Good Friday: Redemption Song

Good Friday — Here is a poem by Les Murray, which explores why Jesus died and how all his persecutors, friend and foe, could actually be redeemed:

Easter 1984

When we saw human dignity
Healing humans in the middle of the day

We moved in on him slowly
Under the incalculable gravity

of old freedom, of our old freedom
under atmospheres of consequence, of justice

under which no one needs to thank anyone
If this was God, we would get even.

And in the end we nailed him,
lashed, spittled, stretched him limb from limb.

We would settle with dignity
for the anguish it had caused us,

we’d send it to be abstract again,
we would set it free.

*
But we had raised up evolution
It would not stop being human.

Ever afterwards, the accumulation
of freedom would end in this man

whipped, bloodied, getting the treatment.
It would look like man himself was getting it.

He was freeing us, painfully, from freedom,
justice, dignity — he was discharging them

of their deadly ambiguous deposit,
remaking out of them the primal day

in which he was free not to have borne it
and we were free not to have done it,

free never to torture man again,
free to believe him risen.

Good Friday is a day to address St Paul’s teasing question to the Galatians, “who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Christ was publicly portrayed as cricified?” to ourselves, and dedicated followers of some contemporary fashions:

1. Sincere attraction to Pharisaism (as in Galatia)
   
   
2. Excluding Jesus from the public square (even though he started out there)
   
   
3. The auld liberal Protestant habit of severing a lovable mop-haired Jesus (of History) from the Pauline Christ (of faith)
   
   
4. The notion that human dignity, rights and equality are somehow, in themselves, a threat to the real Jesus Christ
   
   
5. The folly that Christianity is a religion, rather than a process of personal and social renewal.
   

SPCK shops — Wet Fish rotting

Even with my mind was on higher things, I've been following the unfolding saga of SPCK bookshops and the Brewers, but somewhat from afar. I see it’s now made Private Eye again. This is certainly a classic Eye Story:

More on the Texan Brewer Brothers who presided over the disastrous demise of the SPCK chain of Christian bookstores.

The St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust (SSG) claims not to have the money to pay their former employees (see Eye 1214), but appeared to have somewhow scraped together the pennies to pay lawyers to silence cartoonist Dave Walker who had written about the affair on his blog...

...the saga has been taken up by other bloggers who have been checking out the US bankruptcy filings, which may explain why SSG can afford to pay the lawyers. The “disclosure of compensation of attorney for debtor” shows that for legal services rendered in connection with the bankruptcy case SSG is to pay $75,000 to lawyer J. Mark Brewer, who also happens to be.... chairman and CEO of SSG!

PS: As the Eye went to press, a number of other bloggers had received C[ease] and D[esist] letters from J. Mark Brewer, including Rev Sam Norton of West Mersea. Brewer’s correspondence now makes the bizarre claim that “Neither English nor American law permits you to engage in what you term ‘fair comment’ with respect to a private company, nor with respect to a private individual — namely, me.”

Thanks and greatest respects to Matt Wardman, Sam Norton and Phil Groom, who have borne the heat of the day. It’s an almost perfect example of the Streisand Effect — named after the attempt by Barbra of that Ilk to prevent her house appearing on the internet. Like a bizarre game of swatting the mole, every attempt to ban the picture increased the number online, until she had given her name to a whole new “groundswell” phenomenon. The whole SSG/SPCK fiasco demonstrates that to run a chain of bookshops you need staff, stock, suppliers and customers, as well as crusading zeal and views somewhre over to the Right of Genghis Khan.

Spy vs Spy?

Privacy International monitors the extent to which personal privacy is vulnerable in different countries around the world. The UK is right up there in the superleague of “endemic surveillance societies.” Lagging far behind are countries like Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Greece and Romania hardly score anything. We just manage to beat the French, which will be a comfort to some. The UK has the lowest ratings in the world, alongside Singapore, Russia, China, Malaysia and the US.

Governments photograph and snoop on individual people, of course, to keep everyone safe from crime and terrorism. This is obviously sometimes necessary. But hang on; It is simply not significantly more dangerous out on the streets of Luxembourg, Greece or Portugal, than those of Russia, the US or, come to that, the UK. We experience far higher rates of crime and terrorism, along with our superleague companions. Of course there’s an element of chicken and egg about this. We experience crime that has to be fought, so we tighten up on everyone. But I wonder:

1. Where and how does this process of progressively spying on everybody end? At what point could we break into the cycle of fear inducing more intrusive security measures that inspire more fear, and how? Or is the whole process just inexorable, until we all really end up in a kind of 1984 state?
2. Security strategies aimed at containment can work well in short term and immediate ways. But what are the positive factors that enable many other countries to protect personal privacy better, whilst at the same time enjoying a higher underlying level of public safety?

Answers, on a postcard?

Divis Flats, Falls Road, Sandy Row, Shankhill — redeeming some names from the curse of the past....

For as long as I can remember Belfast was a war zone. It seems incredible that people so decent, caring and pleasant should have descended into civil war for the best part of forty years. Belfast now is in full recovery, building everywhere to put behind it the legacy of the troubles. Thank God.

There's a particular theological challenge here. Jesus said people would know the genuineness of faith not by its content, or its conformity to some ideal specification, but by its fruits. How could religion bear such bitter fruit?

