tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99018152024-03-08T02:32:21.885+00:00a sideways glancesimonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.comBlogger1038125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-45454265609059095782021-04-12T14:55:00.001+01:002021-04-12T14:55:46.957+01:00So, what is the normal church that we are returning to?<p> Our church began working its way through the early chapters of Acts earlier this year and yesterday arrived at 2:42-47. It was my turn to preach, so here's what I said (pretty much).</p><p>I'd be interested in the thoughts of others</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There’s lots of excited talk at the moment about things returning to normal. Tomorrow we can go and spend a small fortune sitting freezing in a pub garden with six friends and queue for a haircut and shop for non-essentials. Yay!</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And churches are wondering what this means for us. A return to singing - yay! (again or not - depending on your taste!!), gathering to worship and learn together in silent rows, standing in the lounge having coffee with people we know and those we’d like to.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But is that what is normal for church? If it is, then it’s little wonder that so few people join in with us - maybe 5% of London’s population gathers in a church on any given Sunday; fewer on Zoom over the past twelve months.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The only time I met Prince Philip was at the opening of a youth centre in Bromley. I introduced myself as a baptist minister in the town and he remarked, ‘Oh, are there any Christians in Bromley?’ Legendary wit? Astute social commentary? Not sure…</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But this ‘normal’ of church life is hardly a description of the revolution we started to look at when we opened Acts together earlier this year. Today we get to the place where Luke gives us the first of two summaries of ‘normal’ church life (the other is in 4:32-37) </p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Here it is,</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">The whole company of believers stuck together and held all things in common. They were selling their goods and belongings, and dividing them among the group on the basis of one<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">’</span>s need. Knit together with singleness of purpose they gathered as the church every day, and as they ate the common meal from house to house they had a joyful and humble spirit, praising God and showing overflowing kindness toward everybody. And day by day, as people were being rescued, the Lord would add them to the fellowship. </p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">That’s different to the version you’re looking at because it is from Clarence Jordan<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">’</span>s Cotton Patch translation of Acts 2:44-47.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Jordan was a remarkable Baptist preacher from the deep south of the USA that most of us have never heard of. Trained in agriculture and the New Testament (he had a PhD in NT Greek - and those aren’t easy come by!), he and a few friends set up Koinonia Farm in 1942 in Americus, Georgia.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Based on a radical call to discipleship, Jordan set out to create a community that was committed to racial integration, nonviolence, a simplified lifestyle, sharing of possessions, and stewardship of the land and its resources.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This was very Acts 2 but in the Jim Crow states of the USA in the 1940s, it was also dangerously out there.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But Jordan believed the resurrection changed everything. This was the promised revolution that had erupted into the world from the hand and heart of God. For him, </p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">The resurrection of Jesus was simply God's unwillingness to take our 'no' for an answer. He raised Jesus, not as an invitation to us to come to heaven when we die, but as a declaration that he himself has now established permanent, eternal residence here on earth. He is standing beside us, strengthening us in this life. The good news of the resurrection of Jesus is not that we shall die and go home to be with him, but that he has risen and comes home with us, bringing all his hungry, naked, thirsty, sick prisoner brothers with him.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Furthermore,</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px;">The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Brilliant!</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Hence Acts 2 being a manifesto for and description of this revolution. Let's focus on four features of this normal church life Luke draws our attention to:</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">firstly, <b>shared space</b> being together requires open homes - and we find that all through the book. The revolution has come home (2:46; 5:42; 11:3; 16:15, 31-34; 18:7, 8; 20:7-12, 20)</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">As Christians spread out, homes were their base; the place where they lived and worked was the place where the revolution took root and spread to others. Most Christians would have met in workshops where they plied their trade as artisans of one sort or another.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This had two implications. The first is <b>hospitality</b> which is essential to forming community. It’s why Paul says a vital qualification for being a leader in this movement is that they were hospitable (Ti 1:8). And the second is that through their homes they were focused on <b>helping out. </b>Their gatherings were very practical; these folk looked out for each other at the square meal level (2:44 cf 4:32-37; 2 Cor 8:13-15). If people couldn’t bring food to share that didn’t matter, they could always get a meal because that’s what the gathering was for.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But of course it went beyond that. As Jordan says, ‘What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but coworkers. And what the rich need is a wise, honourable and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance’.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And that is precisely what Koinonia Farm is all about. People with nothing are provided for and given the skills they need to provide for others. And the model has spilled out into other communities where groups of Jesus followers buy debts and pay medical bills, offer training and the finance people need to get on their own two feet so that they do the same for others.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Students often enthuse to me that it would be great to see God working among us in signs and wonders just as he did in the early days of the movement. And I agree with them. And then I ask if they are prepared to pool their resources so there is equality among the people of God and no one in need. If we want to release the signs and wonders we crave, economic jubilee is an essential part of it.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Secondly, we see <b>shared values</b> in operation. There are so many stories about how the world works, each one giving rise to values to live by – we see it in the way the government works, companies operate and if we are going to embody God’s revolution, we need to know ours so that we can model them to others.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Values are based on two things: <b>facts, </b>the<b> </b>apostles<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">’ </span>doctrine: there are things we need to know; so reading the bible, talking about it, learning it matters. We need to know who Jesus is, what God has done, how the Holy Spirit works in our midst.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But the other thing we need is <b>footsteps</b>. The point of this teaching is that we walk in it: writing to the Corinthians Paul said he was sending Timothy to them to remind them of his way of life, not just his words (1 Cor 4:17). If the facts do not lead to foot steps, they are not being heard right, they are not being learned correctly. If they remain in our heads and do not reach our feet, they are, frankly, pretty useless!</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So we need to learn how to be accountable to one another for how we<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">’</span>re living; this is not threatening but good; it strengthens us, helps us become the community we are called to be: if we<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">’</span>re not changing as result of coming to church, becoming more like Jesus, why are we coming?</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Thirdly, these were a people with a <b>shared mission</b>, a<b> </b>community that was built as much by working together serving others as by meeting together: what they did to show kindness and offer practical help to their neighbours was the outworking of their shared values.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So their gathering was a bit like stopping at the motorway services when on a long journey. They met to refuel, get fed & get cleaned up so they could continue serving God their neighbours during the week: this is what church is for. So 3:1-11 with its story of mission follows 2:42-47 and shows that the revolution has taken root and we are becoming the community that will show the world who God is. </p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Effective evangelism is always incarnational, it’s always a demonstration of the message in actions that flow from the message; we cannot preach what we are not prepared to live. As John Stott once said evangelism and social action are two blades of a pair of scissors, one without the other is as useless as one-bladed scissors.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So the revolution is about feeding hungry people as much as talking about Jesus, housing homeless folk, sharing food with our neighbours, clothing the naked, healing the sick, welcoming the stranger and making space for them at our tables. That’s when our neighbours start saying, these people have turned the world upside down, as the people of Thessalonica said of Paul and his crew.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And finally, what we see here is a <b>shared encounter:</b> a community of trust, learning, mission and mutual accountability is the very best place to encounter the living God (43). God doesn<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">’</span>t leave us to live as disciples and become such a community on our own: he gives us his power and strength through the Holy Spirit. </p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Then we see signs and wonders, share our goods, are flooded with joy because God is active in each one of us and in our gathering: it is here we taste the new creation as we grow together into community and the world sees in a way that changes their lives and ours (2:47).</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">As Clarence Jordan says, ‘The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.’ Adding, ‘Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds. It is betting your life on the unseen realities.’</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Is this the normal we are longing to get back to? Are we longing to gather because we are products and perpetrators of the Pentecost revolution? As we walk this life of faith together, we will grow into that community, for faith as Jordan reminds us ‘is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.’</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">God will build little outposts of his revolution through his Holy Spirit wherever people trust him and allow him freedom to move: is that us?</p><div><br /></div>simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-67536556016871387882020-12-22T17:25:00.000+00:002020-12-22T17:25:44.257+00:00Soundtrack to the weirdest year...<p> I haven't done this for a while, but I thought 2020 merited a brief comment on my playlist during this weirdest of years. I have spent a lot of time working at home, typing, preparing, reading, thinking, when I've not been in Zoomworld. And to keep the right side of sane, I've been playing some great music - some of it new, some of it the comfortable old favourites you snuggle up in when the world feels bleak and inhospitable.</p><p>So, I've listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, quite a bit of Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. I've also rekindled a love for LCD Sound System, Dead Can Dance, Kate Bush and Vaughan Williams.</p><p>So here's a run-down of new stuff that has delighted my ears this year (in no particular order until the end):</p><p>Smoke Fairies, <i>Darkness Brings the Wonders Home</i> - languid, bluesy, beautifully played and sung.</p><p>Bob Dylan, <i>Rough and Rowdy Ways </i>- when the 17 minute reflection on the consequences of the Kennedy assassination dropped in the early Spring, I was astounded (I even reflected on it theologically for a mate'a church newsletter). But I was not expecting it to be followed by <i>Rough and Rowdy Ways</i>, probably Dylan's finest work of the century, a great record full of wit and wisdom and some great tunes.</p><p>The waterways, <i>Good Luck, Seeker</i> - I'm a long time Waterboys fan and this is up among the best that Mike Scott and his attendants have recorded. It's a mixture of rock and celtic folk; it's got a great cover of Kate Bush's <i>Why Should I love You</i>; and has a centrepiece - <i>My Wonderings in a Weary Land</i> - that ranks among one of the band's best ever tracks. Spiritual, odd, tongue-in-cheek and wonderfully realised.</p><p>Fleet Foxes, <i>Shore </i>and Sufjan Stephens, <i>The Ascension</i> dropped at the same time. They are good but I am still not sure what to make of them, especially the Stephens record which lacks his customary ramshackle guitar in favour of a Prophet 5 synth (I'm not sure I like the change...). But I shall continue listening and allow them to reveal their hidden treasures.</p><p>Deacon Blue, City of Love - this slipped out in the early Spring and I only noticed it in the autumn. It continues the late renaissance of one of my favourite bands of the 1980s. Following in the footsteps of <i>The Hipsters, A New House</i> and <i>Believers</i>, this album has a slightly harder edge to the mellifluous tunes, more prominent guitar and still the lush vocal support of Lorraine McIntosh. Ricky Ross gets better and better as a lyricist and tunesmith.</p><p>Ben Watt, <i>Storm Damage</i> - I didn't think Watt (one half of Everything but the Girl) could better <i>Hendra</i>, his 2014 first solo album for two decades, but he does so with <i>Storm Damage</i>. Watt is a great chronicler of the effects of the memory on the present, wonderfully gifted at conjuring up a sense of place and time - nowhere better than on <i>Summer Ghosts</i>. But every track on this album is a thing of beauty. Indeed, it would have been my album of the year but for...</p><p>Nick Cave, Idiot Prayer - strictly peaking this is not an album of new material. It is rather a solo live album where the Cave songbook is reimagined for solo piano and Nick's rich baritone played in an empty Alexandria Palace. I was supposed to see him and the Bad Seeds at the O2 this year, a gig that has now sadly been cancelled (the silver lining being the promise of a new album in 2021...). <i>Idiot Prayer </i>reveals the depths and strengths of 22 Cave classics from across his back catalogue. I loved 2019's stripped back, minimalist <i>Ghosteen</i> and <i>Idiot prayer </i>captures that vibe across a range of Cave songs but brings a unity of theme and atmosphere to them. It is an unforgettable and immersive one and quarter hours of heartfelt and searching songs that offer insight into a poet's journey through grief in a year when so many of us had to make that journey. It is truly a gift.</p><p>So 2020 will not be missed for all sorts of reasons but it has given us a great deal of great music. I am sure it will have seeded rich crop of great albums yet to be revealed in 2021. Bring it on...</p><p><br /></p>simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-56962933960880766082020-12-13T18:02:00.001+00:002020-12-13T18:14:30.072+00:00Tuning into the voice that matters<p>This began life as an advent sermon on Isaiah 40:1-11 earlier this month. Then an edited version was published at A Broken Church, run by good friend Rich Blake-Lobb. For the sake of completeness, I am publishing the whole sermon here as I listen to the new Deacon Blue album, City of Love (who knew this band would still be soundtracking my life 35 years after I first heard Dignity?!)</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So, do you remember those halcyon days when you entered a cafe or bar that was full of people - go on, stretch your mind back to those dim and distant times; you can do it! Everywhere you looked people were talking and your ears were washed by a sea of disconnected words.