Why you cannot hear me

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Because good girls don’t make a scene;
because it isn’t ladylike to swear.
Because of “shriek,” “screech,” and “shrill,”
the vocabulary of shame.

Because strong protest is, methinks,
too often twisted and turned back.
Because denial tied my tongue.
Because of the breath shocked out of me.

Because of your hand across my mouth.
Because you told me not to cry out.
Because if I had spoken out
who would have believed me?

Because I didn’t know the words.

Because I was taught to be quiet
and nice, hold my tongue,
bite my lip, my voice
has a tendency
to trail away…

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Day 178: the end of Esther

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

From today’s Bible Challenge blog. We have been reading the Book of Esther over the weekend; one which I find disturbing for many reasons. The coincidence of this reading with the tragic murders of Friday and the conversations that have happened in its aftermath was one I couldn’t in good conscience ignore. I do not claim to offer wisdom. I do offer my prayers.

epiphanyeuclid's avatarEpiphany's Bible Challenge

Esther 9-10, Psalm 145, II Corinthians 4

On Friday, I wrote about the dangerous sexism embedded into the very foundations of the story of Esther. I was shocked, saddened and ashamed to read later that same day of the misogynistic and murderous rampage that occurred that evening in Isla Vista, California. Over the weekend, I read many tweets and commentaries about tweets containing the hashtag #YesAllWomen, detailing the casual, demeaning and dangerous sexism and misogyny that women continue to face. Yes, all women.

Last night, watching television, we saw a minutes-long portrayal of lechery and casual sexism by a group of male cooking contestants (why was this relevant to a cooking show? Ratings, one assumes.). My husband, dear sweet man, turned to me and said, “I apologize for the members of my sex.” Having assured him that I do not consider him personally to be a contributor to the problem, I…

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Year A Easter 6: Unknown

Posted on May 25, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

 

William Barclay said,

 

There were many altars to unknown gods in Athens. Six hundred years before his a terrible pestilence had fallen on the city which nothing could halt. A Cretan poet, Epimenides, had come forward with a plan. A flock of black and white sheep were let loose throughout the city from the Areopagus. Wherever each lay down it was sacrificed to the nearest god; and if a sheep lay down near the shrine of no known god it was sacrificed to “The Unknown God.”*

 

So Paul begins his preaching in Athens in a rather sarcastic manner, saying, “So, I see you’re really religious, right?”

 

Actually, at this point Paul has been in Athens for some little while, waiting for Silas and Timothy to come and join him on his journey. Whilst there, he has noticed the preponderance of idols around the city, and it has got him quite upset, so he has been engaging everyone he can find in argument about them, because of course idolatry is strictly forbidden in Jewish tradition, and has a history of getting the people of God into trouble whenever they have indulged in it.

 

The people of Athens, we are told, loved nothing more than a new idea, an innovative philosophy, a shiny new idol to adore. When Paul came preaching the resurrection of Jesus Christ, they thought that was exactly what they had found; and finding Paul quite happy to talk and dispute and discuss until the cows came home, they invited him to do just that.

 

And he rewarded them with biting sarcasm, “So, you’re really religious, right?”

 

The Athenians, if we believe the story about the sheep, said, fine, we may not know the name of the god this sheep is laying next to, but we can still control it with a little bit of ovine sacrifice. We can contain it with a shrine, so that next time we need a pestilence driving out, we know where to find it again. We can keep it at our side, for our convenience.

 

In some ways you can hardly blame the Athenians for wanting to cover all the bases. After all, don’t we do the same? How many people here have buried a statue of whoever it is you bury in your front yard to sell your house? Is that the one you bury upside down? What about the little rituals that we make up to bring us luck?

 

And we do more. Some of us make idols out of flags. Some of us make idols out of guns. Some of us make idols out of people, or out of ideas, even good one. Even the good ones become idols when we trust them with our salvation.

 

We all do it. We do it, I think, because we like to think that we have our bases covered, that we are in control, that even when we face the unknown, we can label it and build a shrine to it, or destroy it and bury it. We are not so different from the Athenians.

