Hope/less

Since the beginning of Lent, the first few lines of TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday have been revisiting. It's not that I have any great insight into the poem but rather because a phrase is resonant for me just now: "Because I do not hope". It feels to speak to a growing awareness and a reluctant coming-to-terms with the humanly-slow, geologically-fast unfolding of environmental catastrophe. 

"Because I do not hope" -for those with the power to act wisely and in a timely manner. 

"Because I do not hope" -for lobbyists or the business-as-usual crowd to be stood down.

"Because I do not hope" -for systemic changes to take place.

 

In noticing this resonance, I realise that I had been hoping for things that now seem unlikely. 

I had been hoping that enough people would realise, yesterday, how dire the prognosis is. 

I had been hoping that governments would see beyond the next election

and be concerned about future generations

and so to prime collective action with policy, law and finance. 

I had been hoping that our collective consciousness would kick in before tipping points were reached. 

I had been hoping that if enough of us made greener decisions, spoke, wrote, pleaded and even, God forgive us,

shamed enough other people, then maybe disaster could be averted.

 

What to do? To go off-grid would be an act of despair.

What is needed is a turn to a way of living together where doing roughly the right thing by the environment is the default and not a special effort by a few enthusiasts with the time, money and curiosity to hug trees and eat organic.

 

"Because I do not hope to turn" people around me to living a one-planet lifestyle…

"Because I do not hope to turn" politicians and business leaders towards the common good

and becoming better ancestors…

"Because I do not hope to turn" a profit- and rent-seeking, mammonist, System

into a humane, modest and creation-respectful modus vivendi… 

"Because I do not hope to turn" any of these things I cannot hope.

For I am, like you, helpless in the current of hopeless, misdirected, collective striving.

I no longer strive to strive for such things?

I may no longer desire the constant flow of tat and novelty

but I am carried along by the powerful rip-tides of those aggregated efforts;

billions of decisions formed and constrained by the ecosystem-eroding business as usual,

further empowering it in turn. 

 

I know the obverse of lost hope too: anger: at the short-termism, the stupidity, the cupidity.

Anger that speaking, shouting and lifestyle changing during 40 or 50 years were dismissed; ridiculed even.

 

"Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?"

Civilisations -each in turn has been 'the usual reign'- have risen and fallen.

“Why should I mourn?”

Because billions of people some of whom I know and love personally will be harmed and traumatised.

If they survive the floods, the famines, the pandemics, the migrations, the resorts to violence,

they will hope that their new feudal lords may be kind and respond mercifully to their new skills of servility.

 

What is hope in the face of a sixth great extinction? Of another desperate dark ages?

 

Humanly speaking: little or none; only degrees of denial -refusing to think about it.

Perhaps this is a kind of hope. A hope that if we refuse to see it, it will turn out to be a bad dream or a mistake.

Understandable: we sense the lurking trauma in being disabused

of the deeply-embedded cultural hope of Progress and contemplating its casualties.

 

Time and again the usual reign has passed away. This is not new -though it is grievous. 

Yet the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. 

God knows us, eternally.

 

Also in Lent this year, the refrain from Psalm 42 has played recurrently through my mind.

"Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?  

O put your trust in God; for I will yet give him thanks, who is the help of my countenance, and my God."  

-I can answer the 'why?' in one sense:

my soul's heaviness and my disquiet are prompted by climate catastrophe

and the revealed priorities of our Westminster government in the face of the pandemic.

In the face of such entrenched greed, denial and veniality,

somehow, hope-against-hope, it feels like the only recourse is as these verses state.

And as I write that I am mobbed by centuries of teaching about trusting in God,

but it somehow feels like only now do I get it. Only now am I being disabused of a human pride

that somehow with enough motivation, knowledge or cajoling we can do it.

Like with step one in a 12-step program, we can only truly hope when

we admit that we are actually, truly, powerless. Only then can we hope.

But that hope is oblique to the sources of our despair.