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Well that’s how Isaiah 40 opens. We enter a new scene in the book, 150 years after the first part ends and we are greeted by a host of voices. Here we are not so much invited into a conversation as assailed by a cacophony of speakers - 1-2, 3-5, 6a, 6b-7, 8, 9-11 - maybe five or six in all.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And at the heart of this is v6b-7, the voice of a reluctant prophet, someone offered a job who gives God a piece of his mind in a bid to turn it down. But it’s the voice that grows stronger and more urgent as this remarkable poem unfolds over the next 15 chapters. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The voice in v6-7 is the voice of everyone who feels that God has paid them too much attention and he wants him to leave us alone. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Like Job in 7:17-21 </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Like Debbie we met when church planting near us in Peckham back in the 90s: 'I can't believe in him up there ‘cause of what's happened to me down 'ere'’. And she proceeded to tell us how she’d been treated by men, the council, her kids, and life in general…</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Like Jack: no dad, not much mum, a litany of bad choices, reluctantly in our night shelter because it was marginally better than sleeping out on a frosty night, ‘but don’t talk to me about God,’ he snarled, ‘all I’ve had in my life so far is expletive deleted…’</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Like Colin, an ad sales executive on the last paper for which I worked, gay, disabled, HIV+ who gave me a mug as a Christmas present that I still use to remind me there is no cure for Aids. I wished him a happy Christmas, told him what I’d be doing and he said he didn’t do Christmas because nothing good happens in the world and God was not as useful as his crutch. He didn’t live to see another Christmas…</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The prophet puts into words what many feel: there’s no good news, look around you, all people are frail and fragile and God keeps blowing them over, like the scorching wind that blows across the Judean desert in the height of summer (6b-7).</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And too often the source of the lashing wind is the church, God’s would-be mouthpiece, which snipes and snarls about lifestyles and choices without understanding what it's like to walk in the shoes of those it is addressing. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The prophet who opens the collection of words in this amazing book (back in chapter 6) volunteered to take a message of judgement to people who would not pay any attention. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But the prophet of this section doesn’t want that gig.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The voice of v6f is certainly aware of what’s gone before – ‘don't send me with a message like that, a message of the scorching wind that blows people away. Don’t send me with a word of judgement’. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But his voice is only one of many in these verses and the others clamouring for our attention are suggesting that God has something altogether different in mind.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So Isaiah 40 opens with an invitation to listen, to tune in to the voices echoing around us, voices of dislocation and disillusion; to tune into the voice within us, fragile and uncertain; and to find God’s voice in it all.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">There is a searing honesty in this opening section of the poem, a telling it like it really is, telling God how we really feel. Here were people languishing in exile, far from home, mourning the loss of family, of livelihoods, of good times with friends, of fixed points in their lives, </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">people who would say a little later ‘my way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God’ (v27).</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">People like us and our neighbours.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">So, this is a great text for Advent; indeed this is really the only place to start an advent journey.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Because advent is a clearing of the decks, a bringing out into the open everything that upsets and unsettles us about the world, about our lives, about God, a time of being blown on by the scorching wind, breath of God so that we might be able to receive his word of comfort, forgiveness, solace and strength for the journey.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The voice that cries out in v3-4, is picked up in the opening verses of Mark’s Gospel, as John the Baptist blazes a trail for Jesus to arrive with a message of the coming Kingdom and a new world order, a world of peace and justice. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Something is stirring, God is on the move, speaking comfort, sweeping into the lives of the unsettled, the broken, the forgotten.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Advent is the vital preparation for Christmas, for this arrival. It’s not about dusting off the decorations, sorting out our present wish list, still less about queueing outside Primark for the season’s must-have onsie. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It’s about standing stripped by the wind of God ready for God himself to arrive along the highway prepared for him in our hearts and lives (3-5).</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">A voice says, </span>God is coming (3-5, 9). This voice has heard him stirring up the nations, fermenting the rise of Cyrus in neighbouring Persia and the changes in the global political landscape that will at last lead to these exiles going home. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">God is still coming, whatever is happening in the world at large – things we welcome, things we wish were gone so everything can get back to normal – God is coming to break chains and set people free from sin and its all-too visible consequences: debt, poverty, illness, poor education, unemployment, violence and injustice. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">We’ve seen too much of that this week, this month, this year… We need God to come and make everything new. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">And God is comforting (1f, 11) God knows our pain and longs to gather us to him like a mum sweeping her child up in her arms. He knows what the voice in v6 knows - that we are weak and frail, that we’ve had enough, that we’ve used up all our spare energy just getting through lockdown and all it’s brought with it. The last thing we need is God arriving with a pep talk and a call to action. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">We need God to come and wrap us in his arms and say, ‘enough; that’s enough’ (as he says in v1-2). And because this is how God comes to us, it is how we are called to draw alongside our wounded and hurting neighbours, in God's name bringing his comfort and pointing to the light on the horizon.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">And God is calling. He comes to comfort, seeking relationship with us, but we’re deaf and he needs to get up on high mountain and shout it out. Notice how he does it – not through a lecture or a sermon but in a poem, language that burrows deep into the heart of who we are. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">For in advent, God wants us to change way we <b><i>feel </i></b>about him and ourselves; so, there’s no new theology here, no fresh revelation; just a reminder of the old stuff (especially the exodus with its memory of a journey to freedom and new life): he’s reminding us that we are his, that he loves us and he will not leave us to face this alone.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">And so as we walk into the cafe or bar with its clamouring voices, we also hear the sound system playing the wonderful Deacon Blue Christmas song:</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">You’ll know it’s Christmas</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">when the snows are beginning </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">and someone’s singing a song.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">If there’s a star in the sky</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">if the air is filled with the mystery</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">if there’s a babe in the church with a choir</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">you’ll know it’s Christmas…</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">If there is love in this world</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">if there is something worth struggling for</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">If there’s someone you’re holding close</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">you’ll know it’s Christmas</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">Really what Ricky Ross captures in his sly and subtle way is the spirit of advent. Advent is our invitation to get ready to meet him, in the things we think worth struggling for, in the people we hold close. </p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">In advent we get ready to welcome our God not as a conquering king but as a baby in a manger with the echo of choirs of angels, at the centre of an ordinary family’s celebration of new life and hope for a better future.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">Advent is an invitation to tune into the only voice that matters among all the other voices clamouring for our attention. Because that’s the voice we hear in the things we think worth struggling for, things he thinks worth the struggle of coming to be with us</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">And as Ross sings in a different Christmas song,</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">I can’t carry you</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">you’ve gotta make your own way there;</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">this boy belongs to you</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">move a little closer, don’t be scared.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px; min-height: 17px;"><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2.9px;">what better invitation do you need this advent to tune into the only voice that really matters?</p>simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-77698234940820822032020-05-10T14:23:00.000+01:002020-05-10T14:23:44.260+01:00Thoughts about caterpillars and butterflies in a time of plagueThis morning the leader of our zoom gathering had planned to start with Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, familiar words about everything happening in its time, probably appropriate for current circumstances. But earlier in the morning, she had the strong sense that we should read to v17. She was not sure why, but I am really glad she did.<br />
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I love Ecclesiastes, the collector of riddles, the riddler of the faithful (as Doug Ingram suggests). So I am often drawn to its enigmatic text, hoping it will give voice to and shape my muddled thoughts. Well, this morning it didn't disappoint. I don't know why God wanted my church to hear these words but I know why he wanted to bring them to my attention.<br />
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I have been wrestling with the issue of what church and mission might be like as we emerge from lockdown. Will we be the same distracted caterpillars, over-feeding on the same bush while constantly remaining the same, or will we be butterflies, transformed by the grace of God encountered in hard places and shaped for a new adventure with God in the world?<br />
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I hope the latter. Often the conversation about mission is about returning to what we used to be able to do when we could go out and gather for all sorts of activities. I hope those opportunities will return, opportunities to serve others, to show the love of God in tangible ways to those who need reminding if it. But that will be a resumption of caterpillar life.<br />
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Ecclesiastes 3:12-13 showed me something of the possibility in our discourse of becoming the butterflies we are called to be. It's simple advice, a little downbeat if read in certain tones of voice. It's about toil (v9 setting the themes for the short section that follows) but it is also about God's gift. And it was that which hit me with some force this morning.<br />
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What is God's gift? That all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil. It is God's gift that everyone should have enough to eat and drink and find delight in what they do. So why are so many hungry, thirsty and stuck in soul-destroying, unproductive and unrewarding labour? Because we have taken God's gift and kept it for ourselves. A few benefit from the majority's labour and live lives of ease and enjoyment as a result. The many sweat and toil under the harsh sun for precious little reward.<br />
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This is not God's gift; this is our abuse of what he has given us.<br />
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I started the day reading an alarming piece by Naomi Klein on the Intercept website about how the powerful are profiting from the current pandemic and are gearing up to profit more as we come out of it and the world returns to normal. Maybe this is why so many are suggesting that returning to normal is not what we want.<br />
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So, what's this got to do with mission after covid-19 and Ecclesiastes 3? I think it has to do with what our mission is about. We have been called to God - who has lavished the gifts of Ecclesiastes 3 on us; we have been called into a new creation set loose in the resurrection of Jesus; we have been recruited to a revolution whose manifesto is the beatitudes. So if our mission is about anything, it is surely about pointing to a world where everyone enjoys the gift of Ecclesiastes 3:12-13.<br />
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More than that, it is surely about seeking ways to make that world a reality. This means going beyond poverty remediation through foodbank's and night shelters (good, essential, though those they are) to poverty alleviation through adventurous reimagining of how we can use our resources to create the kind of world imagined by Ecclesiastes 3:12-13.<br />
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For the section doesn't end there. The riddler says he looked for justice and righteousness where he expected to find them - namely, I guess, in government and the courts, and possibly even the places of worship - and found only wickedness (the word the bible often uses for the selfish self sufficiency and looking out for me and mine that is all too evident in and around us).<br />
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Our mission needs to be marked by justice and right relationships - both enacted in what we do and agitated for in what we say and how we act towards those who should be distributing the power they so tenaciously cling on to.<br />
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I was glad to go to church this morning to be reminded of this and provoked into new trains of thought. There is so much more to say about this but I throw it out there for people to react to. So, over to you...simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-55795720849751784762020-04-02T19:49:00.002+01:002020-04-02T19:49:42.077+01:00hearing something new in familiar linesI don't know about you, but as I have been working away in splendid isolation, I have been rediscovering gems in my music collection. Of course, half my life is spent in Zoomworld, trying to focus on what's being said but often taking more interest in the wallpaper or curtains behind whoever is speaking.<br />
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But among the CDs (remember them?) that I've been spinning has been my limited Jethro Tull collection, <i>Aqualung</i> and <i>Passion Play</i>. The former was a gift from long time friend, fellow minister and Jethro Tull aficionado, George Pitcher, and is full of musings on the presence of the divine in our daily lives. I might reflect further on that in a subsequent post as I've played it a lot.<br />
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But <i>Passion Play</i>, Tull's flawed musings on mortality and morality (I think...) contains two of my favourite lines in popular music. Over maudlin piano and acoustic guitar, Ian Anderson sings,<br />
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There was a rush along the Fulham Road<br />