 

We make idols out of everything and anything that we think will keep God at our side, on our side, at our convenience. When we reduce God, in whom live and move and have our being, to a shrine, to a ritual, to a touchstone or an idea, even a good idea; whether or not we give it the name of God, we are practicing idolatry.

 

“Well aren’t you the religious ones,” says Paul.

 

The good news (says Paul) is that although any god that we might hope to control is no god at all, there is a way to know the uncontrollable, unpredictable, wildly wonderful, abundantly real God without sacrificing our senses, without sacrificing our minds or memories, and even without sacrificing sheep. The God whom we all know with the essence of our being, in whom, in fact, “we live and move and have our being,” although not confined by gold or silver or stone (let alone by flags or guns), has deigned to share our human nature with us, so that we might, through the person of Jesus, know God in a very human way.

 

There’s a paradox, a seemingly unresolvable tension in all of this. If we try to make God in our own image, then we commit idolatry. Yet we ourselves are made in God’s own image, and we know God, although, as Paul says elsewhere, we see God as though through glass, or through water.

 

In last week’s gospel Jesus insisted that his disciples had seen God because they had seen him; that they knew God because they knew him; that they had heard God because Jesus was speaking to them. Now, he addresses us: Although I have to go away, he says, you will not be left alone. You, too, will know me, will know God, because of the Holy Spirit whom God is sending to you. And you will know the Spirit, because the Spirit is that which lives in you, and in which you live and move and have your being. It is the very breath of life; it is the whisper of God in the wind, and the haze on the horizon, and it is in the Spirit that you will continue to know me, and through me, to know God.

 

With the coincidence of this reading falling on Memorial Day weekend, by simple word association I was reminded by the shrine of the Unknown God of the tradition of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

We memorialize that which we do not remember, which we do not know, but we do know, when we pay our respects at the tomb of the Unknown Solider, that we are honouring real people, real memories, real sacrifice. Just because we do not know their names or faces does not make them vague or immaterial, nor any less important in the scheme of things than those that we do know; and we trust that our sorrow, our horror at the horrors of war, our penitence for our part in the violence that kills the sons and daughters of our neighbours, even in our ignorance, is acceptable, and that our prayers, even for those whom we do not know, are heard by the One who knows all.

 

We try so hard to pin things down, to make them, literally, concrete. Yet there is a blessed unknowing that comes from knowing that God is God, and has created all things and loves everyone that has been created. There is a comfort in letting go of the need to control an idol, and instead trusting the living God to work out the plan for our salvation.

 

The Athenians, because they did not know God, had to make one up: The Unknown God. We who know God, revealed to us in the Risen Christ, breathed over us anew each day by the Holy Spirit, who is our constant companion and Comforter; we are free instead of making idols to let God be God.

 

Perhaps if we were to let go of a few more of our own idols, and let God be God, we would more readily recognize the Holy Spirit in the image of others, more easily keep the commandments of love that Jesus gave to his disciples; perhaps we might even find that peace which is offered to all peoples, nations and families of God’s creation; that peace which passes all understanding.

 

For such peace, let us pray:

 

Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen. (Book of Common Prayer)

 

*William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible: The Acts of the Apostles (St Andrew’s Press, 1976),

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Sunfall

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

The only sign of a seam
between sea and sky,
a bright, slim line;
the sun falling,
pooling;
a slick of liquid gold.

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First Peter: first thoughts

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Haiku towards a reflection on the Flood and the ark as symbols of baptism: 1 Peter 3:13-22, Year A Easter 6

Children of the flood,
each of us was drowned at birth,
startled to breath.

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Year A Easter 5: In Jesus’ Name

Posted on May 18, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Some years ago, a friend’s child got sick. Then she got sicker. …

The child recovered, but she had not survived the experience unscathed. Neither, of course, had her parents.

During that difficult time, a group of friends were discussing prayer. “I keep praying for her,” said one. “I pray while I’m doing the washing up, while I’m walking the dog, when I wake up in the night. But I am no longer sure what it is that I am doing. I don’t see that it makes much of a difference. I don’t know, any more, why I am praying.”

