a deterrent. It is an entertainment. It is a humiliating way to die. It shows total defeat and reminds everyone who’s in charge, that Caesar is lord. It has served the Roman empire well.
What kind of man then was this?
Jesus – King of the Jews they called him. He wasn’t the first to die this way, and he wouldn’t be the last. But his dying was different. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, awe-inspiring death.
It wasn’t the look of him that made a difference. There was nothing attractive in the way he looked. He was bloody, bruised, beaten – more than either of the two hanging at each side. Might is right in the empire. No favour is shown to those on the receiving end of Roman power. We crushed him. We caused him to suffer. People turned away at the sight of him. We despised him – a piece of bloodied meat stretched out upon a spit; a cross of shame. We thought he was a worm, not a man. He was forsaken; ratted on, spat upon. We mocked and hurled insults at him.
There was nothing to attract us to him. We wondered what all the fuss was about. He’d been pushed around all night and all morning. Pushed from priest to procurator, to the puppet Herod, and then back again. None of these authorities ever miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
There was talk of a Jewish plot, talk of a Roman plot – all of it finishing up on this plot. This plot of land – a scrubby piece of wasteland with a cross outside the city among the criminals. People said in life this Jesus had friends in low places. In his life, so in his death.
What kind of death then was his?
Crucifixion crushes the spirit as well as the organs and the bones. Criminals, enemies and terrorists die this death with terrible cries and oaths, calling down curses on themselves and others. Yet this man Jesus did not rain down on those who were watching curses and oaths or screams and moans of self-pity and hatred. He didn’t say much of anything. Yet his words in life had stirred such passion and anger. For that alone they had accused and arrested him. Yet at his trial he hadn’t said anything. Despite oppression and affliction he had been silent. He, who was so good with words, had been silent before his accusers.
And on the cross as he was dying, instead of cursing us for killing him, he broke his silence with something else. Forgiveness. ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,’
Crucifixion takes the breath away. It costs so much to keep breathing. The spine is crushed, the lungs collapsed, screaming pressure exerted on the tendons and nerves in the wrists and arches of the feet where the nails go through. It costs so much to take even one more breath. Yet this man Jesus, in his dying, used those breaths to speak forgiveness, to offer paradise to a thief, to speak blessing not cursing to those around his cross. And with the last breath he gave himself to his God, the God he called father.
And as he breathed his last, he took our breath away too. His death was breath taking. His death was utterly different. In pain and anguish his death was not never just about him, but about us. He was a man of righteousness; a man who in his death could breathe life into us. A man who held nothing back from us, even in death. His death was breath taking and life giving, and that has made all the difference.
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And later I came across these thoughts on Good Friday here.
The day was Friday.
But it was quite unlike any other day.
It was a day when men went very grievously astray, so far astray in fact that they involved themselves in the utmost iniquity. Evil overwhelmed them and they were blind to the truth, though it was as clear as the morning sky. Yet for all that they were people of religion and character and the most careful of men about following the right. They were endeared to the good and none were given to profounder meditation. They were of all people most meticulous, tenderly affected towards their nation and their fatherland, sincere in their religious practice and characterized by fervour, courage and integrity. Yet this thorough competence in their religion did not save them from wrongdoing, nor immunize their minds from error. Their sincerity did not guide them to the good. They were a people who took counsel among themselves, yet their counsels led them astray. Their Roman overlords, too, were masters of law and order, yet these proved their undoing. The people of Jerusalem were caught that day in a vortex of seducing factors and, taken unawares amid them, they faltered. Lacking sound and valid criteria of action, they foundered utterly, as if they had been a people with neither reason nor religion.
They considered that reason and religion alike laid upon them obligations that transcended the dictates of conscience. They did not realize that when men suffer the loss of conscience there is nothing that can replace it. For human conscience is a torch of the light of God, and without it there is no guidance for mankind. When humanity has no conscience to guide, every virtue collapses, every good turns to evil and all intelligence is crazed.
On that day men willed to murder their conscience and that decision constitutes the supreme tragedy of humanity. The events of that day do not simply belong to the annals of early centuries. They are disasters renewed daily in the life of every individual. Men to the end of time will be contemporaries of that memorable day, perpetually in danger of the same sin and wrongdoing into which the inhabitants of Jerusalem fell. The same darkness will be theirs until they are resolute not to transgress the bounds of conscience.
