Radical equality

It seems to me there are some things Christians need to get seriously angry about. Three new books have focussed my thinking on one of these issues – attitudes to women.

In Equals, Jenny Baker describes the transformational effect of genuine equality between women and men, but highlights the many issues still to be addressed – for example, women on average still earn less than their male counterparts, women are in a minority in leadership positions in business and politics, one in four women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime.

Former US President Jimmy Carter’s A call to action: women, religion, violence and power is a devastating chronicle of injustices to women world-wide. Honor killings, genital mutilation, rape, the forced marriage of young girls. Domestic violence – against which there is no legislation in a third of countries.

Trafficking – at least 480,000 girls and women are trafficked annually across international borders and sold into the sex trade. The genocide of girls by abortion, neglect and murder – statistical calculations suggest that 160 million women are ‘missing’ as a result of this breathtaking holocaust.

Both writers are deeply concerned Christians convinced that a key element of our faith is the equality of men and women. I believe we must say ‘Amen!’ to Jimmy Carter’s ‘call to action’, energetically and prayerfully supporting agencies working to ensure men and women are given equal opportunities of fulfilling their God-given potential.

We must speak out in condemnation of the scandalous injustices to women. We must confront attitudes in our own communities and in our own hearts which spring from stereotyped views of the roles of men and women. We must, in love, get seriously angry.

But there’s another problem. The third book I’ve been reading is Women in waiting: prejudice at the heart of the Church by Julia Ogilvy. It’s a series of powerful interviews with marvellous Christian women (largely in the Church of England, although the first woman Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Alison Elliot, is included.) They are women of strong faith, certain of their call to the ministry, bringing a distinctive female perspective to their work.

There have been women deacons in the Church of England since 1986, priests since 1992, but women are still barred from becoming bishops. Many of the interviews mention how difficult the speaker found it to be accepted in ministry as a woman, and the prejudices they encountered.

The Roman Catholic Church has no women priests, although Pope Francis acknowledges ‘It is necessary to widen the space for a more inclusive feminine presence in the Church.’

Despite the fact that there have been women Church of Scotland ministers for over 40 years, there are still many churches of different denominations across Scotland where ministry and leadership is not open to women: women are sometimes seen as simply supporting men, undertaking traditional women’s roles.

So the problem is this: how can Christians speak our convincingly about injustices to women when our own house is not in order, even part of the problem?

There is much to suggest that the church across the centuries has got it horribly wrong, and that male-dominated approaches to building society are a symptom of our human sinfulness, which the liberating power of Jesus Christ conquers, setting men and women free to flourish together as equals.

Jesus’ attitude to women was, for his time, revolutionary. He treated men and women as equals, rejecting all implications of the inferiority of women. ‘There is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,’ wrote St Paul. A third of the names in one of Paul’s list of leading Christians were women.

I respect the views of those, women among them, who argue from other passages of Scripture that, though equal in status, men and women have different, complementary roles. But I believe this view obscures the Bible’s powerful vision of men and women equal in worth, equal in the variety of gifts God has given them, equal in the roles God entrusts to them. It’s tragic if the attitude of some Christians hinders the flourishing of women.

Some look back over 50 years of feminism in society and say ‘we must not let culture shape our thinking.’ But what if a mistaken, generations-old church culture is blinding us to  reality? What if God is speaking to us through our culture, showing us in the convictions of our neighbours what we have been so slow to learn?

I believe we are called to express in our world the revolutionary culture of Jesus, which includes the radical equality of men and women. It is the culture of God’s kingdom, and only when this kingdom is fully come will the equalities which my reading this week has highlighted be gone forever.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 1st May 2014)

Let him Easter in us

You might get the impression that Easter is festival of child-friendly cuteness – bunnies, painted eggs, chocolate and the obligatory daffodils. It’s true that Easter culminates with a focus on joy and rebirth, but that’s by no means the whole story.

For Easter is a journey through the most horrendous darkness into amazing light.

Day 1: Jesus, a good, innocent man is executed. Evil, it seems, has triumphed. Within a few hours the hopes which had inspired his followers have crumbled to dust. This messiah, they must have been thinking, was no different from all the others who made promises, and shared visions they were unable to fulfil. Jesus’ followers had forgotten, if indeed they had ever truly understood, his counterintuitive words about dying and rising again.

Day 2: 24 hours of utter despair. Jesus has been placed in his tomb, a great stone rolled across the cave-mouth. His followers face the utter despair of shattered dreams. There is no comfort other than the sharing of tears, and the stirring of life around them as Jerusalem shakes itself awake for a new week mocks their pain.

Day 3: Early morning. Some women visit the tomb. He is there! He is alive! It’s not a ghost! It’s Jesus, the same yet somehow changed. Wonder and joy! A deeper magic than the power of evil has overcome death. Jesus followers realise that the dream is in fact only beginning, and that it’s a bigger dream than they had ever imagined, embracing the whole of humanity, the whole world, the whole universe.

We’re familiar with journeys through darkness into light. It’s spring again, and we are living through the annual rebirth of nature after the long death of a wild, wet winter.