there was a hush in the Passion Play<br />
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I've always liked the internal rhyme that emphasises the stopping of everything in the bustle of life. And as I heard these lines a number of times over the past week or so, they have resonated in a new way.<br />
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There was (past tense) a rush along the Fulham Road; there was a hush, pause, a rest, even a full stop, in the passion play... I don't know what traffic on the Fulham Road is like just now but if it's anything like the traffic round here, it's not the jam it used to be.<br />
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The lockdown, the absence of the bustle of traffic and office life, the grinding to a halt of so many parts of the economy, means there is a hush in our passion play, a pause in the clamour, rush and tear of business, productivity and consumption.<br />
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The tune of this refrain - it comes number of times over the forty minutes of the album - in minor chords, has a feeling of loss, lament, even bereavement. And of course, the juddering halt to so much of our passion play has crashed production and put countless livelihoods at risk. Good companies will go the wall - the hush will be permanent - and good workers will be rendered unemployed.<br />
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And we weep for all this; and in particular for all those whose lives are rendered insecure by this current crisis; just as we weep with the bereaved who have lost loved ones before their time.<br />
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But perhaps the hush in the Passion Play also forces us to take stock, to examine what life is, what we get out of bed for in the morning, whether the passion play is worth our investment.<br />
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People talk about getting back to normal by the summer, as if what we are experiencing now will vanish like the morning mist and be consigned to the filing cabinet of bad dreams. The economy will bounce back - though what shape will it be in? How much austerity will be visited on us for the largesse of these months?<br />
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But people also talk of things never being the same again. How can we go back to underfunded health care systems and undervalued, underpaid key workers, not just those in the NHS but those who kept the food supplies going, those who work in shops, clean our streets, clear away our rubbish; all those people we suddenly realise are essential to our lives, if not to the economy.<br />
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And we are coming to the season of the great passion play. This Sunday I would have been preaching at a Palm Sunday service in West Croydon, I would have been reminding the faithful of the parade Jesus led as a counter blast of the arrival of Pilate from his palace by the sea to a sweaty city simmering with uproar and unrest. And the following weekend we will be retelling the story of the passion of Jesus, his cross and suffering, and the resurrection of Christ, the eruption of new creation in the midst of a tired and fractious old world. Our retelling this year will be unfamiliar, even novel, but no less heartfelt than previously.<br />
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Things will never be the same because Christ is risen. And as the rush returns to the Fulham Road and the hush in our Passion Play is over, will our world return to business as usual or will we have seen things in these days that means we pay closer attention to the one who comes to us and says 'behold, I make all things new'? Will our re-emergence into 'normal' life be a new adventure in justice and equality and the re-ordering of things in the interests of what matters?<br />
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simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-16257504082023975042020-03-29T15:34:00.000+01:002020-03-29T15:34:13.835+01:00Modern monetary theory and the God of abundanceThere's been a lot of talk of late about how governments will recoup the enormous sums they are putting into the economy to keep people from penury and companies from tanking. Some talk of the need to raise taxes once the crisis is passed, while the proponents of modern monetary theory suggest that central banks can create all the money required without seeking any of it back.<br />
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Well, you pays your money (sorry!) and takes your choice (as they say). The best explanation of MMT is found at Richard Murphy's Tax Justice Network blog. The other view is well known from elections over the past 40 years that all been fought on public spending and the taxation needed to pay for it.<br />
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I probably lean to the MMT view of things. And in that perhaps God's on our side...!<br />
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I'm reading Walter Brueggemann's lovely provocative little book <i>A Way Other Than Our Own</i> for my lent devotions. I'm a bit behind (as always) but I'm catching up. And yesterday I read his reflection on the feeding of the five thousand, how Jesus turned the wilderness, the place of scarcity and lack, into the place of lavish, almost unending provision; how Jesus turned 5 loaves and 2 fish into a feast for five thousand men and an untold number of women and children; and how the disciples, who started with nothing, ended up with a basket of leftovers each.<br />
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It's a wonderful story of miraculous provision, a sign of Jesus' identity as the one who feeds his people in the wilderness as God had done with the manna.<br />
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But it is also a wonderful lesson in divine economics. As Bruggemann puts it, in a world that tells the story of scarcity, and has economic theories created to meet the problem of scarcity (theories that had seeped into the hearts of disciples who helplessly ask, where can we buy enough food for this crowd; we do not have the resources), Jesus comes and provides and so questions our assumptions about the world in which we live,<br />
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'The story we tell about scarcity is a fantasy. It is not a true story. It is a story invented by those who have too much to justify getting more. It is a story accepted by those who have nothing in order to explain why they have nothing. The story is not true, because the world belongs to God and God is the creator of the abundant life. All of us are invited to be children and practitioners of this other story. We act it out in ways that disrupt our society, even as Jesus continues to disrupt our world of scarcity with his abundance.' (p51)<br />
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Christians have always said there is enough to go round - enough food to feed the hungry, water for the thirsty, bricks to build shelters fr the homeless. The problem is not scarcity but inequitable distribution. Jesus shows that he creates and controls the abundance of creation and ensures everyone gets what they need.<br />
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And he still says to us, his nervous followers, wondering what's coming next, 'you give them something to eat'<br />
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What would happen if we said 'yes'?simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-53532504735247224462019-02-07T12:44:00.002+00:002019-02-07T12:44:28.341+00:00The congregation as good news?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">So, here I am contemplating a Devon rain-scape, the low sky a single shade of grey, drizzle making the pavements shimmer, and I’m thinking about the church. There are probably a host of reasons for this - not least my role in helping to form minsters at a Baptist college - but chief among them are two recent experiences still reverberating in my mind. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The first is church on Sunday where in the context of a wonderfully informal cafe setting, we sang a set of bewildering Bethel songs that seemed connected to nothing, not the life experience of the congregation, not the content of the Christian message, not the culture within which this church existed. These people were grieving because a young man associated with them had died on the Friday evening before in circumstances that are far from clear. And having sung the songs, a group left the building to go and pray in the areas the town’s young people hang out and enter whatever conversations might transpire. As people left - including me - it struck me that <i>this </i>is what church is really all about. After we’d gone, the remaining congregants talked and prayed and drank coffee, and shared their pain and bewilderment, again what church is for. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The second was a half-day conference I had attended a week earlier at King’s College on a new book called <i>The Desecularisation of the City</i>, a collection of essays looking at church growth, the emergence of new churches and the persistence of old ones, across London. The essays in the book tell a single story which could be read entirely optimistically. The persistence of church attendance, the growth in some congregations, the fact that there are twice as many churches in the capital now than in 1979, all suggest that the secularisation thesis, so popular among sociologists from the 1960s onwards - and still staunchly defended by such luminaries as Steve Bruce of Aberdeen - does not tell the whole story. Indeed, maybe the essays in this collection are evidence of desecularisation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The critical friends who took up the second half of the afternoon did not think so. Secularisation is not just about the numbers attending worship services or the numbers ticking ‘Christian’ in survey boxes. It is also about the enduring influence of religion in cultural and public life. And it is in relation to this that the critical friends were unsure that desecularisation is taking place at all.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">One, Daniel Dehanas, is a lecturer in politics and religion at King’s. He has studied the faith journeys of young people in both church and mosque across the capital. He told the story of a significant ministry in south London - significant in the sense that it made a lot of noise about itself - that drew large numbers to the estate on which it was based. Large numbers of young people were affected by the ministry. But the neighbourhood in which the ministry was located seemed entirely untouched by it. For all the numbers being converted or otherwise influenced by the ministry, there seemed little impact on the surrounding estates. Indeed, he seemed to suggest, for all the good news stories contained in <i>The Desecularisation of the City</i>, there seemed precious little evidence that all these new and growing churches were having the kind of cultural or political impact you would expect if genuine desecularisation were taking place.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The other critical friend, historian Michael Ledger-Lomas, suggested that the book told him that SE15 has the largest concentration of African Christianity outside of Africa, but who knew? He and I both live within that London postal district and I agree with him that the growth of these churches is important and tells an interesting story but often the only time they have an impact on their neighbours is when a planning application goes in for a building’s change of use or congestion around people’s homes leads to mutterings.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">He suggested that few of the chapters were about identity among the churches featured, what does it feel like to be part of these congregations? He and Dehanas agree that the faith espoused and promoted is very personal, about me and Jesus. But Ledger-Lomas wanted to know how the adherents of these congregations felt about their neighbourhoods. It led to his astute observation that many of these stories are about how attending these churches is often a coping mechanism for migrants of all kinds in a slightly hostile and often difficult world.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">There’s so much here that provokes thought. But two issues come to the fore for me. One is about the implied relationship between a congregation and its neighbourhood. Who knows churches, Christians are in their midst? How do they know it? The other is the idea of the congregation as coping mechanism for those who attend, which has a bearing on the palette of music on offer in our churches.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The friendly critics of the book seem to suggest that desecularisation will only be seen to be happening if there is a shift in the culture, the political atmosphere, if the Christian faith returns to a place of central influence over social mores and morality. Perhaps this is what the classical sociological theory would take as evidence of its error. But I wonder if this is a measure we are interested in, a measure of the Kingdom worming its way round our neighbourhoods. When I went out to pray in the town I’m visiting at the moment, I did not expect anyone to notice. I did it in a way that would not attract the attention of anyone but God. And what would the effect of such praying be? Well, when combined with the ongoing presence of members of this congregation with the town’s young people, offering support and encouragement, accompanying them through the pitfalls of adolescence, working with families and schools to help them find themselves in a welter of competing voices, the effect could be profound, life-changing, life-stabilising, a little glimmer of God’s Kingdom. But evidence of deseculariation? I’m not so sure.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Sometimes I think the Kingdom is most present when we hardly notice it. What we notice is human community working well, the vulnerable supported, the voiceless listened to and helped to speak, and the strong learning life lessons from such as these. We see it when an alternative agenda to that espoused and expounded by the world’s elite is evidenced. But I’m not convinced that this would register even the faintest blip on the sociologists’ radar and that what does - mere assemblage of numbers, new locations, recent arrivals forming groups of their own - is not actually that important in Kingdom terms.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Which brings me to the congregation as coping mechanism. As I first heard Ledger-Lomas articulate this, I thought, ‘yeah, that’s right; and it’s not what church is for!’ ‘Coping’ is not a missional term; it is not part of the great commission of the church to go and help people cope. And it is ‘coping’ that often encourages a musical palette that is all about me and what God has done for me, and how he has helped/healed/supported/lifted/enabled (delete as appropriate) me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">But on slightly more mature reflection, I came to see that, of course, the church is a coping mechanism. It is the community of the congregation into which God has set us that does enable us to cope with the vicissitudes of living in a difficult, sometimes hostile world, where putting food on the table and paying the rent and maintaining family relationships is hard. If the congregation is not a coping mechanism, then what on earth is it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">In a book I wrote a while back called <i>Building a Better Body</i>, I argued that church was not about worship, not about singing and all that stuff. And I still believe that. Much of what we sing in church is execrable and people much cleverer and wittier than I have pointed this out (see Pete Ward and Nick Page). It matters what we sing in church, though that is not the point of our gathering, because music touches emotional recesses that conversation often doesn’t. So we need to sing our pain and anger as much as our joy and hope; indeed if worship song writers actually read the Psalms they claim to be emulating, their repertoire of topics would be a good deal bleaker and more earthbound than it currently is.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Maybe music helps us to cope, reminds us of who God is and what he has done for us; and that happens as we listen to performed songs as much as as in community singing. But congregations as coping mechanisms must be much more than this. My congregation must be the place I go to with my pain and bewilderment, the bruises from standing up to the powers that be, from standing with the vulnerable, from giving voice to the mute, for sharing my goods with the destitute. My congregation needs to be the place that helps me to cope with the call of God on my life to be like Jesus which is just too hard to manage on my own. And my congregation must help me to cope with the joys of seeing an exile settled, a court case won (as I heard when writing this), a home found for a homeless family, a teenager shown that life is navigable. In telling these and other stories in and to my congregation, it affirms that what I am doing is what Jesus smiles on and that affirmation tells me that I can do the same in the coming week, that this will be my spiritual and acceptable worship (Rom 12:1).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">And, of course, the church I attended on Sunday, coming to terms with the tragic death of a young person, needed to be a coping mechanism for all the people who knew him, all those who had stood with him and his mates in the dark, played games, accompanied him through the turmoil of growing up and now had to cope with his premature death. Of course, praying out on the streets or sitting together and holding their grief before God was what congregations do in these times. The church is undoubtedly a coping mechanism.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">I’m not sure such congregations are signs of desecularisation - though I’m really not sure what would be - but I am sure that they are little signs of the Kingdom, tiny evidences that there are groups of people who get what Jesus is about, pockets of resistance to the way of the world, shelters for those who cannot navigate the choppy waters alone, places that rejoice when they see the light of God’s reign break on the horizon.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">And it’s still murky here, a slate grey sky darkening as evening draws closer, and my friends are out accompanying young people, and I sense Jesus smiling. </span></span></div>
