Sex and violence

My apologies for the different colours of font through this post, which I have entirely failed to fix!

A disquieting synchronicity.

Wolf Hall has been on the telly in the UK, a superlatively good TV dramatization of both Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall (and here for UK) and Bring Up The Bodies (and here for UK). Not being an avid follower of the Booker Prize-winners or indeed what goes on in the world generally, I had not read her books. But the dramatization is of such quality that I looked them out and found them spell-binding. Brilliant work.

The two novels trace the political career of Thomas Cromwell, a central figure in England at the time of the Reformation. Just over a year ago I read Henry Vyner-Brook’s (also excellent) novel The Heretic (and here for UK), looking at the same period of history.

As I’m sure you know, the Church of England was essentially built on a pile of dead bodies – beheaded, burned, disemboweled, tortured and terrified. One might think, an inauspicious beginning. Not that the Catholic church from which it emerged had any kindlier track record. Quakers, Puritans, Lutherans, Anabaptists – burned to a crisp all over Europe.

So that has been my reading material and my food for thought in recent days. 

Meanwhile on the news has been the executions by ISIS of Kenji Goto (beheaded) and Moath al-Kasasbeh (burned alive in a cage).

The machinations of power harnessing political process of law and underwriting it with the name of God for good measure, just as in the Middle Ages.

But, lest anyone thought that between the English Reformation and 21^st century Islamic political extremism there had been any respite, over on Facebook I find a friend posting a link to an article graphically detailing the spectacular lynching of African Americans – and it seems the States could have taught even the medieval torturers a thing or two in their gruesome refinements of pitiless cruelty and prolonged torture. Between 1882 and 1968 there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the US.

But, in case we thought 1968 was plenty late enough, napalm, white phosphorus, drone attacks . . . it seems the arms trade has been doing brisk business in human suffering.

I cannot say I greatly recommend reading the accounts of these things, but I do recommend the awareness. So I will post links at the end of this article, for any who have the stomach for it.

It is important to grasp that, when it comes to agony and responsibility, ‘somewhere else’ doesn’t really apply.

Then what can we do? Whatever can we do? We send little gifts of money to those whom war has maimed and traumatised, children whose parents are blown to bits, families whose homes and farming land are destroyed. We pray for them in their terror and acute vulnerability, to a God whom we see in Jesus pinned naked in the midday sun to his cross.

Thinking through it all yesterday, I came back to the wise command of Jesus: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’  (Mark 12:28-31KJV)

I’ve quoted from the King James Bible here not from a fondness for cute archaisms, but because there’s an important difference between ‘you’ and ‘thou’ in terms of instructions the Bible has for us. ‘You’ is plural, meaning you the community. ‘Thou’ is singular, meaning you the individual.

So Jesus is not giving a general group instruction to us to take care of one another, but a direct personal charge to each individual one to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’. And, no doubt you will remember, there had to be some tricksy lawyer in the crowd to pipe up with his sardonic question, ‘And who is my neighbor?’

To which Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan. And when he’d told the story, he made the man answer his own question, made him confess with his own lips that it was the foreigner, the unclean infidel, who acted truly as a good neighbor. ‘So you go and do the same,’ said Jesus.

But it is my belief – otherwise the project is so huge I don’t know where to begin – that therefore my neighbor is, regardless of social or cultural difference, simply the person I come across. Loving my neighbor as myself means doing for the person I come across the thing that would be most useful, in that circumstance, if it were me.

My reach is not large and my opportunities not all that many, for which I thank God because I do believe we were intended to take this seriously.

And I cannot believe that war in any shape or form, or gun culture of any sort, or torture, or any type of persecution, has any place in Christ’s command to ‘love thy neighbour’.

In my own life in most recent years, the aspect of persecution I have been in a position to observe most intimately has been the relentless persecution of homosexual people by the church, and the merciless exclusion of homosexual Christians from the church community by their Christian brothers and sisters. They have been driven to suicide, pushed to the margins. And of course the attitudes of the church in Europe, America and the UK, sends strong signals to those countries where ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians, or torture, imprisonment and execution of homosexual people, are still seen as entirely acceptable.