Egypt: a Muslim reflects on the meaning of the crucifixion.
from “A Procession of Prayers : Meditations and Prayers from around the World” edited by John Carden; Cassell 1998
Why did the Marxist only drink herbal tea?
Because all proper tea is theft.
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Now playing: Ex Cathedra – Agnus Dei
via FoxyTunes
The Writers Room piece in the Saturday Guardian has pictures of famous and famousish writers’ rooms with an explanation of why they put that Afghan rug just so, or have a Mozambique desert scene to ponder on, or whether they sit side-on, back to, or facing a window or wall. The seduction of the piece is that you might think if I did that, I too would be writerly, prize winning and featuring in a Guardian feature.
I have a bit of desk envy when it comes to Al Gore’s work space:
TDS has got our household on a carbonfast for Lent. This means I’m honour bound to simplify and not mug the planet further so will be unable to add the plasma tv and three cinema display screens to the disorder and chaos of our house which looks not unlike a Turner Prize installation.
My consolation:
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. A.A. Milne
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Now playing: The Kooks – She Moves In Her Own Way
via FoxyTunes
It’s the 50th birthday of the Lego brick. I’d read somewhere that originally Lego did not make green or brown bricks so that no-one used the bricks for tanks or war toys. Now that weaponry’s more sophisticated there are a good number of Star Wars, Batman or alien battles to be had – ‘though still no tanks.
Batman doesn’t make it to the Brick Testament (unless there’s a reference in The Boy’s Bible with its strapline, ‘Finally a Bible just for boys’) but there are a few jokes.
We looked at Mark 10 on Sunday which included the camel and eye of the needle trick. The answer to the camel and needle seems to be either to grease the camel and invest in a large liquidiser and a big syringe – or when that doesn’t work, go, sell, give to the poor and follow the Rabbi Jesus.
I had 31 verses to get through on Sunday so it was definitely a case of less is more. I remembered afterwards that there was a good camel-
shoving quote from Richard Branson in 1994 when he was asked why he wanted to run the lottery franchise for charity and not for profit and he said:
Well, I hope to make the eye of the needle a little bit larger when I come to the end of my days.
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Now playing: Pete Seeger – Little Boxes
via FoxyTunes
Because it fits in with the last post, and because we love Howies
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Now playing: Gwen Stefani – Early Winter
via FoxyTunes
From St Kylies (Patron saint of the post modern waster).
I have a strong attachment to the idea of community, but having recently started working with a community of the unwilling – where members through homelessness have to get on with communal living, I’ve smudged some of the lines of my idealised picture. Community can be more picaresque than picturesque and often it doth sucketh.
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Now playing: Matt Nathanson – All We Are
via FoxyTunes
One of the posts I first wrote which wandered off the digital highway on its own was about the Pope’s liturgical shoes which looked like this:
But these are better for any dance, liturgical or otherwise. Tanssitossut or dancing shoes for the very small or very large to dance together:
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Now playing: Madeleine Peyroux – You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
via FoxyTunes
Geoffrey Stephenson ran an event on preaching yesterday. There was a great quote from Barbara Brown Taylor on the place of imagination. Imagination is not only permitted, it is required in living the story we’re trying to tell. Taylor writes:
Imagination has no point to make, no axe to grind. It’s more like a child roaming the neighbourhood on a free afternoon, following first the smell of fresh bread in an oven, then the glint of something bright in the grass- led by curiosity, by hunger, by hope, to explore the given world from its highest branches to its deepest roots because it is wonderful and terrible and because it is there. When imagination comes home and empties its pockets, of course there will be some sorting to do. Keep the cat’s eye marble, the Japanese beetle wing, the red feather, the penny. Jettison the bottle cap, the broken glass, the melted chocolate with lint. But do not scold imagination for bringing it all home or for collecting it in the first place.
And it’s from the messiness that order and shape in preaching might emerge – rather than the other way round as it so often is. The quote is from The Preaching Life. (Barbara Brown Taylor’s also the author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, which might give the flip side to her preaching advice.)
Taylor’s quote about preparing to preach – however she feels about it now – reminded me that preaching is like writing just about anything – prose, drama, music, poetry. (Well perhaps not anything, although some of my report writing and income tax returns have been fantastical.) One of the best books ever on anything is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where she quotes a preacher as saying hope is a ‘revolutionary patience’. ‘Let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.’ Just like preaching.
The light through the woods was great too, and there was the non smokers’ equivalent of a fag break to nip out and roam the neighbourhood.
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Now playing: Amy Winehouse – Tears dry on their own
via FoxyTunes