Dawkins, of course, would say it was religion wot done it. Dawkins has a point. Sometimes, as the Chief Rabbi tactfully puts it, people believe too much. But you don't have to know very much about the troubles to see that religious identity was only a background factor. Sir Edward Carson wasn't a religious leader, as such, nor were those who have driven this strife ever since. It's about far more than religion, and most religious people on all sides tried consistently to ameliorate the worst of it, rather than stoke it up. Anyway, the hypothesis that atheism somehow stops you being violent is ridiculous: most of the great Mass Murderers of the last century — Mao, Stalin, etc. — were, in fact, secularists.

As history begins to emerge from the headlines and slogans, here's one crude tentative hypothesis, overheard on the streets. It states that these nice people were let down catastrophically by their leaders, at all levels, including the highest echelons of the British government. Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments committed their fair share of cock-ups and bad tactical calls, but were essentially carried along by forces beyond their ken, reacting tactically to something they didn't really understand, and couldn't think through strategically.

The shocking, culpable failure came in the late 80's when the UK government pulled up the draw bridge, pursuing illusory military solutions to a non-military problem. Thousands died whilst they sat on their spotty behinds, trying to sound hard for Fleet Street, throwing shedloads of money at increasingly ingenious security measures — anything except the one thing needful.

History awards surprising prizes. I was never keen on the Major government, but they turned things round. Often panned by Fleet Street as weak and vacillating, Major had the imagination and moral courage to see there was no military solution, and the problem wasn't going to go away unless he did something. Far from the line that "you can't talk to people like that" that played to the gallery at home but accomplished nothing, Major (and, eventually, Trimble) came to see that the people they really needed to talk to were the enemy. Until that happened nothing was going to change.

Well there's a tentative historical hypothesis, from which we learn...

1. Wars on terrorism are, by definition, exercises in pointlessness and futility because they attack the symptom not the cause. When you win the hearts of people of goodwill, you win. There is no military solution — the lesson the British learnt at great cost in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, etc. etc., and Northern Ireland.
   
   
2. Positive change happened here, and in South Africa, when the two sides sat down together and talked. The role of leaders is to bring people together. Any fool can cheerlead abusive songs from their own camp. It takes courage and real leadership to talk; and until someone develops that courage and leadership you are descending into a deep abyss, from which it will take years to emerge. If you feel the urge to walk out, turn it round now, and get listening, get talking.
   
   
3. We have to find a more Christlike way of doing Christianity, for God's sake, for the peace and salvation of the world, for our own souls' good.
   
   St Paul's letters to Corinth dealt functionally with the bizarre phenomenon of schism among Christians — the body that rips itself apart for the sake of politics and being right, the Christian who fixes on a leader who comes to matter more than Christ. In Ephesians 2 he hits the heart of the matter — Christ has broken down every dividing wall of hostility that stands between people — race, or identity, or history. Who are we to rebuild them?
   
   Posture and manipulate as much as we will, in the end we have to sit down in peace as children of one heavenly Father. We are all laden with culture, expectation and identity. As we lay down those burdens for what they are, we will be free to discover each other the way God sees us, with perfect understanding and hope, and begin to live a bit of the life of the world to come now. That's how redemption works on the ground.
   

Postcard from the Windy City

It’s humbling to be a little foreigner in a Big country, a Size 11 lost on a Size 21 film set of big portions, big cars, big churches. Some English are deeply prejudiced against Americans — fascinated but envious, perhaps. For all the USA’s excess and craziness, even barbarous Capital punishment, it is generously cut, warm, fun — a place of simplicity, optimism, self-respect.

Chicago! Here Charlie Chaplin made his Essanay films, and Louis Armstrong recorded his hot fives and sevens. Here Wrigley invented chewing gum. On this improbable swamp Adler and Sullivan invented the skyscraper, for Mies van der Rohe to work on last century. Here stands the tallest building in America.

Better to be a foreigner than an enemy. It was the British who burnt down Fort Dearborn in 1812. Anyway, that’s history, and now we’re deep into an all too special relationship. On Tuesday I saw a button on the streets — “Clinton Lied: Nobody Died.” Americans have a slick way with words. And guns. This was Al Capone’s backyard. And WMD. In 1942, at Rockefeller’s University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi first split the atom. The purpose of this exercise, friends, was Mass Destruction, not Bunny Love baby carrots.

America is all about Unity from diversity, say the dollar bills — e pluribus unum. Here little people grow big, too — your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore… Actually, Liberty Island closed down after 9/11, but that’s another town, another story. The Blacks pouring into Union Station in the 20’s and 30’s found they could assimilate here like they couldn’t back home down South.

Scripture says healthy people welcome the Alien within their gates. God has made of one blood all his children. In Millennium Park there’s a huge squishy mirror doughnut, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture. Chicagoans call it “the Bean”. Under it, faces becomes the face of a work of Art — black, pink, young, yellow, twisted, fresh, wrung out, old, all meld into a work of art. And standing there on a fine day, looking into those faces I realise that, however distorted, we are all what St Paul called God’s work of Art. All the small minded, mean spirited paranoia of the Old Country, even the Daily Mail, seems at least 4,000 miles away. Amen!