Such hope feels small and underwhelming, fragile even. And yet …

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

    for his compassions never fail. (Lamentations 3) 

 

"I no longer strive towards such things" for myself.

But I do continue to strive because it is better to do good than not,

to live the change we desire to see God effect in the world.

I keep on striving because when the Day comes

we should be about our God-breathed business.

And who knows? -We may yet be surprised by hope.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins   

Innoculating British Christians against USAmerican rightist ambitions

I just read this:

Franklin Graham invested $10 million of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money in his 2016 Decision America Tour to each state house in the country. Billed as “nonpartisan” prayer rallies, these gatherings framed the “moral crisis” as a decision between progressive atheist values and God. After the election, Graham called Trump’s victory an answer to prayer. 

The reason I'm concerned is that about 2 years ago, we nearly had a BGEA tour of the UK headed up by Franklin Graham. I was concerned at the time and this has made me more so. I was concerned that Graham was at least as much about networking so-called Christian right personnel with British Evangelicals with a view to creating a bridge-head to amplify an approach to values consonant with the USAmerican right-wing agenda. I wondered whether I was being too 'conspiracy theorist', but now reading this, I'm minded to think it would be precisely that bridgehead-building.

The article goes on to say this:

Today these influences — the Christian and religious nationalist organizations, religious capitalist and prosperity gospel movements, and independent charismatics — have access to the current administration in the form of its “court evangelicals.” The Values Voter Summit has become an important focus point for this coalition and its narrative. Through federal contracts and student aid, Liberty University has become the largest private Christian university in the country 

I'm thinking, having thought over the last 5 years in British politics, and recalling things I've read about the increasing reach of the American right into funding campaigns in Europe and further afield, that this is precisely an aim of Graham's deployment of the BGEA in this way. I think that they see an opportunity to leverage the current situation to build a stable if smaller base of right-wing support using somewhat Christian themes in the way they have in the USA.

As such I think that we need to be moving away from naivety in British Christian, especially evangelical and charismatic circles. We need to be in a position to resist Graham's next overtures. I'm pretty sure they will come once the dust is settling after the pandemic emergency.

So, my question is what do we need to do now to enable British evangelicals in particular to see through the rhetoric to the political agenda? To understand that this isn't the relatively benign BGEA of the 1980s and '90s but rather a vehicle for right-wing agendas which would struggle to answer 'WWJD' with responses that weren't more like responses to 'WWCD' (what would Caesar do?). There are UK evangelicals and charismatics who would covet the 'court evangelical' role, how do we pre-empt that? How do we innoculate against the cunning use of single issues to marginalise more Godly values (check out here for further reflection). It is a characteristic of some of the Pharisaism that Jesus criticised -maybe that's the way to pursue? (WWPD? -what would Pharisees do?)

My hope in this is that it seems that British Evangelicalism has tended to be more focused on justice and mercy than the USAmerican counterpart. I hope I'm not wrong in that, and I hope it is not too shallowly rooted.

This is going to be occupying some of my prayer-time for weeks or months to come.

And for the record, I think that such cynical usage of evangelism and co-option of the good will of those concerned for sharing the Good News of Jesus is despicable. If this is what Mr Graham is doing (and it does look likely given the history) then I think that puts him and those others who do it in the place of those pharisees and sadducees whom Jesus laid into for misleading the poor and the seeking. At the best they may be acting the part of 'useful idiots' at worst ... shudder ...

Source for initiating quotes: Our Demands – Poor People's Campaign:

Ephesians and All that Jazz -A review

Lately, I've been finding myself appreciating poetic writing more, and that's what drew me to the description of this book: I really delight in fresh expressions of thought and feeling that connect those concepts with different areas of our experience and throw light on them. That was the hope I began reading this book with as some of the blurb said "A fresh, new meaning must be created within the heart of a believer before these words can be understood and lived out. Objective truth must be internalized. The Word must become flesh once again. This is the essence of transliteration and what the Holy Spirit yearns to do in each heart, regardless one’s tradition. Jazz can begin to open up the possibility of God to a hungry heart." 