Most of us have personally experienced times of difficulty, struggle and pain, when we have felt, perhaps, that things would never improve. But then one day we’ve sensed the tiniest ray of hope breaking through.

This journey is central to Christian belief too. Christian visionaries sense that, for all its wonder, there is something amiss with the whole universe, as though a spell had been cast over it, and we believe, whatever the language means, that the spell will be broken, and the whole cosmos rebirthed into something new, the same, yet different.

And for Christians death itself, followed by an Easter resurrection into that re-born cosmos is another key journey through darkness into light.

This all seems very theoretical and speculative. The key point is that what happened to Jesus the first Easter is not simply another example of the journey through darkness into light, not simply an encouraging indication that what happened to Jesus can happen to us all, but the key act which makes it possible for us to break into light at the end of our journeys. Somehow, in travelling through death into life Jesus took the whole cosmos with him, and we await the results of this at the end of time as we know it.

All this has some very practical implications. It prompts us to ask what it means to follow Christ on his journey through death to life. We find ourselves called to be active participants with Christ on the journey. There are things we need to put to death – by which I mean acknowledging them, owning them, and relinquishing them – things like pride and greed, and ways of living which must change.

But there are also things in us which we need to call out into the sunshine of a resurrection morning – parts of me I’ve buried, my hopes and dreams, the real ‘me’ I have hidden for so long. As we journey through darkness into light a joyful Jesus summons from the cave our true identity.

And Jesus’ Easter journey brings hope for us in our despair. Some of us may be Easter Saturday Christians. We feel surrounded by darkness. The dreams we once had of the difference Jesus could make have crumbled. We are disappointed with God, disappointed with Jesus, disappointed with ourselves, and angry.

Some of us may be people of no religious faith, with whom the Easter Saturday story nevertheless resonates. We’re despairing because our lives have lost their purpose: there seems to be no ultimate meaning and we wonder if we have the courage to walk through the darkness alone.

The good news of Easter is that Jesus brings hope in our despair, whoever we are, however weak or non-existent our faith. The living Jesus invites us to reach out in the darkness, and promises that in some way we will recognise as authentic, his hand will grasp ours, and lead us forward, sunshine piercing the darkness and mist, towards the glory of the Easter Sunday garden. ‘Let him easter in us.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 17th April 2014)

A bite out of the Big Apple

I’m just back from a family holiday to New York. We climbed the Empire State Building, strolled in Central Park, saw both Wicked and Phantom, took the Staten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty and much else.

But what I want to share is how hard I found it just to get there. I am prone to anxiety – it seems to be deeply embedded in my DNA. Though I cope reasonably well with the help of medication, particular challenges can ramp up the worry level.

I was deeply anxious at the prospect not just of the long flight but of being what seemed so very far from home. In addition the health scare I had in November, a mini-stroke, made getting travel insurance more complicated, and left me feeling fragile and fearful.

Many people – 3 million in the UK according to 2007 figures – experience abnormal anxiety disorders. We are helped in part by talking therapies, medication, positive visualisation of achieving the things our fear attaches itself to – and all these means of addressing the problems are I believe God-given gifts.

My doctor slightly increased my medication prior to our New York trip. I thought positively, and reminded myself ‘God will be with you.’ I was encouraged by my wife’s assurance of her our daughters’ love and support. But I remained fearful.

I had been attending a lunch-time discussion group at St Andrews Cathedral, Inverness, on the Wednesdays of Lent led by the Provost, Alex Gordon. Two days before our holiday, the group was discussing the giving of ‘the peace’ – the moment in Anglican and Roman Catholic liturgies when members of the congregation greet each other, saying ‘Peace be with you.’

I said I appreciated this – it makes me feel included, part of the group. Alex gently deepened my understanding, telling me that what we are conveying to one another is the fact that God gives peace to each of us. Almost immediately, I had a deep sense that God was giving, and would give me peace.

The unexpected ‘givenness’ of this brought calm, joy, trust and a lightness of spirit about the forthcoming journey which my own attempts at positive thinking had failed to deliver. The memory of this gift from beyond me sustained me during our time away.

I didn’t sleep well on the Thursday night, and woke fearful on the day we were leaving. I didn’t know if I could do it. I had a mental picture of a circle on a map of Scotland, centred on Inverness. My comfort zone. It seemed so small, New York so very distant.

And another picture came to mind, not with quite the same sense of givenness as the assurance of peace on Wednesday. It showed two hands, the tips of thumbs and forefingers touching to form the shape of a heart, and within it, green and blue and brown and white spun our planet. I realised that the whole world is in God’s infinite comfort zone. God is at home in New York – or perhaps New York is at home in God. Certainly, I am at home in God.

This thought helped me face the day. That evening at 9.30pm we are crossing the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow on the shuttle bus to the airport. I find my heart alive with praise and gratitude to God.