And some say it is all the work of the devil, that it is end times and compassion grows cold and opposition is fierce. The devil? The devil could take it easy, sit back and read his newspaper, seeing what Christians will cheerfully do to each other for themselves, and call it the holy work of God.

‘Love thy neighbor’, eh? Perhaps it is time we begin.

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WARNING – the following links may include graphic images and descriptions of an upsetting nature.

Spectacular lynching in the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

Spectacular lynchings and the violence they involved.

Burning people to death in modern warfare.

The rape of boys by US soldiers in modern warfare.

What it means to be homosexual in Gambia. . . .

. . . and elsewhere in Africa.

The danger of being homosexual in various parts of the world.

Money thoughts

There’s a new women’s magazine out in the UK (and elsewhere?) called Porter (as in Net-a-Porter). It’s been running a year and caught my eye, so I bought a copy of the most recent edition. It’s really good. Intelligent, interesting articles, an honest tone – nothing arch or frivolous – well, unless you think any inclusion of fashion and beauty stuff in a women’s magazine automatically renders it frivolous. But the articles were about interesting people and significant things that had happened to them – altogether both lovely to look at and a good read.

I saw that it had the usual special price reduction if I took out a subscription, so I thought I might do that. I went online to the website with that intention, then discovered that the big reduction applied to automatically recurring card payments, whereas direct debits had a much smaller reduction. Hmm. I didn’t take out the subscription.

Here’s why.

You know those roadside rescue (car) organisations – you must have them in the US, we here in the UK have two or three main ones – that will come out to fix your car and help with your onward journey etc if you break down? Well, I sometimes do and sometimes don’t have a car, depending on where I’m living and what I need to do in any particular stretch of my life, so I have joined and unjoined these organisations at various times.

Well, one time I joined then read an article about a person who had left such an organization (the same one I’d joined) but had real trouble stopping payments when he left. They had his card details, he had set up a recurring card payment, they kept on taking his money, and he had no power to stop them because control over the payments lay with the payee under this system. With a direct debit the person paying can stop the payments at the bank (though of course must notify the payee as well), but not with a recurring card payment. As the payment to these breakdown organisations goes out annually, it’s easy to forget to look out for it if one left in July but the payment is not due until next March. It’s not that the organisations are evil and weasely, just that the person leaving isn’t paying attention, and probably binned the notification unread, thinking “Oh, them – no that no longer applies to me.”

I like to keep a very tight grip on my finances and know what’s going on, so I wanted to be sure this couldn’t happen to me. So, when I sold my car and left the organization, as well as notifying them, I went to my bank and said I wanted a new debit card. They asked why. So I explained I wanted to prevent any large recurring annual payment going out when I’d cancelled membership. The bank clerk said I couldn’t do that – they wouldn’t cancel a card on that basis. Hmm.

So I made a mental note to watch carefully as the time drew near when my membership renewal would have fallen due.

As it happened, by a stroke of good fortune, I was able to go into my bank a month before that date, to report that my infant grandson had somehow got hold of my card and bitten it a lot, rendering it unusable. The bank clerk wanted to see the card and check if it could in fact still be used, but I explained that I had cut it up and thrown it away now, it really was very destroyed. So I needed them to issue me a new one – which they accordingly did, and of course I notified any organizations needing to know of the number change.

This sequence of events stuck in my memory, and it occurred to me that you might not realize the difference in who controls the two different kind of payments – with direct debits it’s you, with recurring debit/credit card payments it’s the payee. I imagined you might have an opinion about that, so just thought I’d pass it on.

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Since posting this, a Facebook friend commented that the law changed some time back, making it possible to cancel these payments at the bank. She sent me a link to a page/site explaining all about it. Here.

Hero (Family of the Year) - A cover by Nathan and Eva Leach

If you haven't seen this, you are in for such a treat. I love them, I love them - they make my heart sing!