What struck me as I read the first pages is that it seemed to be a kind of midrash -especially in the way it offers a verse-by-verse 'commentary' but a commentary that is playful, sometimes poetic, always trying to connect with contemporary language, idioms and thought-forms. I guess that's why the word 'jazz' is in the title -it points well to the approach to the text. It comments not by looking into history or etymology or even intertextuality but rather by expanding, rephrasing and re-framing -riffing, you might say. That all makes for a lively, stimulating and sometimes intriguing and insightful read.

I think I'd classify it as devotional literature. It might be useful to refer to in sermon preparation because it might help shake loose an insight or a way to say something. It could also be helpful if  you're preparing to lead prayers referring back to Ephesians.

Links for this Review Ephesians and All that Jazz on Amazon Tom Anderson’s Website Tom Anderson Podcast Interview Tom Anderson Text Interview #EphesiansAndAllThatJazz Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this e-book free through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own

Funerals and tech -evolution?

Having now outlived both my parents, I find myself wondering more about funeral arrangements in a more personal way. And it is notable to me, being involved as I am, from time to time, in the funerals of university students, that funeral practices are changing. And then covid-19 arrived and introduced further changes, which may be to some degree permanent. it is poetically expressed by an Episcopal priest, Padre Angel of Boston, Ma.

 A smartphone is no longer an intruder into the numinous, but an acolyte in service of the sacred. The tablets have transubstantiated into pallbearers: holders of the moment, and not transgressors of it.

It has been a forced development, but now it's happened, perhaps it will mean that it will not feel so odd or sacriligious for remote viewing or even more active participation to take place.

On the other hand...

Mr Collier watched a ceremony live-streamed from Kerstin’s garden. “I feel like I witnessed it,” he says. “I don’t feel I took part.

On the other hand, some notice that the reduction in numbers being able to attend personally has meant a return to something that has been downplayed in recent years.

During the pandemic — particularly during lockdown, when numbers were so small — funerals got back to their original purpose of being allowed to grieve. And we’d almost forgotten that in funerals before then. The interesting thing will be what the long-term impact of that is, whether we’ll hold on to that. We want ritual, but we’ve got to reimagine ritual,

It seems to me that it is still too early to tell how this will play out. It is plausible that a hybrid might emerge: funerals becoming normally smaller, more immediate, affairs where bodily action is at a premium: being able to touch one another and perhaps the coffin or the body being more central possibilities. But those smaller events might be 'attended' also virtually by more people whose relative emotional distance means that it 'feels' okay to pay respects by viewing online. It may even be that others, more distanced by geography, could participate more actively by video interaction.

My question is about how this would all play out into ritual and the staging of memorial events. I suspect that the recent trend towards foregrounding the 'celebration of the life of...' someone may continue in later events. This life-celebration has probably had the effect of moving the grieving elements out of public view (understandably) and into more private spaces. Perhaps more intimate funeral services are allowing ostensible mourning back into the now-semi-public space of a church building.

My concern in it all is that what happens enables people to mourn. It is important that people are allowed and given supports to enable them to recognise their own grief and losses and to express them helpfully. 

I do still worry that the unspoken conspiracy to keep public things positive and upbeat is not doing us any favours in relation to processing loss, grief and even rage.

Drawing initially from this article: Funerals in 2020: better for mourners?:

Cremation, Burial -or what? -Christian eco-propriety in funeral practice

We've been thinking about disposal of human remains lately, particularly our own when eventually it needs to happen: what do we want to do? Mostly our thinking has been around it being ecologically righteous as far as possible, starting with the body itself not polluting or being treated in a way that will hinder the natural recycling that nature has been doing for millions of years with dead bodies. And then also the processes of funeral rites not contributing to pollution or global heating (or at least minimising that impact).