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simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-89961767455384334372019-01-13T16:18:00.001+00:002019-01-13T16:18:08.466+00:00Words to sustain a journeyI came across these words the other day and they have burrowed their way into me.<br />
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'I lost my way. I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller's heart for his turning.'<br />
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They are by Leonard Cohen from a collection of his published in the Everyman's Library of Pocket Poets (Alfred Knopf 1993).<br />
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Cohen has been a constant companion on my journey since his first album became the second album I acquired when I was still at school (I still have it, though I generally play its songs on an iPod these days).<br />
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He is the poet of the journey, the surveyor of the human heart, and has frequently been able to put into words what I am feeling long before I can. I especially like the phrase in this piece, 'the heart is a rage of directions' that seems to capture the experience of being pulled in a range of directions about which we feel emotionally engaged; it nails the sense of wanting to focus on everything at once but feeling only impotent and angry at our ability to do so.<br />
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Cohen has also always been a poet of faith. His faith is never anything but vague and suggestive, a voice suggesting that God might be interested in us, but I have always found that he has helped me to connect with that God when some more traditional or contemporary faith songs have not.<br />
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I'm not sure any of today's hymn writers have come close to penning a line as suggestive of who and where God is as 'Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller's heart for his turning.'<br />
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Leonard is a reminder that we are not alone on the journey; he points us to the one who is our constant companion even when we are blissfully unaware of his presence with us, within us. <br />
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<br />simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-45369248575957167782019-01-09T15:01:00.002+00:002019-01-09T15:01:31.962+00:00Some useful informationWhile the hysteria over the tiny numbers of people crossing the channel in small boats to claim asylum here continues, I thought I'd post a couple of really helpful sources of information.<br />
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One of the things that is happening in our country at the moment is that debate has been replaced by the strident assertion of positions, often based on little more than hearsay and wishful thinking. Some people take exception to what's happening, say it's wrong, say there's no solution other than extreme action and base it all on rumour and half truth.<br />
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We all need to be well-informed about the issues we express a view on. And when we express a view we need to be polite, civil, kind (in the sense that we allow others to express their views); we do not repay rudeness in kind, we seek to defuse anger by being calm and considerate. It is essential to bear in mind that people's opinions about stuff going on around them is often driven by anxiety and fear - fear of change, fear of the stranger, fear that lives already hard-pressed by forces they don't quite get might get worse and they are looking for someone to carry the can for that.<br />
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So here's a couple of good sources of information on the current migration situation as it affects our shores.<br />
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The first is the refugee council which has an excellent website, worth consulting regularly as it is full of useful, fact-based information. In particular, <a href="https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/latest/blogs/5459_channel_crossings_-_time_to_set_the_record_straight" target="_blank">this recent posting</a> is worth checking out and reflecting on.<br />
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And Refugee Rights Europe have produced some excellent research over the past couple of years, all of which can be found at their website (<a href="http://refugeerights.org.uk/" target="_blank">here</a>). Today they posted on Facebook their response to the Government's recently announced new accommodation and support contracts for those in the UK asylum system (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/RefugeeRightsEurope/?__tn__=kC-R&eid=ARCUJSo33pzjH1A234sqEfjqsRSdT67gcdPFONbEJBHsbqM1a5tQQ0AZTzSZOg0i300XIL1eTvYdYHwA&hc_ref=ARRge4OzrdQpRpWq73UbilmeEv87oFnKGeIy9FtP6Hvh_coGhZVdg_kVPquWnCuLCy4&fref=nf&__xts__[0]=68.ARC45e0BAVgwEEG4gAnWXJCNFiQv7VGxYa4p9DeaZUaeb0qca34ecBykq8nx4PJf1YE26a9Ww7eW5a20h5geDSvnLijPOT2Q_GRl8HZsMrR1atwGobnkAAMXWtlI2D7lbHhn_RQc8E8uMddgaiTJ1GBhNOYy6W13X-at8rzFsEegKtBfGz8Sq2bPYk4YbTljpq9MxVLv8QK9-O3VeUd7ycvuErMhM7LRZtoa_ykSh53hYGCFh-DF7BrFMzdI-vBBZP9uBi8oEYA_ux5emYtwdJkcXPd1mowiyAYESmNG8kYz6KECLLP_7BogIzuo5Enl59FEdetswP8MQPOidsmaqXcZzi3E" target="_blank">you can find it here</a>; you need to scroll down to the Asylum: Written Statement link).<br />
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Being informed is key to having a voice in these crucial conversations happening all around us. We can help to shape and gently correct perceptions and opinions, help more people to find ways of reaching out in welcome to those forced to flee in search of refuge.simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-13729171118534421352019-01-07T19:39:00.001+00:002019-01-07T19:39:56.778+00:00So, what is happening in Calais?<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is far too long since I blogged here. But my new year resolution is that I will blog as I did before. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At Jim Gordon's suggestion we should all be reading Luke to brace ourselves for the days we are living through. So I had taken up Jim's challenge. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I also want to reflect on some issues that are arising as I reflect on ministry formation. Recently (and not for the first time), I have been challenged by the work of David Graeber, this time his wonderful <i>Bullshit Jobs: A Theory</i>. I have been particularly drawn to reflect on how we understand vocation in the light of the growing phenomenon of bullshit jobs. So, watch this space.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But first, I am constantly asked what is happening in Calais these days, something that has taken on more urgency in the light of the attempts by a few to cross the channel in rubber boats. So here's a version of a report I wrote late last year for some of those who have supported our work. It's quite long (sorry)!</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The safe house run by the Association Maria Skobtsova is now in its third year. Originally opened in February 2016 as a place to aid the work being done by Christian volunteers in the jungle, the house is now a refuge for some 25 mainly Eritrean boys and young men who would otherwise be living on the streets of the city. The situation in Calais continues to be tense and difficult for those would-be refugees trying to reach the UK and a new life, free from war and persecution. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The house is run by brother Johannes, a Belgian monk, and a small team of volunteers and overseen by a management group that I have the </span></span>privilege<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> to be part of. As well as providing accommodation to a mobile community, it also provides hot food, showers and laundry services for around 50 people a week. Most of those making their home in the house are Christians from Eritrea, so the house a rhythm of daily prayer that reflects their orthodox tradition, with evening prayers in Tigrinya and Amharic led by the boys themselves. Though they have had traumatic journeys from their home countries, the residents of the house enjoy getting involved in the cooking and cleaning that needs to be done to ensure the community functions well.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These daily routines are supplemented by a fortnightly visit from a UK charity, Art Refuge, that uses creative arts to help them tell their stories and process their feelings. The volunteers also try to help the boys to consider where their future lies. Some have a claim to come to the UK because they already have family here (and they are put in touch with Safe Passage). Others might be better to try and claim asylum in France (though that is difficult from the Pas de Calais).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The needs of the house are pretty simple. We need money for food, paying utilities and laundry costs (we have two industrial washing machines and two tumble dryers but could do with one more of each), clothes and bedding, and a budget for educational and entertainment activities.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In early September 2018 we had to close the house because there was an infestation of bedbugs. We were advised that the only way to deal with this was to destroy all the existing bedding, strip the wallpaper from the walls and take up carpets and thoroughly disinfect all the rooms affected. This is a costly inconvenience but we hope the work will be completed by the end of the month. Sadly, the first cycle of eradication was not wholly successful and so the house is having to undergo three further cycles throughout November and December. This means that the house will be closed for four days at a time while professional pest-controllers do what they have to do. This is hugely disruptive to the smooth running of the house but is unavoidable if we are to have long-term viability as a place of safety. This has now been completed and we hope that the bugs are history!</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">One of the volunteers in the house, a retired French nun, recently described life in the house like this, ‘We always live in vigilance - who will be sick, injured, visited by the police, encounter trouble today? This means whenever we are at peace, we are living with tension.’ She adds that everyone in the house is always on the point of leaving. People might leave the community today. The fact of leaving is a constant everyone in the house lives with. Furthermore, everyone who arrives in the community has had a difficult journey and so comes with wounds - both physical and much more psychological’. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But she continues that ‘the community is a dynamic place, full of life, hope and energy, full of young people keen to make something of their lives.’ And these young people are the ones who make the community what it is. The house is full of difference - different countries, and continents, different life experiences, different religious understanding and denominations. And yet together these young people, resourced by the association, are able to make a place of safety for all who come. It’s a place of laughter and learning, creativity and music.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">A former resident now in London, says of the house, 'Your home is not where you come from but where you feel safe; I feel safe here.’ A volunteer tells the story of what she calls a present from Daniel, one of the young residents, to the house. One day he wrote Mt 11:28 in Tigrinya, applying those words to the house. ‘I think this was very important for Daniel,’ she says, ‘because he wrote it out again and put it back up when we had a periodic clean up of the walls!’ It is a lovely image to think of the house as the outworking of this saying of Jesus, suggestive of how scripture is fulfilled through the people who hear it, and act on it, often when they are not consciously trying! To see the house as the embodiment of Jesus says something deeply profound about what has been created in this ordinary Calais semi.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">This lovely, fragile, creative community needs the continued support and prayers of people across Europe. So we are grateful for all the help that you have given us over the past months and hope that it will continue into the future.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">What’s happening in Calais?</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The situation across Calais continues to be difficult for those seeking refuge. At the last count (December 2018) there were 500-600 sleeping rough across the city. This is a reduction on the numbers in the summer but they do fluctuate. These people are helped with hot meals by the Refugee Community Kitchen and L’Auberge des Migrants who run the warehouse which supplies clothes and sleeping bags and some tents to those in need. The French authorities are struggling to know how to respond to this ongoing situation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The British Government has recently decided to change the status to those children it accepted from the Jungle which gives them a more secure future. But it is still dragging its feet helping children and young people trapped in France who have family in the UK.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">What’s happening in Dunkirk?</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In October Simon, Juliet and Nathan from Peaceful Borders went to Dunkirk to get a clearer picture of what is happening in that port town. Since the camp in the railway yard at Grande Synthe was burned down over a year ago, there have been families in and around Dunkirk but over recent months those families have begun to live in parkland around a lake. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we visited it was estimated that there are around 1500 people living in tents and makeshift tarpaulin shelters in the wooded areas of this parkland. The population is still mainly Kurdish (many from Iran), but there are people from Iraq, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On the afternoon of our visit Care for Calais was there offering residents the chance to charge their phones and Medicine du Mode were running a makeshift clinic. Charlie, a partner from a small grassroots support group, a seasoned volunteer having worked in the region for the last three years, took us round the camp. His assessment is that the numbers are growing quite quickly, the needs are many and various, and there are a lot of children, most of them in families, but some unaccompanied.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we were walking around the camp with an Iranian guide, I was struck by seeing a veiled mother, about five foot four, pushing a wheel chair in which was sitting a boy, probably her son, aged about 12. He was dressed in a shabby brown track suit and was clearly severely affected by cerebral palsy. They had emerged from a wooded area where their tent was one of a handful pitched around a fire and kitchen area. I was struck by all the reasons why this family should not be living in the mud of Dunkirk with winter approaching. Charlie, however, thinks there is little chance of this family receiving the kind of help they need.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sadly about two weeks after our visit, the French authorities moved in to clear the camp and bus the residents to a variety of centres across France. It is not the first time they have done this, so the likelihood is that after a while, people will drift back and the camp will reform somewhere in the area, though not necessarily in the same place. This is not a viable future for these people and we would urge the authorities to work with the associations and volunteers to come up with a way of meeting the daily needs of the migrants while their longer-term future is being assessed. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the run-up to Christmas there was a rise in the number of people from the area trying to reach the U.K. in small boats, a perilous undertaking for even the most experienced of sailors. This seems to be linked with continued French attempts to remove the presence of migrants from the camps in and around Dunkirk. Displaced people have been regularly tear-gassed, their possessions taken, and their shelters destroyed. They are forced to move with no settled place provided for them. As people say, when the land is a shark, the sea seems a safe place. </span></span></div>