Jesus said, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

Some petitions are easy to dispose of. It would seem disrespectful, even blasphemous, to ask in Jesus’ name for a financial windfall, or the success of a sport’s team; we don’t really hold Jesus to his guarantee when we know that we’re misusing it, abusing his generosity, mocking the gifts of God. And there are some logical problems, too. If I win the lottery, what happens to the prayers of all the others who are asking in Jesus’ name for their own payout? If my team wins, what happened to the prayers of the other side? For God, all things are possible, but God has kindly created a world in which some sort of order prevails, so that we are not driven mad by its unpredictability and caprice. My God, if everyone who prayed for a prime parking space in Christmas shopping season at the mall got one, what would that do to the landscape?

Those are the easy ones. But what about the bigger picture, such as need for wisdom in government, compassion in the courts, intelligence in scientific research, humility in our dealings one with another, peace between people and their nations? We ask for such things, we are mandated to ask them in our Prayers of the People, but sometimes we wonder if we are seeing any results.

There’s a comic strip that was going around Facebook a year or so ago, which I saw again recently, in which someone is afraid to ask God why there is still poverty and war and suffering in the world. Why is he afraid to ask? wonders his friend. “I’m afraid God will ask me the same question,” says the reluctant prayer.

Harry Emerson Fosdick suggests that sometimes, we “attempt to achieve by supplication what can be achieved only by thinking,” thinking things through; working things out, ways in which, says Fosdick, just as much as in prayer, we make ourselves partners with God in the world.[1] Jesus taught his disciples to pray for their daily bread – and he fed the multitudes with bread and fish. Jesus says plenty about works in this passage – much more than he does, in fact, about prayer. “You will do greater works than these,” he promises. Works demand work.

In a more personal and poetic vein, John Newton, he of “Amazing Grace” fame, wrote this hymn:

I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek, more earnestly, His face.

’Twas He who taught me thus to pray,
And He, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once He’d answer my request;
And by His love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand He seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
“’Tis in this way, the Lord replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ,
From self, and pride, to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may’st find thy all in Me.”[2]

So, prayer is not always answered as we expect. Prayer is not the only way in which we cooperate with God nor God with us. And petitionary prayer, or intercessory prayer – the prayers in which we ask good things for ourselves or for others – are not the only kind of prayer that God entertains.

Still, it is hard, when we are in the position that my friends and I were in a decade ago, helpless, hand-wringing, wondering what Jesus could possibly have meant when he promised to do what we ask in his name if not this: to ease, to remove the suffering from a child, and her family.

Fosdick points out that the Bible is full of unanswered prayers.[3] From the prayer of Job: “I cry unto thee, and that dost not answer me: I stand up, and thou gazest at me,” (Job 30:20), to the prayer of Jesus: “If it be your will, take this cup from me,” the Bible is full of prayers that are left poignantly unresolved. But are they unanswered?

God, in good time, speaks to Job out of the storm; it may not be the answer Job expects, but God does answer him, and God asks Job, “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?” (Job 40:8)

God gives Jesus the grace to end his prayer, “Yet not my will, but thine,” and the strength to follow through.

Jesus says, “Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Trust me.

We may not know what we are doing when we pray, but God will not turn away from us because of our ignorance, or if we use the wrong words. This is one of the reasons that we pray in Jesus’ name:

 “Christ our Head gathers together all the dim and faltering prayers of his members, our futile prayers, our sighs and groans that cannot be put into words, our numbness and our silence, and he interprets and presents them to the one God and Father of all.

That is why we regularly end our prayers with the words, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ … by which I mean that Jesus Christ my Head and the Head of the whole Church will explain to my heavenly Father what I have been trying to say and what I have failed to say, and that it is because of him, and not because of any virtue or merit in myself, that I Know I shall be heard.”

So Alec Roper Vidler, in his Windsor Sermons.[4]

Jesus says, “Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Trust me.

I wonder if that is what it means to become a holy people, a royal priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God, proclaiming the works of the one who has brought us out of darkness into light. It is nothing less than to gather up the prayers of the people, the groans and sighs that cannot be put into words, and the curses and cries that can, and to present them to God as a spiritual sacrifice, in the name of Jesus Christ, who interprets them and present them to the one God and Father of all.