But/And, as Christians, we also want funerals to be consistent with Christian discipleship. So this article when I happened across it, caught my attention. It did so because the article had no consideration of the environmental dimension but rather mainly a -forgive me for the slight disparagement- a narrow individual-salvation concern as shown by this couple of sentences early in the piece.

Some believe that the Bible says you can’t go to Heaven if you’re cremated. This isn’t what the Bible says. There is nothing in the Bible that forbids cremation as a means of disposing a person’s body.

Fair enough as far as it goes: our hope of salvation lies in God's grace and remembrance (both in the sense of knowing us 'timelessly' and of re-making us eschatologically) of us beyond death not in a particular treatment of human remains. A few moments reflection will show up problems with the idea of the physical remains being necessary to ultimate participation in the new creation: many, many people's bodies do cease to exist after enough time. eventually in most conditions even bones' molecules are dissipated into the environment. A theology of reconstruction, if I may characterise it like that, means that after a few hundred or thousand years, there is nothing to reconstruct. It also implies a reconstruction using 'new' material to replace decomposed flesh, so why not simply replace everything? Especially if the new creation's material basis is different to the current material basis? 

Anyway, to return to the main focus: I think that a more wholistic consideration of disposal of our remains should take place; it isn't just about whether we 'go to heaven' or even whether we are being consistent witnesses to Christian teaching. Actually that last clause in the quote includes, in reality, noticing that being good witnesses to Christian perspectives should include -prominently at the moment- doing right and justly by the ecosystem and climate.

With the following quote from the article, however, I see both a positive basis for thinking about corpse-composting and also I find a quibblesome point.

Cremation, however, subtly suggests that our bodies are of no significance. Burial, on the other hand, communicates something far more consistent with the Bible. It affirms not only that the human body has dignity, but also that it has a future. It affirms that death is not the end of the body.

The positive basis is the appraisal of human bodiliness as good and having dignity as well as having a future and those things I definitely affirm. I'm not convinced, however, that cremation really does suggest lack of significance for bodies; I think that's a value judgement that doesn't make sense from 'my' (ecological) perspective -I can see why someone might say that but it lacks force because it only communicates those things if you come from a certain cultural background or with a certain way of looking at life-processes narrowly focused on individuals in an industrial system. 

I'm not convinced that the means by which a body is decomposed do in themselves suggest any such appraisal. Because that's what we are talking about -burial, cremation (or whatever) are all about what processes we entrust a body to for return to the elements. We need to see the bigger picture of molecules and elements returning to the wider ecosphere. What gives a body significance (which is a cultural construct) is how we treat it in terms of 'fare-welling' and how we link that fare-welling to whichever 'bigger picture' of life and cosmos we are beholden to. 

I want to suggest that it is also important to affirm bodiliness by recognising that 'from dust we are created and to dust we shall return' -"dust" being matter, essentially, and the energetic means for its decomposition back to 'dust'. We can do that slowly, by letting bacteria, fungi and biochemical processes work through their life-cycles with the body as raw material. We can do that quickly by oxidising using heat. (And there is another option mentioned below).

More important in terms of Christian ethics and witness is surely making the process most consistent and compatible with the Creator's designs of energy and matter cycles and flows. So, if there's a problem with cremation, it's not really that it disrespects the body or a Christian appraisal of bodiliness. The problem with cremation as I see it, is that it uses methods to accelerate bodily decomposition that are noxious for the environment (ie usually fossil-fuel in the form of methane based gas jets). It may be possible to mitigate that, and to do so would help return to a more positive appraisal of cremation.

As a related side-note here, I would also point out that embalming is a pretty bad thing to do from the perspective of environmental impact. 

And while we're considering less-direct issues of body preservation, we might want to consider how a body is stored pending burial, cremation or whatever. Cold-storage often does have a carbon footprint or dangers around coolants' storage and release. So the title of the article that stimulated my response here might also ask "is it OK for Christians to be embalmed?". I think that embalming is far less good than cremation in the bigger picture.