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simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-61872677892725164282017-07-07T18:38:00.000+01:002017-07-07T18:38:04.344+01:00Witness and story telling<span style="font-family: inherit;">I continue to travel to Calais to support those exiled to the city in whatever way I can. I was there on Wednesday. Here's a brief reflection on the day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, the UK border force reckon there’s a thousand sleeping rough in Calais and its environs. The officer checking my passport, enquiring where I’d spent the day, told me matter of factly, ’we’ve just picked up eight hidden among the fruit and veg in a van; it happened only an hour or so ago.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m guessing it was discovered here at the terminal somewhere. I’m also guessing he was telling me to reinforce the message that the borders are secure. Of course, earlier in the day, I was told that yet another of the young people we’ve had contact with over the past few months is safely across and with friends in London, the fifth or sixth this month. So the borders are at best permeable. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It might also explain why French border control is in the hands of a platoon of paratroopers, heavily armed young men fanned out across the road ahead of the booths. One flagged me down and asked me to open my boot. It was polite and good natured, the young grunt smiling as he peered at my all-but empty boot. The bulk of the soldiers I can see - about eight in all - are black or middle eastern. One is checking his mobile phone!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Things have returned to normal after a frantic and fractious weekend. There are about six in the house, a further five came for showers and fresh clothes this afternoon. The numbers at distribution were higher than for a while - maybe pushing 300. A snaking line of desperate looking people, mainly men but more women than I’ve seen recently, waited patiently in the heat for a polystyrene tray of hot food. A smaller number were at the back of the water truck, washing. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We talked to an Eritrean worker with Secours, about what happened on Saturday night. There was trouble in the food line, an Amharic speaker pushed in front of Tigrinya speaker. A fight broke out. But he thinks there are probably deeper roots. The Eritreans have secured the Belgian parking and the Ethiopians want it. But all seems peaceful for now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, once the fighting broke out the CRS kettled everyone into the site - where the daily distributions take place in what’s called the ‘new jungle’, though it isn’t - preventing anyone who wanted to from leaving and ensuring that tempers got more heated than would otherwise have been the case. The CRS did not use the kettle as a means of sending in snatch squads to remove the trouble-makers, ringleaders, even the people fighting (which is probably what the Brits would have done in similar circumstances). My witnesses think this might have made things worse. It seems to have led to the casualty rate being higher than it would have been. There’s no way of telling, of course.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no obvious mechanism for peace-making. It was the Afghans who stepped in, urging peace on Saturday night. There is no single place where people gather and live. People emerge from the woods when the food arrives and melt away just as quickly afterwards. Explosions of frustration and desperation happen at odd times in unexpected places. It is not surprising as most of the exiles are subjected to daily harassment, the confiscation of what little they possess (especially sleeping bags), the pepper spraying and beating of the slow to move.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are exploring what kind of Orthodox focused activity we might be able to broker so people can be brought together by the thing they have in common - their faith and culture - and can then talk through their differences. We need to create spaces for hospitable story telling. We had one in the jungle - St Michael’s church - which everyone from the region respected and in which they found common ground.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a church available in a good location which would probably cost as much as a house to make into a useable space. But it would provide three or four times the floor area with a dedicated space that could be turned into an orthodox worship zone and plenty of space of volunteers to live and exiles to crash for a few nights. So can we raise €300,000?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A young Eritrean man was at the distribution, limping with a substantial bandage round his head protecting a deep and large wound. We spoke with him as best we could as he waited for a friend to get his food, while he nestled in the shade at the front of the van. His hospital notes speak of him being resuscitated. So he must have quite severely wounded and is probably still concussed; and yet the hospital released him after 36 hours with a letter but no pain medication. He still seems groggy. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, we took him to the house, found him fresh clothes and shoes and contacted St Omer about him. This is the place that takes under-18s, especially those who might be up for claiming asylum in France. He seems to be and the Secours Tigrinya speaker confirms this. But there turns out to be a discrepancy over his age. The hospital suggests he’s over 18, while his other documents suggest he’s 17. For this reason the St Omer workers who turn up in their mini-bus will not take him and so he will have to stay at the house with its steep stairs. Not ideal given his mobility issues!</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is just a snapshot of the stories I witnessed in a single day where thousands of stories unfolded. But it is as honest a reflection of the continuing precarious nature of life for those on Calais’ streets as I can write. As ever, one leaves feeling a mixture of impotent rage at the governments whose inaction keeps these people in limbo and awe at the tireless volunteers who day in day out work to feed and clothe, befriend and support as many as they can.</span></span></div>
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simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-86518016771857130762017-06-02T16:44:00.000+01:002017-06-02T16:44:01.986+01:00A simple story of a food queue<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A heavily armed CRS officer brought his baton down on my hand as he prevented me from carrying a box of food to a group of refugees, unnecessary aggression reinforcing a total prohibition on helping people in desperate need. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is calais in 2017 where a group of a hundred or so refugees had gathered on the wasteland near what is being called the new jungle (though see my previous post) in expectation of getting food and water. The van from the warehouse had duly tuned up, the smell of hot food wafting from the tailgate. We had arrived to rendezvous with some young Eritreans in need of a shower and a change of clothes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But between us and our friends was a row of CRS vans and heavily armed officers toting pepper spray, CS gas, rubber bullets and other weaponry. There were probably more paramilitary police than volunteers and they were there to ensure that no one got fed today.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An awkward stand-off ensued. As we waited municipal police turned up on motor cycles and proceeded to issue fixed penalty notices on the vans from the warehouse. They were fined €130 for various violations. We could not quite work out what rules had been infringed. Recently one van was fined for being a few kilos over-weight. These seemed to be 'illegally' parked, though how you can do that in an industrial estate, where vehicles are left at rakish angles to the kerb all over the place, beats me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally Vincent decides that this has gone on long enough and with a few of us in tow, he grabs baskets containing takeaway boxes filled with food and leads us towards the line of CRS officers. We intend to feed some people. It's why we'd come. As soon as we reached the line we are stopped, pushed back. A few volunteers take individual meal packs and walk towards the refugees. They too are stopped. One has the lunch box knocked out of her hand and its contents land on an officer. She is led away by a group of police for 'assaulting' one of their own but quickly released. Another volunteer has his mobile phone taken off him by a burly policeman who doesn't like being filmed. Amid howls of indignation from onlookers and some remonstrating from his colleagues he tosses it over his head in the direction of a gaggle of volunteers, one of whom catches it and returns it to its owner. This display of casual brutality is daily life for those we've come to feed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is clear that the CRS line is not going to break; indeed it is being reinforced as all this is going on. More vans are arriving and joining the barrier, more heavily armed officers are disgorged and join the thickening blue line. Behind them we notice a van full of border force officers arrives. They start rounding up the refugees, pepper spraying the rocks they are seated on, bundling some into their van and chasing others off. About a dozen are taken away.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is clear that we can do no more. The few refugees left soon melt away into the woods, making themselves scarce. Hurried phone calls and gesturing from one of the volunteers indicates they will try to meet them and at least give them water on this hot afternoon.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We head for our vehicles that are the other side of the police line. Vincent asks if we can go through to be told firmly 'no'. He asks the young officer why, expecting to be told something about orders or operational safety. But the young man fixes his gaze and tells him 'because it annoys you.' Vincent marvels at his honesty as we walk around the block chuckling in the early summer sunshine to approach our cars from the other end. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It seems that the Prefect of Calais has decided that, though the court in Lille declared it illegal to prevent the feeding of refugees, he can determine how many times a day they will eat. And he has decided that once a day is sufficient. So distribution, under the watchful gaze of the police, will be allowed between six and eight this evening. We wonder if the prefect is on this one meal a day diet. By the look of a good number of his officers, they are not.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For the refugees who have fled war or the threat of persecution in their own countries, travelled often dangerous routes for many months, this is yet one more indignity visited on them by the home of human rights. It makes you proud to be European! </span></span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We head home to guiltily partake of lunch and post our experiences on Facebook and twitter.</span></span></div>
simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-38668675372600605472017-05-11T22:51:00.000+01:002017-05-11T22:51:23.245+01:00A new jungle?<span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, it has been a while, but here is a reflection on today's visit to Calais. I caught up with friends in the warehouse, met new people in the Catholic worker house and went shopping with my favourite monk (everyone should have a favourite monk!) and I went to see where food distribution takes place on a daily basis...</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On a piece of waste ground at the back of Calais’ Zone Industrielle des Dunes, a snaking line of a hundred or so people queues for food. A similar number sit in groups eating, talking, some catching up on sleep. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is not the new jungle but it is a rumour of it. Desperate people tell stories of being pepper sprayed last night by the police, of running for most of the hours of darkness to avoid the CRS vans. They gather here seeking a break from the monotony of dodging the authorities, a chance to catch their breath, tell stories. But there are no shelters here - bar one (of which more in a moment) - and no evidence of any emerging. This is just a place for an hour or so's respite before the trudging continues. So it is no new jungle.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Away from the groups eating, other groups huddle round jerry cans of water 'showering' as best they can, squatting with shampooed hair and cupping water over their heads. There has been an outbreak of scabies, an infection caused by lack of sanitation and living in the same clothes for days on end. With showers harder to come by because the authorities harass those groups that provide them, laundry services all but non-existent and new clothes in shorter supply than a year ago, this low-level plague will only get worse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A CRS van cruises by every fifteen minutes or so but doesn't stop. So we sit and chat with a mixed group of Eritreans and Afghans, talking as best we can about the previous night and how long they have been in Calais, how often they have tried to get to the UK, and where they are going to try to sleep today or tonight before they try again. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's an Afghan family living in a tumble-down wooden caravan (the aforementioned single shelter). A mum and dad and three children, grateful that Secours Catholique will take them off for showers. As months give way to years, they wait for a government that will pay them the attention they are looking for. Meanwhile the children play and run and hug Mariam and eat oranges, juice streaking dirty faces and hands. Their hope breaks your heart, their plight raises a fierce anger in your gut, the desire to break down the fences keeping them from the safety and security we all take for granted.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our wall - £2m-ish of UK tax payers money lining the A16 to the ferry port - speaks of our attitude to these people: a problem to be kept at arms length by concrete and razor wire, increased armed patrols, pepper spray and harassment. And this group of a couple of hundred, subdued, wary but smiling when we squat with clutches of half a dozen or so, welcoming us into their conversation, wanting to tell us as much of their story as they have language for, wanting to know who we are and where we're from, interested in making connection with the world beyond the constant search for shelter in the storm of indifference.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But this is not the new jungle. That had been a place of relative safety, somewhere, at least temporarily, to call home, a shack, a bed, a kitchen, and the rudiments of community. That was swept away in a wave of cleansing zeal by a prefecture which assumed that if they washed these people from the land, they would disappear. But they are here, large as life, still determined, still amazingly good natured, still steely in their determination to cross over to the promised land. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And where are we? Most of us are home, tucking our children into bed, entertaining friends for a meal, enjoying a night out, settling in front of the TV, safe, secure and doing all the things those in the snaking line would rather being doing given half a chance.</span></span></div>
simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-84640668342400117932017-01-07T15:36:00.000+00:002017-01-07T15:36:26.068+00:00The ever-present John BergerI was saddened to hear that John Berger had died earlier this week. He was one of those voices that has been with me through my whole adult life. I first encountered him as a sixth former watching his BBC film <i>Ways of Seeing</i>. I was a proud owner of the wonderful Penguin book that accompanied the series. And he has surfaced from time to time ever since.<br />
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He was a man who knew the value of words and could capture a world in a phrase.<br />
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There have been lots of reflections on his life in the past week. What struck me was how much his concerns resonated with mine in relation to Calais. He spoke a lot about hospitality and migration and a couple of phrases in particular have set me thinking about how I might capture some of my thoughts on the past year in writing that I am just getting down to.<br />
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The first was reported in today's Guardian. The writer Ali Smith was reflecting on a British Library event that Berger spoke at in 2015. He was asked what he thought about the huge movement of people across the world. It was an obvious question because in the seventies he had a written a classic study on migration, <i>A Seventh Man</i>. Smith reports that he paused for what seemed like an age and then responded, 'I have been thinking about the storyteller's responsibility to be hospitable.'<br />
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What a great phrase. I have been thinking how to tell my story in relation to the Jungle, and that is a story of hospitality that I have been on the receiving end of. That's something that Berger reflected on with New Statesman writer, Philip Maughan in 2015. He'd been in Istanbul and was invited to tea in a draughty cabin on the edge of the city. There a migrant scraped an existence in the hope of a better life. As Berger waited for tea to arrive he noticed on a shelf in the cabin the Turkish edition of one of his books! Maughan observes 'this is precisely what Berger meant by fraternity: even in great solitude, against the dehumanising reality of servitude to capital or war, connections can be formed. Our differences diminish.'<br />
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That's precisely what I felt in the jungle. And I, therefore, feel a responsibility to tell the story of my experience hospitably, paying careful attention to my hosts' stories.<br />
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This is something that Olivia Laing also reflects on in the same piece in today's Guardian. She says, '<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Capitalism, he wrote in <i>Ways of Seeing</i>, “survives by forcing the majority to define their own interests as narrowly as possible”. It was narrowness he set himself against, the toxic impulse to wall in or wall off. Be kin to the strange, be open to difference, cross-pollinate freely. He put his faith in the people, the whole host of us. </span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">Host: there’s another curious word, lurking at the root of both hospitality and hospital. It means both the person who offers hospitality, and the group, the flock, the horde. It has two origins: the Latin for stranger or enemy, and also for guest. It was Berger’s gift, I think, to see that this kind of perception or judgment is always a choice, and to make a case for kindness: for being humane, whatever the cost.'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The second phrase that resonated with me was at </span></span>the end<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> of Maughan's piece in the New Statesman. Reflecting on Berger's novel <i>To the Wedding</i>, he noted a line he liked in his diary, something that seemed to suggest what storytelling was for. 'What shall we do before eternity?' it asks; 'take our time.'</span></span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">Those final three words have been burrowing away in my mind since I read them. Clearly we take the time we are offered. The </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">implication<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> is that time is to be seized, wrung of all the possibilities it holds for us; not a moment is to be wasted because it comes in an all-too finite supply. But clearly also, we take our time; hospitality requires that we linger, relax into the company of another. I'm reminded how long it took to make chai in the camp, a length of time that was filled with storytelling and silences, laughter and tears, things that </span>could<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> not have found a place in our shared lives if we had not taken the time to be together.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Berger's death has sent me back to his writings with a new relish and a fresh set of questions and expectations. We have lost a voice without equal and yet as Ali Smith noted, it's hard to think of his voice in the past tense because everything about him was so present. Like all great writing, his is continually present tense. For that I am grateful.</span></span><br />
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simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-84549748087812013312016-12-01T13:44:00.002+00:002016-12-01T13:45:26.519+00:00A month on, what am I thinking..?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm sitting in a meeting understanding very little, seeing mainly smiling faces which laugh in the way that people do to an in-joke. I wonder if I'm feeling a little of the disorientation that a refuge feels when people are talking about them rather than to them, when they are trying to navigate their way through an alien landscape. Most are talking about the issue from their viewpoint and in the interests of the organisation they represent. And now my translator has abandoned me to make a phone call!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's strange a month on from the demolitions - this week the twenty-eight day cooling off time is up for the residents shipped to CAOs. I'm trying to gather my thoughts. I have wanted to sit and write to get some reflections down but I wonder if everything is still quite raw. I feel as though my mind is a dam behind which a lake of emotions is rising. Once the dam is breached I have no idea what will come out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When people ask me about the jungle - often expecting me to say that there's nothing to do now, so I'm not going to Calais anymore - I can feel a river of information like a pent-up flood that will be released as soon as I begin speaking. I find myself having to check my sentences so that I give space for others in the conversation to tell me and the rest what they've been doing. But once I start, it's hard to stop.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I want to talk about the government and how woeful its response has been; I want to talk about the people I don't see anymore because they're scattered across France (and the pain I feel about that); I want to talk about my friends who are in the UK and who I don't see enough. I want to talk about the people I've met and how I've seen Jesus in their eyes and actions. I don't want to talk people into submission or drive them away because they don't know what to do with the feelings that I'm offloading on to them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So I say I'm still going because of the house (I'm one of the managers of the association that runs the Catholic worker house in Calais). As a follow-up, I say that there are still three refugees in the house who have various medical needs, that we are hoping they will be moving on to the next stage of their journey very soon, into a place where their needs will be more fully met. There were five but one has gone to Paris, the other made it to the UK earlier this week; both need mental health support.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I can't leave it there. Suddenly I'm railing against the inertia of a system that is only now - only when the twenty-eight day window has closed - beginning to assess people. Suddenly I'm asking in a voice being overcome with pain why the home office hasn't seen any of the kids we were working with who have a claim to go to the UK to be reunited with family, why no Dubs children have left France for the past month, why we think this is an acceptable way to treat people. But, of course, no one in the conversation thinks this is an acceptable way to treat anyone - let alone a vulnerable child refugee. And of course, few know what a Dubs child is or how the Dublin treaty works and they are not sure they should ask me for definitions at this point!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, I stop. I ask how they are and what they've been up to. But they are looking for someone easier to catch up with.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I find myself asking (myself) if I've become too political, too absorbed in this issue that is complex and overwhelming and leaves so many feeling powerless. I wonder if they are a bit in awe at what I've done over the past year, feeling that they don't know how to engage me on it, what questions to ask. I wonder if I've come across as too bolshy, like a demonstrator ranting at the police for want of making my case to an authority figure who could actually make a difference.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Calmer now, I tell my friends that I've been to see my MP, raised some specific cases with him, urged him to urge the Home Secretary to pull her finger out. I do this in answer to the question I get asked more and more: 'what can we do?' My answer is always 'write to your MP, try to meet them, make a noise, sign a petition.' It's safe but I wonder whether it does any good. I feel I ought to be saying that they should be ripping up paving stones launching them at lines of riot police... I feel the heat rising.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, I don't think that. I believe that we need to raise the issue peacefully, move to learn the way of non-violent resistance to power, find ways of adopting the techniques of civil disobedience to bring the traffic to a standstill and inconvenience the government into pulling its finger out (without, of course, making life harder for the government's many victims over here). I find myself so far out of my comfort zone, I begin to stop talking. Where's Arthur when you need him? A reference to a wonderful volunteer who always talked about mobilising along these lines!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So now I'm asking how I can gather my thoughts and reflections on this year. What can I write? And suddenly I'm mute. I'm back in that place of feeling a dam solidly stopping the flow of thoughts and feelings from spilling onto the page. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So I wait.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I know, however, that the thoughts won't appear until I sit in front of the keyboard with a blank screen and a free day.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So I wait.</span></span></div>
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simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-87672589626671990052016-11-03T09:41:00.004+00:002016-11-03T09:41:49.752+00:00Why planning matters<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As the last bus leaves the camp, I am reminded of a second curse of today's world (after too few people doing important jobs). It is our apparent commitment to brinksmanship. We leave everything to the last minute. Now this is ok when you're thinking about an evening out or a weekend away. It's not a good strategy for sorting out complex problems affecting the immediate safety and long-term futures of some of the world's most vulnerable people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But it seems to be the mindset of both the French and British governments in relation to the children of the jungle. Our government has known since the start of this year of the presence of many hundreds of unaccompanied children who have a Dublin 3 claim to asylum in the UK (because they have close family already settled here). The government knows because of the work of Citizens UK identifying and registering them, taking a test case to court and opening up a channel with the Prefecture to transfer children from Calais to London. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet our government did nothing. Indeed it opposed Citizens UK in the courts. It lost the first round but won on appeal - lots of money spent to keep children out of the country that could have spent bringing them to safety. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then when the French finally decided that they had to remove the jungle, the British sprang into action with all the all the energy of a lethargic snail. Acknowledging that something needed to be done, they then allowed any and every obstacle to slow the process down. They managed to transfer 200 unaccompanied minors in a week but there it has ended. Our government is now locked in unseemly buck-passing with the French government. The thinking seems to be 'who can be seen doing the least to resolve this situation?’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Last week's chaos in the camp that has resulted in 2,000+ people, many of them children, existing with precious little support and no idea of what the future holds for them, is down to a lack of planning on the part of both governments. Now we all know that lack of proper planning results in piss-poor performance. But it reveals something more than that. It reveals a complete indifference to the consequences of our poor planning, in this case, the abandonment of some of the most vulnerable people in France.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Proper planning is evidence that we care. It shows that we are prepared to put ourselves out, commit resources to ensure that those who need our help, get it. Lack of planning demonstrates that we actually do not care at all about these people. The lack of proper planning on the part of our government and the government of France shows that neither really cares what happens to those who have come seeking refuge, safety, help.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yesterday, the buses took unaccompanied minors to accommodation and assessment centres across France. Some of them were accompanied by officials from the UK border force whose job will be to assess Dublin 3 claims that any of the minors have. This is a change from last week when the mood music was that children who had been registered as having a Dublin 3 claim would be bussed to the UK to have it sorted out there. The upshot of this is probably that fewer of these children will make it to the UK, more families will remain divided, more minors will remain stuck in limbo.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Today the final residents - women and children and a few male partners - left the Jules Ferry centre. The camp goes quiet for a while.</span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-45802621011042967252016-10-26T16:56:00.002+01:002016-10-26T17:00:18.385+01:00witnessing the jungle's last gasp<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">It is the curse of today's world that companies and organisations, even governments think it is efficient and cost-effective to run any operation with the minimum number of staff. It isn't. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">I arrive at a virtually empty house to be invited to take a young man to register with the minors at the camp. He has mild mental health issues and gets agitated in crowds. Some in the stationary queue have been there for two hours already. It doesn't look good. We stayed about five minutes in the melee and it was clear that he wasn't coping. We left. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">We bumped into a colleague on the way out of the throng, told her what was happening. She confirmed the under-staffed chaos within and regretted that she couldn’t pull any strings to get our friend fast-tracked. We’d have to find another way </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">We went off to find other friends under the fly-over and plan our next move. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">The only place where the staffing maxim doesn't apply here is with the CRS, the armoured, tooled-up French riot police. The more the merrier. They've booked some 1500 bed spaces across Calais for the foreseeable and now a great phalanx of them Is deployed as the prefect's people arrive for their photo call with the world's press.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">it’s mid-afternoon, an autumn sun is warming the air and the show is about to begin. A spokesperson for the Prefecture, a petite, almost chic early middle-aged blond woman in fur topped wellies, tells the waiting media what’s about to happen. She makes it clear that it is not a ‘destruction’ but a ‘cleansing’. I turn to my French speaking colleague to confirm what I’ve heard. The prefecture would prefer the world’s press to describe the removal of mainly black and middle eastern people by a mainly white, European police force as a ‘cleansing’. She seems to have no idea of the bloody swathe this word has described through European history, including the recent story of the Balkans. But she sticks with it.