We have all known of prayers that have been answered, and they bolster our faith. It is our spiritual sacrifice to continue to be faithful in prayer, to continue to pray even when we don’t know what we are doing, what we are saying, what God’s answer will be. It is our spiritual sacrifice, as a priesthood of believers, to believe on behalf of the world in God, and also in Jesus, to place our hope in the Resurrection.

It is the work of the church to gather the prayers of the people in Jesus’ name. You who have received mercy, you are a royal priesthood, consecrated and appointed on behalf of the world to lift up its prayers to God, in Jesus’ name, to offer your faith as a spiritual sacrifice, trusting in the loving kindness of God, which never fails, never falters, never ends, even in the face of death.

In the name of the Risen Christ, Amen.

 

[1] Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Meaning of Prayer (National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Associations, 1915), 126

[2] http://cyberhymnal.org/htm/i/a/iaskedtl.htm

[3] Fosdick, 122-3

[4] Vidler, Alec Roper, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work, compilers Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, Rowan Williams (Oxford University Press, 2003), 641-6

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In Jesus’ Name

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

John 14:13-14 “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

What if I were to say:
No matter what I say,
no matter if I beg or plead
or curse or kick or swear,
you are not to give me
what I most desire?
What if I were to say
all this
then ask for it
in Jesus’ Name?

Too easy. What if
I were to risk my life,
my soul, my sanity
on an errand of love,
a noble cause which
must not fail:
what if I were to ask
not for my life
but for another
in Jesus’ Name?

What if I were to threaten
to curse God and die?
What if I could not fathom
the depth of your “no”,
the mercy of refusal,
the grace of your averted eyes?
Whatever you ask
in my name, is what you said.
Whatever the Hell
did you mean by it?

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Mother’s Day

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

From the side of the multipurpose
metro parkway trail,
a single angelus transports me:
You sing some nursery nonsense as
we pack away the picnic stuff;
it’s time to go home.
Within the forest’s shade,
there is nothing to be seen but
bluebells, by their thousands,
ringing out the joys of heaven.

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When is a door not a door?

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Jesus is posing his listeners a riddle when he talks of himself in the language of the sheep pen. We only get part of the passage today; we don’t hear Jesus, today, call himself the Good Shepherd. That comes immediately after we stop reading. Today, Jesus calls himself the Gate. It is not an image that has received nearly as much attention as the Shepherd, or the Light of the World, or the True Vine. It has similarities, I suppose, with “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” but that is nicely abstract and at least lends itself to poetry and music. A Gate is not exactly abstract, not exactly romantic, not exactly what we expect Jesus to call himself when he is talking about sheep and shepherds.

It doesn’t entirely help that Jesus also says that the Shepherd, whom he also is, will enter through the Gate, which he has just said he is; it is a puzzle.

We might find an easier way into the puzzle through the thieves and the bandits that Jesus warns against. These sayings come right after the man who was born blind is healed, and the Pharisees argue with him about Jesus and about his healing, and they expel him from the synagogue. The Pharisees, as religious leaders, are supposed to be shepherds to the people of Israel; they are supposed to look out for them and guide and protect them, but instead they closed the Gate against the man who was formerly blind, against the possibility of God working through Jesus and bringing light to the world; and so they failed their flock, and became like thieves or bandits. They tried at once both to break and to lock up the Gate – you can taste their desperate confusion. They put themselves before Jesus, before God. They put their own power before the works of God made manifest in the healing of a blind man. They put their ability to eject the man from the synagogue before the ability of Jesus to draw all people to himself. They put their talent for misery before the man’s gift of joy.

Whenever I thought about that phrase this week, I couldn’t help thinking, though, not of the Pharisees but of some other religious fanatics, those thieves and heartless bandits that stole hundreds of girls from their schools and their homes in Nigeria. Those thieves and bandits who have stolen the children of hundreds of mothers and fathers; who have stolen the innocent lives of those young women; who have stolen the joy of a nation. I am glad that it is not Mothers’ Day in Nigeria today. I cannot imagine the salt that such a celebration would rub into the wounds of those hundreds of mothers, grandmothers, godmothers on a day such as this, when those with a talent for misery have stolen a generation’s worth of joy.

