Love overcomes

The red-headed dynamo began working life in the Dundee jute mills, supporting her family after her alcoholic father’s death. By the time she died in Nigeria a century ago on 13^th January 1915 she was, after David Livingstone, Scotland’s best-known missionary.

Mary Slessor arrived at the United Presbyterian Church mission in Calibar as a teacher in 1876 passionate about the God she had encountered as a young girl. The message of the Bible had made her, she claimed ‘a changed lassie.’ Down-to-earth and intellectually sharp, she shocked her fellow missionaries by shinning up every tree in the area to burn off surplus energy.

In time, and with the blessing of the Church, her practical, perceptive dynamism propelled her from the comparative safety of the mission compound to inland areas previously only sporadically visited by the missionaries. There she lived alone among the African people and their chiefs, fearlessly confronting, encouraging, and cajoling them to adopt beneficial ways of living and believing.

Over the years she struggled on despite pain and sickness. The African people adored her: a visitor noted that she enjoyed ‘the unreserved friendship and confidence of the people, and has much influence over them.’ She became a UK consular agent, dispensed justice among the African tribes, and by the time of her death was a legend in the UK.

We celebrate notable people from Scotland’s past, but also ask what their lives teach us.

I love the level of Slessor’s engagement with African culture – she lived not in a gated compound, but in the heart of the community, open to the African perspective. She learned the local language. She didn’t wear a hat, stubbornly refused a mosquito net, drank untreated water – and her health suffered accordingly. She adopted African children – orphans and abandoned twins.

She discouraged Africans from thinking they must dress in European finery, and disapproved of costly church buildings. As someone put it, she saw a British-style church as giving the impression of being ‘a foreign thing in which the Africans would worship a foreign God.’

God is not foreign. God is with us. The God who came to us in Jesus Christ to a particular place and time and culture seeks to engage with our society in part through us, as we go and meet people, in our communities and in cyberspace. We are called to engage with others not in decades-old ‘foreign’ ways of being Christian, but in ways which show the presence and relevance of God in this culture, at this time.

I love Slessor’s conviction that change was possible. Aspects of local practice were hugely destructive – there was frequent inter-tribal warfare and widespread alcoholism; twins were routinely killed on the belief that one or other of them was the offspring of an evil spirit; when someone died others were killed and buried with them so that they did not go unaccompanied into the great unknown; trial by ordeal saw poison administered to suspects – if you vomited it up you were deemed innocent, otherwise you died.

Our world has its own darknesses - crime, addiction, self-harm, poverty, religious violence. Mary’s example and experience in Africa shakes us out of any ‘this is just the way things are’ despondency. The elderly Mary Slessor, in the dark days of WW1 still claimed ‘God is always in the world, the sunshine will break out and light will triumph.’ Change is possible. ‘Give up your whole being to create music everywhere,’ Slessor challenges.

I love Mary Slessor’s living in openness to God, seeking divine help in everything (though no doubt there were days of doubt and struggle.) I believe we are at our most effective both as human beings and as Christians when we acknowledge our need of and rely on God. ‘It isn’t Mary Slessor doing anything,’ she wrote ‘but Something outside of her altogether uses her.’

And I love her unconventionality. Slessor simply didn’t do ‘conventional’. She thought ‘out of the box’; she was stubborn and at times could be hard to work with. And yet her challenging and her passion drove forward mission and the development of the African church. We need people like Mary Slessor, still fiery when red hair turned silver.

This speaks to me personally. For in my 60s I am finding a new freedom after six decades of Christian experience to tell it like I see it. I’ve been conventional too long. It’s time to get real.

Mary Slessor’s fundamental conviction was that ‘love will overcome all.’  We thank God for her, and for the lessons we learn from her life. And we pray for grace to welcome todays Mary Slessors young and old, who may at times irritate us, but always challenge us to find new, relevant ways of expressing that overcoming Love.

(Christian Viewpoint columns from the Highland News dated 15th January 2015)

Unbroken

I find it difficult to understand why someone would consciously choose to be an enemy of God. Yet an old story from the Middle East, and Unbroken, the new film about the life of American World War 2 survivor Louis (‘Louie’) Zamperini remind me that people do indeed set themselves against God.  

Tuesday was ‘Epiphany’ when Christians remember the visit of the wise men from the east to the infant Jesus.  On the way, they alert Herod king of Judea to their star quest. Familiar with the old prophecies of a coming Messiah, Herod ascertains from the religious experts that the child is to be born in Bethlehem, and subsequently massacres every young boy in the town. He hopes, presumably, to retain the throne for his descendants.

I can understand people who don’t believe in God acting as God’s enemies. But to me it’s almost incredible that someone who believes in the goodness and grace and the wildness of God should choose to oppose God. In Herod’s case, the reason was clearly the depravity and evil of a man who was ‘prepared to commit any crime in order to gratify his unbounded ambition.’

In Unbroken there was similar evil in the character of Matsuhiro Watanabe, a Japanese Prisoner of War camp commandant who saw in Louis Zamperini a particular challenge and sought, through a series of relentless beatings, to break him. A key scene shows an emaciated Zamperini forced by a gloating Watanabe to hold a heavy plank above his head. We are to regard it as a kind of crucifixion, good confronting evil.

Zamperini was born in 1917 in California to an Italian immigrant family. He was rescued from a delinquent childhood by his elder brother Pete who saw his potential as a runner and challenged him to develop it.

He participated promisingly in the 1936 Olympic Games, and had set his sights on a medal in the 1940 Games. War intervened and Louie found himself serving as bombardier on B-24 bomber flights over the Pacific. He survived a plane crash in the ocean, and a subsequent 47 days afloat in a rubber raft showing tremendous courage and resolve, only to be captured and imprisoned by the Japanese.

Unbroken is based on Laura Hillenbrand’s book of the same name which uses Zamperini’s own memoir Devil at my heels as a key source. For me, the film’s chief shortcoming is that it ends with Louie returning triumphantly, unbroken to his family in the USA, with brief on-screen text outlining the rest of his story. Thus we do not see his battle with post-traumatic stress – the nightmares, the obsessive focus on returning to Japan and murdering Watanabe, the alcoholism, the reckless investment, the disintegrating marriage.

These post-war years were also, I realised, years in which Louis Zamperini lived as an enemy of God. He had always believed in God, and had prayed repeatedly in the ocean and the prison camps. And yet, despite the miraculous nature of his escape from the sinking B-24, despite the gift of refreshing downpour following a prayer, despite the sense as he looked around him mid-Pacific at the beauty of ocean and stars that it was the handiwork of God, he set himself against God.

He refused to let his wife go to church; he refused initially to listen to a Christian evangelist. This was not the wickedness of a Herod or a Watanabe, but nevertheless, afraid to be reminded of his mid-ocean promise to serve God forever if he was rescued, Louie treated God like an enemy.

Unbroken? It seems to me that Louie was a broken man on at least two occasions – when, close to death, he called out to God in the raft, and when he knelt in Billy Graham’s gospel tent. ‘I made no excuses, I did not rationalise, I did not blame.’

I believe Louis Zamperini finished his life unbroken (in 2014 at the age of 97) because he passed through those times of brokenness. There he discovered that the God he’d considered an enemy was in fact a friend; there he found grace to let go of the hatred which was destroying him and to forgive those who had hurt him – even Watanabe.

The truth is that every one of us has the potential of thinking, or acting as enemies of God.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 8th January 2015)