As a Christian, I believe that we honour our Creator by playing our part in good creation-care practices. And this includes disposal of earthly remains. That is a very body-respecting and material-creation-affirming thing to do. It is good biblical theology to recognise the dust from which we come and to participate well in the systems of life-and-death in which that dust plays its part -to 'tend the garden' with our remains as well as our living effort. The practice of embalming seems to me to be not only dishonouring to the living flow of the ecosystem but also to speak, perhaps, of an overemphasis on appearance and human convenience which is not easily consonant with Christian teaching and virtues. Perhaps that's a harsh thing to say, but maybe we need to be sober about such things rather than simply sentimental and revise our funereal practices in the light of the bigger picture I'm trying to work with in this post.

Personally, I'm looking into Water Cremation to recommend and/or enable for my 'relicts'. It seems to overcome the difficulties associated with conventional cremation and offer a way not to take up lots of rooms with a grave plot. And, as a Christian, I'm trusting in God's recreative promises not the condition of my corpse for a share in the resurrection to Life.

And as a PS -as I've looked at what internet search brings up in relation to the environmental impact of cremation, I've noticed that much of the find is backed by funeral industry with an interest in promoting cremation. One of the effects of this is to not quite compare like with like and be low oncomparative detail, giving the impression that hot-cremating is better than burying. Admittedly this is perhaps true if you take in embalming, plot-maintenance etc. But the simple act of burying a body is less fossil-fuel energetic than firing a body. What needs to happen is to factor-in the ecological impact of the 'extra' acts to corpse-disposal: travel, preservation, storage, containment etc of the body and things like travel by mourners. And these need to be accounted for side-by-side in whichever disposal means is chosen. It's hard to believe, ceteris paribus, that like-for-like accounting would put cremation ahead. The one exception may well be so-called water cremation mentioned above.

What Does the Bible Say About Cremation | Is It OK for Christians to Be Cremated - Beliefnet

Destruction of the cosmic Temple? Tish B'Av and Christians

Reading about Tisha B'Av in the Jewish calendar, I understood that it is much about the destructions (yes that's plural: one by the Babylonian empire and the next by the Roman, there has been no third temple) of the Temple in Jerusalem and also folded into those sorrowful recollections have been the calamities that have afflicted Jewish people (pogroms, expulsions, shoah, etc). The destruction of Temple in this way becomes a metaphor for other destructions -including Hiroshima. I wondered whether also taking the idea of creation -or at least the Earth as God's temple- it could be a time of lament for climate-chaos and breakdown? Perhaps a mini-liturgical season could be honoured informally?

If so, how might it look? The Tisha B'Av 'season' is three weeks and the timing is set by the Jewish lunar calendar relating to the anniversaries of the destruction of the Temple (on the ninth of the month of Av). It often takes in Hiroshima day (6 August) and that seems to be one of the things that a number of Jewish people fold into their observance of the season. So maybe the thing to do would be to take in the dropping of the nuclear bombs the 2nd being at Nagasaki on 9 August, and perhaps taking a week or two before that with, therefore, the Feast of the Transfiguration also on 6th. So end of July to start. Perhaps Mary Magdalene's feast day on 22 might be a good starting point -the story of her taking spices to anoint Jesus' body and also witnessing the resurrection are good starting points for considering 'calamitous' events? She's often associated with the woman who anointed Jesus' feet "for his burial" too ...

So I'm not proposing to change Sunday readings or anything at this point but to keep the days in between as times of reflection, prayer and repentance regarding human-made calamities affecting the cosmic Temple that is the Earth.

A prayer for these times

A prayer for these times:
Saving God whom we name 'holy';
Cast down the mighty from their thrones
lift up the lowly
fill the hungry with good things
and send the profiteers away empty.



ձռɗ.͜. (@AndiiBowsher) / Twitter