A year ago this week, three Cleveland women were redeemed from another thief, another bandit, one who had stolen from them a decade each of their lives. We do not have to look far, unfortunately, to find the thieves and bandits who put their own misery before others’ joy, and who would close the Gate of life against their neighbours.

I read an interview with Michelle Knight yesterday, via the Guardian news website. What happened to her should not exist in this world, but listen to the triumph of hope over despair that she articulates. Her interviewer asked her,

Has she ever thought what would have become of her if she hadn’t been kidnapped? “I’d probably be living on a street or dead by now. It probably would have been drugs or drink.” So the hell she lived through might have saved her? She smiles. “Yes. Because it gave me street smarts. It made me see the other side of the road that no one else gets to see. Even though it was painful and horrible, I survived it.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/10/michelle-knight-ariel-castro-how-i-survived

She smiles.

Jesus said, “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”

They know his voice. We know when we hear the voice of Jesus; we recognize it because we are his sheep. The thieves and bandits try to lead us astray – the ones who speak weaselly words to draw us into captivity, to misery, to addiction, to petty sinfulness and meannesses. The ones who tell us that they have the power, the ability, the talents to undermine the work of God, to undo the saving work of Jesus, to outdo the glory of God.

No one, no thief, no bandit, no disease or disappointment can undo or outdo the glory of God.

We know the voice of the Shepherd.

He speaks in the voice of those who preach peace. You know, I am sure, that Mother’s Day in the United States began not as a day to celebrate maternity but as a day for women to gather in their outrage against war, against the violence that stole their husbands and fathers from them, their sons, their nephews, their joy. It was a day to speak out against death-dealing, and to stand up for peace.

The shepherd speaks in the voice of those who preach peace. He speaks in the words of those who prescribe healing. He speaks in the words of those who love to see us laugh more than cry, who raise us up when we fall, who release joy from the many prisons of misery that the thieves and the bandits build up around us.

I can’t help feeling that the true test of the authenticity of the Shepherd’s voice is, simply put, joy. Thieves and bandits fool us through fakery. They offer false joy, or they falsely promise us that there is no more joy, that all hope has been destroyed. They are wrong.

The Shepherd calls us, his voice reaching even down into the valley of the shadow of death; he calls us out of the shadows into the light, into real and enduring joy.

I notice that we are back on the Shepherd rather than the Gate, but it is not my fault that Jesus mixes his metaphors. “Very truly,” he says, “I am the Gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.

It doesn’t make perfect sense. It is a word game disguised as a riddle.

Jesus spoke to them in figures of speech because the thing that he describes is bigger than our language can bear. The joy that he offers, that we hear in his voice, is broader than the biggest words we have to describe space. It is more infinite in its variations than a Bach fugue. It is more detailed and beautiful in its brush strokes than a Renoir painting reworked by Picasso by way of Monet. It defies description.

That is how we will know it. The thieves and the bandits lay out their logical schemes for their own salvation, but the love of God moves in mysterious ways. Pay attention, then, to the voices that we hear, and the voice that we use when we speak. If its words are beyond our imagining, if it hopes beyond reason, loves beyond measure, promises joy in the most impossible of places – then it is almost certainly the voice of the Shepherd, or perhaps the Gate creaking gently on its hinges, calling us poor woolly sheep home.

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Hacked into the neural network,
the viral voice of the Accuser, fiat
crashing in:
Deny.
Gliding behind
the altar:
Make room, sinner.
The silver pieces gleam complacently.

The desert dwellers hunger and my lips are dry.
I watch my own hands try to conjure
bread from stones, strike wine from the rock.
Silver glimmers duplicitously.
The microphone amplifies my soundless cry;
my heart is gripped between my teeth.

Fingertip touches tarnish, silver
blushing at its complicity.
Wild beasts lap up wine like blood
and amble away, satisfied and pacified.
In a draught, the candle
flickers.
For a heartbeat, all I hear is blood
behind my ears:
Just keep praying.

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes | Leave a comment