A Lazy Saturday Collides With Forgotten Company

Wonderful video - I love this family! 

Morning thoughts

Simplicity and minimalism have merged in my life as essential to each other. This is a testimony, but not a recommendation.

Some friends testify that for them minimalism gets in the way of simplicity – because one has to strategize, plan, make choices, continually and patiently apply mindfulness to the maintenance of minimalism in a cluttered world. And some consider this exercise does not belong to simplicity; it makes life complicated, thinking about these things all the time. That our minds are better occupied on God, on philosophy and theology, reading, creating, on music and art and the fair beauty of the living earth. I don’t propose any argument against that. I say only, that is their finding and their lives, but not mine.

I think perhaps it is a matter of inclination or calling – depending whether one likes to lay the responsibility for these things at one’s own door or God’s.

Abba Moses (one of the Desert Fathers) responded to a young monk asking him for some wise teaching: “Go and sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

I think when he said “cell”, he would have been assuming somewhere sparsely furnished, almost empty, a place of few possessions. I don’t imagine he meant “Go into your three-bedroomed house with its central heating, TV, well-equipped kitchen, study with computer and printer and stocked bookshelves, living room with comfy chairs and stacks of magazines, jigsaw puzzles, novels, knitting, and various hobbies.”

“Go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything” doesn’t mean “Go home and don’t bother me, figure it out yourself”. It isn’t even quite the same as what Lao Tsu said in the Tao Te Ching: “Without going outside you can know the whole world”. Though that is true. Up to a point. I think. Maybe. I know having gone out and about a bit has changed the way I look at things. I would not be the same if I hadn’t kept company with dying people, with prisoners, with people struggling in poverty and various journeys of transformation. But I take his point.

Still, I think there’s no getting round it, Abba Moses intended “Go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything” as an exercise in extreme minimalism. No distraction. No comfort. No possessions. Enclosure. Quiet. Solitude. Because it forces you inward, and hopefully along the hidden track to the presence of God.

This is ascetic, of course.

Minimalism means different things to different people, and so does simplicity.

For me, it started with St Francis; and his minimalism/simplicity was about humility and intimacy with God – so that made a good beginning. To do with getting his hands dirty, taking the literal and immediate paths, nurturing the innocence of the childlike spirit. And choosing the place of the lowliest. Taking the lowest place. This spoke to me deeply. In small and insignificant ways I have tried to do it – to eschew status, not that I’ve ever had a lot to eschew so it’s been no big deal.

I watched and learned from monastics and Anabaptists, and learned what I could from Zen (actually of course what Zen teaches you is precisely nothing, so it’s useful in this context).

I loved Gandhi.

Since my teenage years the exercise of living in the smallest possible space has held a fascination for me.

So for a while I dressed in saris, which are excellent for space-saving. They fold up small and carry over from doing the housework to conducting ceremonies to going out and about to attending functions to preaching – pretty much anything you can think of. But I discovered (I would not have known this if I hadn’t worn them) they are also political. Unknowingly I had stepped across a cultural divide into a different world. I know how we dress is always a statement whether we like it or not, but I didn’t want to be a walking political banner. And – oh, dear – what a magnet they were for bored men at religious gatherings: “So. Did you live long in India?” “I have never been to India.” “Then why are you . . .” etc.

Though once a man from India approached me with his eyes full of tears because the sari I wore that evening came from the same place as he did. He thanked me over and over, for wearing it.

The whole thing turned out to be a bigger deal than I’d meant.

Then I discovered the Amish and fell head over heels in love with them. Everything I read said they were all about simplicity and kindness, the humble, guileless, plain pursuit of the Gospel. I embraced this with a whole heart, and entered the world of Plain Dress. For a while my life was all about petticoats and ironing and trying to get the right combination of underclothes so my skirts didn’t ride up when I walked fast wearing wooly tights in the winter. And making head-coverings and remembering to put aprons on and take them off and getting an extra clothes rail to accommodate all the clobber, and trying desperately – and unsuccessfully – to be unobtrusive. And people staring. Mistaking me for a re-enactor – asking me the way to the toilets in the medieval castle. It all got a bit . . . silly. So I stopped. No matter what its proponents insisted, the Plain Dress adventure didn’t feel one iota like simplicity to me.