Eight days later, we are waiting outside our hotel in Times Square for the transport we’d booked to take us back to JFK Airport to arrive. Would the minibus come? I reflected that it’s one thing to go forward through life, entrusting each step to God. It is quite another thing to still your anxiety when all you can do is wait, wondering if the minibus will come. Because faith in God doesn’t guarantee the absence of problems.

Then I realised that security in that situation is found in remembering that no matter what happens – if your plans fall apart, if the worst imaginable scenario unfolds you remain secure because your indestructible self is sustained by God.

We arrived back in Inverness the Sunday before Easter. I have been encouraged and have grown in confidence and faith through the experience. I am so glad I went.

Each of us who struggle with abnormal anxieties has our own story. I know some people, worried sick with the anxiety of making ends meet will feel I am fortunate that I had a trip to the Big Apple to worry about, and I take their point.

But each of us will be helped by the love of friends and family and by appropriate therapies but also, despite dark and agonisingly difficult days, by the moments of spiritual strengthening which Christians believe are the tender, personalised gifts of a loving Father.

(Chreistian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 24th April 2014)

A marvellous book: Kenneth Steven's Coracle

In search of a green woodpecker, the poet enters the wood’s stillness. Through his vivid language, we accompany him – deer, swans, a ‘huge’ silence. ‘I came here searching one bird and found all this instead,’ he says, adding cryptically ‘How like my life.’

A key theme in Coracle, the new collection of poems by Scottish writer Kenneth Steven is the journey we all find ourselves on as human beings, an inner journey, the journey of life as far from shore in our fragile coracle we seek ‘another island and a new beginning.’

Kenneth is a gifted writer: a few words, arrestingly chosen, allow us to see the world through his sensitive eyes – his beloved Scottish landscapes, wildlife, and people met or imagined, all come vividly alive. His Christian faith imbues all his seeing, and all his work, whether or not it is explicit. We bring our own lives to these word-coracles, and they carry us forward.

Some of my favourites: Two wrens dead.  Eight wrens find shelter through a punishing winter in the eaves of the poet’s home. For two of them ‘this winter’ is ‘just too big.’ He finds them, their life extinguished. ‘How little did they weigh, and yet, all day I held them heavy in my heart.’

I’m moved by Kenneth’s St Francis-like compassion and by a recollection of Jesus words ‘Not one sparrow will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.’ The poet mirrors God’s compassion for all creation, and especially for human beings who ‘weigh’ so little in a cosmic sense yet are deeply cherished and heart-held by our Maker.

Ruanan. ‘I am the limping one,’ Ruanan says, bullied at school, finder shelter in the monastery’s loving acceptance. ‘They said they wanted my soft voice for song.’ Daily she draws water for the community from the well. Hauling to the surface the ‘heavy dark’ of the bucket, she remembers the woman Jesus met at the well-head and asked to draw water for him, another outcast brought home. It is for Jesus that Ruanan draws the daily draught of water.

I suspect there’s something of the poet in Ruanan: finding shelter in the Christian community, offering his own gift of song, drawing water to refresh us from deep wells of inspiration, doing it for the Master, limping because poems such as these are only formed through struggle and pain.

Sometimes we are lost for meaningful words feeling as the poet does when meeting Edith in the poem of that name whose son is dying and who ‘had lost God a long time ago.’ Says the poet ‘I felt like a dry well, hollow and empty – nothing but the same old echoes.’ In the silence, Edith says that it’s not expressions of belief that matter, but ‘how you go to the gallows.’ Is our faith, is the Master we trust in, stronger than death.’

But the genuiness of faith is seen, not just in our dying but in how we live. Calvinism depicts the stern legality of extreme Calvinist theology; After all describes a minister’s fiery, incomprehensible sermons. But go in need to the Calvinist’s door and you will find a precious, priceless kindness ‘as old as the one from Galilee.’ And the old fiery preacher was loved for the compassion he showed to his flock. Better good theology and love, Steven suggests – but love can annul the damage of toxic theology.

I love The Ghost Orchard, a post-apocalyptic poem in which cave-bound survivors in a devastated world tell their children of how it used to be. Horses, fields, flowing water ‘birds bringing morning into song.’ For a while, the poet says, the children will believe ‘It was that beautiful, that good.’

The parents have been silent about the human greed and selfishness which defiled the beauty and precipitated the apocalypse. But the point for us is that it is ‘that beautiful, that good’. It’s worth cherishing and struggling and praying to protect our fragile world, holding it in our cupped hands like the hermit in another poem who sat still until the eggs laid by the blackbird while he prayed hatched and new birds took to the air.

A marvellous book, containing 40 poems. If poetry speaks to you, get hold of a copy. We sow these poems like seed in our heart and they bring forth fruit.

The poet searched for a green woodpecker and found ‘all this instead.’ Those of us who have reached the island, who have drawn water from the Master’s deep wells know that in our search for Jesus we have both been found by him and had our eyes opened to a new way of seeing. The journey continues, but we have found the object of our search and ‘all this’ as well.

Coracle by Kenneth Steven is published by SPCK. ISBN 978-0-281-07209-5 Order from Amazon here.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 29th May 2014)