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Almost comically she then warns the press not to speak of the deployment of bulldozers to effect the cleansing. Rather the contractors will be using 'bobcats'. The small machines that appear almost as she speaking are track vehicles fronted with small claw-bottomed hoppers that look to all the world like bulldozers, albeit small ones, but bulldozers all the same. We point this out later to a journalist on a mobile, phoning in copy, telling the ears at the other end that the machines are bobcats not bulldozers. He stresses this as if his story hangs on it. He doesn’t appear to be from Construction News, so we turn to him and point out that a bulldozer is a bulldozer is a bulldozer whatever label the prefect’s spokesperson attaches to it. He looks non-plussed!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">And so on cue, dozens of men in pristine orange jump suits and white hard hats, equipped with a range of tools from spanners and wrenches to chain saws and hammers, appear and start ‘cleansing’ a shelter.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">It is testament to the tireless team of British shelter builders who put up most of the structures around the camp last winter with the help of the residents, what great work they did. The shelter is virtually indestructible. For twenty minutes and more, the team pull and push, poke and prod, bang and twist the panels, eventually deploying the chain saw to cut some 2” by 4” timbers at the base, but seem to leave little mark on it. Eventually it succumbs and the bobcat comes in to take way some of the bits and deposit them in a skip.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">All this is watched by a posse of camera crews ranged on the two vantage points left vacant by the CRS.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">At this rate of progress, it will take until Christmas to cleanse the camp.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Of course, this is a stunt for the press. Offer them something compelling for the six 0’clock news and they’ll disappear to their hotels leaving the authorities to scythe through the camp with their usual brutality.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">A colleague watches all this and a Sudanese boy turns up having queued to register and been turned away because there were too many minors and far too few staff. He needs to get his papers. His caravan is earmarked for destruction and cut-off by a line of CRS. A bit of negotiating ensues and he is allowed to retrieve his documents and a few belongings before having to vacate the site. Now he has nowhere to sleep. His lack of registration means he has no wrist band and does not appear on the lists for the containers. He is homeless.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">It’s ironic that this should be the case because the spokesperson from the Prefect’s office had said that the authorities had chosen to start the cleansing here in order to create a cordon sanitaire around the container park so that the young people housed therein would feel safer. You couldn’t make it up.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Of course the day after this charade for the press, things get mildly uglier. Registered and unregistered residents of the jungle, faced with eviction by the French state, burn their shelters, the homes that they have made from the scraps around them, the community they have forged in the teeth of opposition and harassment. It is their final act of agency in a situation where they are being systematically stripped of any control over their lives, herded like cattle on to buses in some ghastly though far less grisly reenactment of recent European history. The Prefect’s spokesperson, lacking any sense of irony, misses this.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">The rest of us turn away weeping, ashamed.</span></div>
simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-47044299146787740262016-10-26T16:56:00.001+01:002016-10-26T16:59:49.820+01:00witnessing the jungle's last gasp<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">It is the curse of today's world that companies and organisations, even governments think it is efficient and cost-effective to run any operation with the minimum number of staff. It isn't. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">I arrive at a virtually empty house to be invited to take a young man to register with the minors at the camp. He has mild mental health issues and gets agitated in crowds. Some in the stationary queue have been there for two hours already. It doesn't look good. We stayed about five minutes in the melee and it was clear that he wasn't coping. We left. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">We bumped into a colleague on the way out of the throng, told her what was happening. She confirmed the under-staffed chaos within and regretted that she couldn’t pull any strings to get our friend fast-tracked. We’d have to find another way </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">We went off to find other friends under the fly-over and plan our next move. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">The only place where the staffing maxim doesn't apply here is with the CRS, the armoured, tooled-up French riot police. The more the merrier. They've booked some 1500 bed spaces across Calais for the foreseeable and now a great phalanx of them Is deployed as the prefect's people arrive for their photo call with the world's press.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">it’s mid-afternoon, an autumn sun is warming the air and the show is about to begin. A spokesperson for the Prefecture, a petite, almost chic early middle-aged blond woman in fur topped wellies, tells the waiting media what’s about to happen. She makes it clear that it is not a ‘destruction’ but a ‘cleansing’. I turn to my French speaking colleague to confirm what I’ve heard. The prefecture would prefer the world’s press to describe the removal of mainly black and middle eastern people by a mainly white, European police force as a ‘cleansing’. She seems to have no idea of the bloody swathe this word has described through European history, including the recent story of the Balkans. But she sticks with it.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Almost comically she then warns the press not to speak of the deployment of bulldozers to effect the cleansing. Rather the contractors will be using 'bobcats'. The small machines that appear almost as she speaking are track vehicles fronted with small claw-bottomed hoppers that look to all the world like bulldozers, albeit small ones, but bulldozers all the same. We point this out later to a journalist on a mobile, phoning in copy, telling the ears at the other end that the machines are bobcats not bulldozers. He stresses this as if his story hangs on it. He doesn’t appear to be from Construction News, so we turn to him and point out that a bulldozer is a bulldozer is a bulldozer whatever label the prefect’s spokesperson attaches to it. He looks non-plussed!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">And so on cue, dozens of men in pristine orange jump suits and white hard hats, equipped with a range of tools from spanners and wrenches to chain saws and hammers, appear and start ‘cleansing’ a shelter.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">It is testament to the tireless team of British shelter builders who put up most of the structures around the camp last winter with the help of the residents, what great work they did. The shelter is virtually indestructible. For twenty minutes and more, the team pull and push, poke and prod, bang and twist the panels, eventually deploying the chain saw to cut some 2” by 4” timbers at the base, but seem to leave little mark on it. Eventually it succumbs and the bobcat comes in to take way some of the bits and deposit them in a skip.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">All this is watched by a posse of camera crews ranged on the two vantage points left vacant by the CRS.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">At this rate of progress, it will take until Christmas to cleanse the camp.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Of course, this is a stunt for the press. Offer them something compelling for the six 0’clock news and they’ll disappear to their hotels leaving the authorities to scythe through the camp with their usual brutality.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">A colleague watches all this and a Sudanese boy turns up having queued to register and been turned away because there were too many minors and far too few staff. He needs to get his papers. His caravan is earmarked for destruction and cut-off by a line of CRS. A bit of negotiating ensues and he is allowed to retrieve his documents and a few belongings before having to vacate the site. Now he has nowhere to sleep. His lack of registration means he has no wrist band and does not appear on the lists for the containers. He is homeless.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">It’s ironic that this should be the case because the spokesperson from the Prefect’s office had said that the authorities had chosen to start the cleansing here in order to create a cordon sanitaire around the container park so that the young people housed therein would feel safer. You couldn’t make it up.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Of course the day after this charade for the press, things get mildly uglier. Registered and unregistered residents of the jungle, faced with eviction by the French state, burn their shelters, the homes that they have made from the scraps around them, the community they have forged in the teeth of opposition and harassment. It is their final act of agency in a situation where they are being systematically stripped of any control over their lives, herded like cattle on to buses in some ghastly though far less grisly reenactment of recent European history. The Prefect’s spokesperson, lacking any sense of irony, misses this.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">The rest of us turn away weeping, ashamed.</span></div>
simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-34465049924844454812016-10-24T14:18:00.000+01:002016-10-24T14:18:06.658+01:00Firm action brings more questionsSo, my young Afghan friend finally got his ticket and was reunited with his brothers two months after the UK home office agreed to take his claim under Dublin 3. In the late autumn warmth of St Pancras station, brothers embraced and we wept tears of joy into our take-away coffee.<br />
<br />
And the haunted young man who asked our help three weeks ago is also in the UK, swept up in the sudden rush of Dublin 3 cases the government wanted dealt with before the jungle succumbs to the bulldozer. He is impatiently awaiting reunification with his brother, giving constant updates on WhatsApp about his mood and worries.<br />
<br />
Two shafts of light in the darkness of the camp. But we always stress that while you can snatch someone from the jungle in the blink of an eye, it takes weeks, months, possibly even years to extract the jungle from the minds of its former residents (whether refugees or volunteers).<br />
<br />
And now the camp is in its end-game. The day of closure has arrived and sullen ranks of residents queue with their meagre possessions to get on buses taking them to the stage on their journey to peace and security. We knew the day was coming and have felt it to be right that comes. But now it's here and tomorrow they'll start pulling physical structures down, I feel a sense of impending bereavement.<br />
<br />
And another boy assumes the centre of my attention. His sister is willing to welcome him into her family but with the demolitions getting under way tomorrow and no one being registered today, we are anxious for him. And he represents so many for whom this is just one more uncertainty, insecurity.<br />
<br />
Tomorrow I head back through the tunnel clutching my little red book and my association registration allowing me to come and go and do the things we need to do. And I'm wondering what difference are we making? What are Europe's governments and peoples learning as this sea of people ebbs and flows through their lands? How are we allowing God to reshape our thinking about his priorities for us?simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-2076965371874523052016-09-22T13:24:00.002+01:002016-09-22T13:28:38.192+01:00The agony of inertia<br /><br />Yesterday I sat in the sunshine with friends outside a hospital block. One of then, a young man recovering from horrific leg injuries, is almost ready to be discharged though he still needs a good deal of treatment and intensive physiotherapy. He is also waiting for a ticket that will enable him to travel to be reunited with his brother. He is excited at the prospect.<br /><br />He is also close to despair. What the psalmist said of his people is true of my friend: 'their spirits languished within them.' (Ps 107:5). My friend has a languishing spirit.<br /><br />I first met him on dank afternoon in November outside the library. He was cold and haunted by fear. He had only recently arrived and had not yet found a permanent shelter. He was desperate to get to his brother. But he was stuck. He had no idea how he could manage it and was afraid of trapped in this in-between place forever.<br /><br />Eventually he got a shelter near the library and as winter set in, he hunkered down. Then early in the new year, something happened that left him with an aggressive infection that threatened to cost him his left leg. Months of treatment followed in hospitals where he didn't speak the language or fully understand what was going on.<br /><br />He was haunted by a new fear: would he ever walk again without assistance? At 19 with dreams of riding a motorcycle and being someone, he was facing a life of disability. And he was alone. We visited him as often as we could but that did not really touch his sense of isolation. Every time I see him I catch that haunted, fearful look behind his greeting and his hug and his smile and his welcome.<br /><br />And now he waits for a ticket.<br /><br />This young Afghan man, whose family is scattered by the war in his land across at least three countries, whose father died in service of the Nato forces, waits for a ticket. He is on the final agonizing stretch of his journey. Fit enough to be discharged from hospital, he received word from the UK home office that his Dublin 3 claim for reunification with his brother has been accepted on 8 August.<br /><br />And here at the end of September he is waiting for a ticket.<br /><br />Maybe it will come next week after visits to the Prefects in both Calais and Arras.<br /><br />Maybe.<br /><br />And so we leave him, urging him to be patient, and as we round the corner into the welter of tents and shelters and people, a young man with the same haunted look as my friends stops us. He's 16 and has a brother in London and no other family in the world (as far as we can ascertain). Can we help him? And so it begins again. Taking details, making calls. urging patience and offering support.<br /><br />How long? How long O Lord before their cries - and our cries - reach your ears and you deliver them (and us) from this agony of inertia?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-77266134486285084062016-09-22T13:24:00.001+01:002016-09-22T13:25:31.106+01:00The agony of inertiaYesterday I sat in the sunshine with friends outside a hospital block. One of then, a young man recovering from horrific leg injuries, is almost ready to be discharged though he still needs a good deal of treatment and intensive physiotherapy. He is also waiting for a ticket that will enable him to travel to be reunited with his brother. He is excited at the prospect.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
He is also close to despair. What the psalmist said of his people is true of my friend: 'their spirits languished within them.' (Ps 107:5). My friend has a languishing spirit.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
I first met him on dank afternoon in November outside the library. He was cold and haunted by fear. He had only recently arrived and had not yet found a permanent shelter. He was desperate to get to his brother. But he was stuck. He had no idea how he could manage it and was afraid of trapped in this in-between place forever.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
Eventually he got a shelter near the library and as winter set in, he hunkered down. Then early in the new year, something happened that left him with an aggressive infection that threatened to cost him his left leg. Months of treatment followed in hospitals where he didn't speak the language or fully understand what was going on.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