I still dress plain, but my own way of it. Quiet, dark, modest clothes. Nothing fancy.

And then quite by itself, like Red Riding Hood wandering deeper into a wood without wolves, my soul drifted along the tracks that led into minimalism.

Minimalism and simplicity have implications one can compartmentalize. Here are the ones I can think of:

• What I wear. Simple, plain, dark, quiet, unobtrusive; a capsule wardrobe of garments designed to be warm, comfortable, dignified and easy to care for. No ironing. Na-ah. None.
• Other things I own. I try to keep my possessions to a minimum. So I fit my personal things in one tiny room without it looking cluttered. Because I live in a shared house, there are things held in common that belong also to my life; but there too, we continually prune, pare down, review. Open any cupboard and the contents are stored plainly and without muddle. The rooms are not overfilled and the passageways are bare. We try to keep it plain and simple.
• What I eat. A plain and simple diet of only what will nourish me and create health.
• How I spend my time. Working – whether writing or tending to the needs of other people, or cleaning house or whatever. Reading. In conversation with the people I live with, or in correspondence with others far away, or feeding the fox and the crow. Thinking. Praying. Looking. Listening. It is the plainest, simplest life I can devise. A schedule with a quiet rhythm. Not as a penance but because I like it that way. I love the calling of the anchorites – to anchor the Light to the particular spot of earth where they are. I try so to live.
• My finances. My life is small and uneventful, so it proceeds on little income. I try to get things so arranged that any benefit coming to me will, by the structures I’ve put in place, do good to other people as well. Flow through me as well as to me. I have this body, I must sustain it and care for it, but I want no kind of hoard.
• My home. It’s important to me to live in a poor town, among poor people. For a while my work took me into what one could call comfort zones. I lived only in church houses there, owning nothing (apart from the usual domestic basics); even so I felt stifled. It was a relief to come back to this rough and ready place by the sea. I feel at home with those who live near the edge. Making their nests like seagulls on what ledges they can find. Preferring freedom. And I like my place to be somewhat shabby, which it is. Not imposing, not grand; a house that makes no statements. Nonetheless, to me, beautiful. Bigger than I’d like, but then it has to shelter several of us, so that’s okay.
• My relationships. I choose solitude, and the company of those on a serious path. I withdraw from contention and display, from what is loud and rude, or ribald or imprudent. I choose peace – not selfishly, but because I am growing it, like moss, in a world that needs it.

This is my way of simplicity, the cell I am building of my life, and minimalism is intrinsically part of it.

What I’ve found about minimalism (“Go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything”) is that it peels back layers, takes me deeper. This morning, awake and reading towards dawn, occasionally pausing to think, turn things over in my mind – yes, and pray – I noticed something, discerned something in the landscape of my soul. That need to talk things through with those close to me, to let off steam. And I saw how it is like a dandelion clock – these bits and pieces of criticism, of discontent and unkindness I let fly – they are not merely like flakes of shed scales and skin – they are seeds.

And I saw that this is an endeavor of simplicity in which the application of minimalism will be a wholesome salve. The minimalism of silence, the application of “Ssh”, of keeping my own counsel; and, if that’s what it takes to achieve it, of greater solitude.

So this, too, is a form of minimalism, simplicity, a dew nourishing the garden of peace I am slowly developing – not for myself alone but for the stressed and tired world.

But it’s all steps and layers. It doesn’t come all at once. Minimalism and simplicity reveal their riches incrementally. They are discovered behind many veils. Or, like an archeologist, digging down, scraping back, discovering for the first time the story of something lying hidden from view, lost civilization.

Well, that’s what I think, anyway.

Though this is a mere aside. In the main my heart beats this morning in sorrow for this man’s agony. How could they do that?