He was haunted by a new fear: would he ever walk again without assistance? At 19 with dreams of riding a motorcycle and being someone, he was facing a life of disability. And he was alone. We visited him as often as we could but that did not really touch his sense of isolation. Every time I see him I catch that haunted, fearful look behind his greeting and his hug and his smile and his welcome.<br />
<br />
<br />
And now he waits for a ticket.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
This young Afghan man, whose family is scattered by the war in his land across at least three countries, whose father died in service of the Nato forces, waits for a ticket. He is on the final agonizing stretch of his journey. Fit enough to be discharged from hospital, he received word from the UK home office that his Dublin 3 claim for reunification with his brother has been accepted on 8 August.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
And here at the end of September he is waiting for a ticket.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
Maybe it will come next week after visits to the Prefects in both Calais and Arras.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
Maybe.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
And so we leave him, urging him to be patient, and as we round the corner into the welter of tents and shelters and people, a young man with the same haunted look as my friends stops us. He's 16 and has a brother in London and no other family in the world (as far as we can ascertain). Can we help him? And so it begins again. Taking details, making calls. urging patience and offering support.<br />
<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
How long? How long O Lord before their cries - and our cries - reach your ears and you deliver them (and us) from this agony of inertia?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-67363955634213844052016-08-29T19:29:00.001+01:002016-09-22T13:26:07.710+01:00Replacing inertia with actionIt was good to see the jungle leading BBC news bulletins today and with none of the hysteria, hype and hogwash of the tabloid news papers.<br />
<br />
In particular the beeb highlighted comments by the president of the Calais region suggesting that migrants in the camp in Calais be allowed to claim asylum close by in France.This is a view that is gaining traction in the country with two of the candidates for next year's presidential election also weighing in in favour of changes to the Le Touquet treaty.<br />
<br />
Tomorrow our new home secretary is visiting her French counterpart in Paris. It is to be hoped that this issue will be on their agenda. Of course, we know the UK government's view. That was put to the beeb by a former ambassador who trotted out the line the government has been spinning for the past two years - handling things differently in Calais will act as a magnet. This is unlikely given the tiny proportion of refugees heading for the jungle compared the numbers going north to Germany and Scandanavia.<br />
<br />
Instead the UK government thinks spending upwards of £60m on fencing and other security enhancements (which is the cost of the CRS in the camp) is the sensible choice.It is also wedded to the Le Touquet agreement whereby the UK was moved to Calais and the French one to Dover in a bid to quell the 'illegal' movement of people across the border. It hasn't worked.<br />
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And the people of Calais are fed up of living in what is increasingly feeling like a prison such is the rash of razor wire topped creeping across the city, shielding various sites from the migrants.<br />
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So they are beginning to ask what does the Le touquet treaty give them? And the answer is not much. It certainly isn't doing anything for the refugees living in increasingly squalid and overcrowded conditions in the jungle.<br />
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And the answer would seem to lie in the UK giovernment having a little immagination and making it possible for those in the camp to claim asylum in the UK. If they have a strong claim, then ship them to the country to be properly assessed. If they don't, then tell them that even if they can make their way into the country, they will not be able to claim asylum and will be returned to the first place they set foot on European soil. n that way, it wouldn't be a magnet; it would be a more humane response than the inertia that is currently our government's policy.simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-72925846831998946392016-03-30T21:37:00.001+01:002016-03-30T21:37:19.627+01:00God Works Through the Weak to Thwart the Powerful's Plans<a href="http://www.ethicsdaily.com/god-works-through-the-weak-to-thwart-the-powerfuls-plans-cms-23343#sthash.DVlzrSzs.cmfs">God Works Through the Weak to Thwart the Powerful's Plans</a><br /><br />
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Here's a link to my blog as it has been picked up by the wonderful Ethics Dailysimonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-75419607332005495042016-03-20T16:59:00.002+00:002016-03-20T16:59:21.658+00:00The meaning of witnessTen days ago, I visited the jungle with Lynn Green from the Baptist Union to help her see what was happening and give her some insight into the work I and some colleagues (notably Juliet Kilpin) are doing there.<br />
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In the course of our visit, we spent half an hour with some Iranian brothers who started a hunger strike on the day the demolitions of the southern part of the camp started. They had sewed their lips together and refused food until the French authorities acted to resolve the situation of everyone in the jungle justly, in accordance with France's commitment to the human rights of all people.<br />
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A good number of these Iranians are Christians, fleeing religious persecution but facing (as they see it) complete indifference from Europe.<br />
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As I sat with these brothers I reflected on the fact that I have many times shared with my students at Spurgeon's College that the New Testament teaches that Christian witness often involves the church being shredded for the salvation of the nations; that Jesus' call to take up our cross and follow him is potentially an invitation to die. As I looked into the eyes of these Iranian brothers, I saw what that meant: here were people prepared to suffer - perhaps even to die - for the peace and freedom of those who shared their current plight. Greater love has no one, I thought, than those thst lay down their lives for their friends.<br />
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I was deeply affected by this half hour.<br />
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Last week - on Wednesday afternoon - the prefecture visited the Iranians. They offered them the chance to have their asylum applications fast-tracked, even to get assistance to apply for asylum in the UK if that's what they wanted. All they had to do was give up their protest. Their response was to remind the prefecture that they are not protesting on their own behalf but on behalf of everyone in the jungle, that they will not stop until everyone receives justice.<br />
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I gather it was a bit of a dialogue of the deaf, with the people from the prefect's office leaving feeling completely baffled at the Iranians' stance. But I wonder if that's how it was.<br />
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On Friday afternoon word reached us that the prefect's office had decided that it would not proceed with the destruction of the northern part of the camp. Indeed, it would work with the volunteer groups providing support and assistance to the community to ensure that the camp got the resources it needed. To this end, L'Auberge and the other groups that provide support to the camp are conducting a fresh census in the coming week to determine how many people now live in the northern part of the camp, so that support can be directed at the most vulnerable.<br />
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Now this is good news. And it seems to have come out of the blue. But I wonder...<br />
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Could there be a connection between the meeting of the Iranians and the prefect's office on Wednesday and the prefect's announcement on Friday? I have no evidence to support this, just a hunch that there is something powerful about the witness of the powerless to those with power that turns events in unexpected ways. Paul said something about God choosing the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 'God chose the the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.'<br />
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It seems to me that this explains what happened in Calais this week: the nothings of the world nullified what is and God's wily way of working through weakness and insignificant things changed the plans the powerful made to silence the powerless. God once again shows himself to be sneakily at work where he's not invited or welcomed - except by those who have no other prayer but that he'll come to their aid in their distress.<br />
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Just a thought...simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9901815.post-61895414164344443302016-03-20T16:24:00.002+00:002016-03-20T16:24:30.077+00:00Lessons for Europe in owning responsibility and moving forwardA lot's happened in the jungle since I last blogged. There have been times over the past couple of weeks when I thought that the community would be sent to the four winds as the Calais Prefecture moved to sweep the camp away. But that hasn't happened for reasons that I don't fully understand but which I think are profoundly linked to Christian witness (I'll explain that in a second posting...)<br />
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Having won the court case, the Prefecture moved fairly swifly to demolish the southern half of the jungle. While this began three weeks ago very aggressively, they remained true to their commitment not to demolish community buildings such as schools, the church, the youth centre and the library. These now stand in splendid isolation in a charred wasteland that used to be a vibrant community.<br />
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And although they began aggessively, in the second week of the clearances the CRS, the armoured French riot police, began to allow volunteers and residents to move shelters that had been earmarked for deomolition. So when we visited on the second Thurdsay, we witnessed amicable negotiations going on between clutches of volunteers and squads of CRS over which shelters could be moved from the clearance zone to another part of the camp. Through the day a steady stream of walking groups carrying someone's home wended their way down the jungle's high street from the southern to the northern part of the camp. Several shelters were also moved on low-loaders.<br />
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Visitng the northern part of the camp later in the day we found acres of newly inhabited land, home to rows of shelters and new residents settling into their new environment. It was a sight to put a smile on our faces in the early spring sunshine.<br />
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Of course, it was almost inevitable that cramming so many people of so many different nations so closely together could result in friction, neighbour disputes, turf wars of one kind or another. And sadly, the week after I'd seen so many people moving, word reached us that there had been a big fight between Sudanese and Afghan residents. It happened on a wednesday evening, the day before I was due to visit.<br />
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So, I have to say, that on that Thursday as I appraoched the camp, I did so wih some trepidation. I expected there to be a heavy police presence; expected an atmosphere of suspicion and fear, where volunteers like me would maybe be less welcome than we have been. I needn't have worried. We passed the handful of CRS at the entrance and strode into the usual vibrant and bustling scene that we have come to expect.<br />
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We were greeted by members of our team and some community leaders with smiles and offers of tea. But it was clear that there the events of the previous evening had left a mark that needed to be addressed. So in the early afternoon we were invited to attend to a meeting at which the Sudanese and Afghans were going to resolve their differences. I asked one of my colleagues whether it was wise for us to be there and he replied that it would be good to have a group of people present who were not angry; that perhaps our calmness would lower the tensions in the tent where the meeting was to happen. So we all duly pitched up, removed our shoes (the space being used is a mosque) and sat around the sides of the large tent.<br />
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We needn't have worried. One by one Sudanese and Afghan community leaders rose to do two things. The first was to say that the unfortunate events of the previous evening had been everyone's fault, including that of the community leaders. I have to say that seeing gentle men who have never lifted their voice in anger, let alone threatened someone with a rock, owning responsibility for what had happened was extremely humbling. I reflected on the fact that as we met in this makeshift mosque, a hundred or so miles away in Brussels, EU leaders were meeting to pass the buck, blame others for the situation Europe finds itself in for the migration crisis and cobble together a solution that treats the people gathered around me as packages to sent here and there at the whim of a politician. What I saw in the mosque was true servant leadership of a kind I rearely experience or offer in the UK<br />
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The second thing my friends all said was that they were determined to work together for as long as the camp remained to ensure its peace, to ensure that it operated in the interests of all its residents, to ensure that no one lived in fear of their neighbour. They reminded each other that they had each fled places where they'd lived in fear of their neighbours and their governments. They needed to ensure that having come all this way, no one felt such fear again. So they called for others from each community to come forward to support the efforts of the leaders to create mechanisms to ensure the camp runs smoothly, that everyone's needs are met in food distribution, that no one goes without shoes or warm clothes, that no one feels unheard and resorts to violernce to make themselves heard.<br />
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After an hour, during which time everyone who wanted to speak seemed to be able to so so, the members of our team were asked if had anything to add. It seemed to me that it wasn't our place to say anything so all I said was that I was hunbled and moved to see the communities working to settle their differences and work together. After which the Afghan Iman was invited to lead in prayer (I have to say that he could have passed for a pentecostal pastor, so fervent and passionate was his invocation of God's blessing on this decision!).<br />
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And then everyone stood and moved around the room embracing everyone else and wishing them health and happiness and good fortune. It was an amazing moment. It reminded me that the jungle is more than merely a place, it's an idea; a concept rather than a location. What has been created by the community leaders and their willing communities aspires to be an expression of humanity at its best in the midst of continent of indifference and alienation.<br />
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I left the meeting feeling humbled and elated (a common reaction to life in the jungle).<br />
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I was also forced to reflect on why I had felt so anxious when I heard the news on wednesday night of the trouble. I had felt an immediate concern for my friends, people from Syrian and Sudan, Ethiopia and Afghanistan who have made their home there - would they be ok? What would they need in the morning when I turned up? How could best help and support them? I had immediate anxiety for volunteers I have come to know and admire - would they be safe? would they be able to do their work? how would they cope with the fact of violence happening around them? I realised that I was connected to this community, that it's pain was my pain, that it's anxiety was mine. And I recalled that the Bible says something about this....<br />
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And this led to another reflection that I'll blog abaout presently.simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13470335172330595542noreply@blogger.com0