'The Activist(?) Undone': A Re-Writing of Ecclesiastes

The words of the theologian, educator, and activist:

Futility; all is futility. Nothing is worthwhile; everything is worthless. What do we get for the amount of work we do?

Generations go, generations come; causes go, and new causes arise; movements arise and then pass away, and newer movements arise… But the earth is unchanged.

Day in, day out, sunrise to sundown… What has been is what will be; what’s been done is all that is done.

Nothing changes; nothing is new. Try to think of one thing of which you can truly say, ‘now THAT is new.’

Been there, done that.

The movements are forgotten, the issues are blurred, the activism is not nearly as effective as we try to convince ourselves it is.

---

I, the teacher, was dedicated and committed to social transformation.

My social media was filled with all the right causes.

I ‘liked’ all the right things; I ‘followed’ all the right people.

I prided myself on how well I kept people informed about the important issues of the day:

The plight of the Palestinians, the heroic actions of the Kurdish fighters in Rojava, environmental issues in the Cascadian region, the struggles of peacemakers and social activists…

I encouraged people to educate themselves, to be informed, and to take action.

But now I look at it all and say, ‘what has it accomplished, all the ‘liking’, the ‘following’, the ‘trending’?

The poor starve, the weak die, the cruel win, the forests burn, the fish die, and I got 37 ‘likes’…

In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is worthless.

---

My wardrobe was politically conscious. I had badges that declared my beliefs, shirts and scarves that showed solidarity with important struggles;

My jacket was covered with patches that supported the saving of the oceans, that made clear I stood with the Zapatistas, and that called out racism and homophobia.

I said to myself, ‘When people look at me, they can see my dedication; they will be inspired to ask questions, to learn more, to strive, to struggle, to change the world.’

But actually, few people asked. It was, first and foremost, for me- to make me feel active, involved, and keyed in, to look cool…

Most of it was futile, worthless, a chasing after the wind, not doing anywhere near what I made myself believe it was.

---

I dedicated myself to theology that was progressive and radical, public and political.

I devised the most clever and intricate theological reflections; I presented new interpretations of the biblical text designed to stimulate social transformation.

I filled my CV with accounts of seminars given, papers delivered, chapters written, and accolades collected.

I said to myself, ‘you are making it happen. You’ve achieved a lot. Your wisdom is acknowledged by incredible people.’

But now, I wonder…  I perceive that it might all be a chasing after the wind.

---

I was condescending to theology and spirituality that was ‘personal’ or ‘individual’. Theology, I reasoned, was about building the movement, pushing things forward, transforming the social context.

God was a liberator;

Jesus was a child refugee, a worker, a prisoner, and finally a victim of state terror;

We drew strength for the social struggle out of understanding his social struggle;

He wasn’t your ‘best friend’, your ‘co-pilot’, or your ‘lover’;

He was our ‘comrade’, our archetype, our example… our leader…

I said to myself, ‘Jesus exists to give the struggle for social transformation meaning. He is our lens, our paradigm. The personal prayers and poems are a distraction at best and a detour at worst.’

---

Then my world fell apart…

---

Everything familiar vanished.

The days became a wash of confusion, loss, loneliness, despair, screams, and tears…

I descended to the depths, becoming ever more frightened at every new realization of just how deep it went…

I, the teacher, was undone- a naked, weeping heap on the floor of an empty room.

---

I looked back on my social media posts of the weeks before;

The Kurds, the PLO, the IRA;

The Ulster Unionists, the struggle in Western Sahara;

The buffoonery of Donald Trump; the wit of Jon Stewart;

The impeccable arguments of social theorists; 

The right political music; the most conscious hip hop, world music, and reggae;

None of it mattered. 

It was futility, worthless, a chasing after the wind… A wasting of time…

I was alone… and none of it was good company.

I said to myself, ‘why did you think this was who you were? Why did you invest yourself in this? Did you think that this was your strength, you sustenance?

‘Fool… You utter fucking fool’…

---

I, the teacher, noticed something very strange and disorienting:

All became personal and individual

All became survival.

I found myself weeping on the shoulders of people who attended churches of which I disapproved;

I found myself having to pull over, weeping on the side of the road, at Mark Heard singing ‘I Know My Redeemer Lives’, a hymn that, a week earlier, I’d probably have dismissed as overly sentimental and theologically dubious; 

I stopped thinking so much, lit a candle in front of an icon of Christ and, as I had no wisdom to give or knowledge to share, was quiet…

I found myself praying very simple prayers, prayers like ‘Please help me. If you’re there please help me’…

                                                                    ---

My world became very small. 

Rojava, Western Sahara, the Greek economy, the refugee crisis, Congress, Westminster, the Dáil, and the faltering Irish peace process all receded across a far horizon.

I was re-introduced to Jesus- a simple man who grieved at the death of his cousin and wept at the grave of a friend;

I was reintroduced to God- a God who an ancient Hebrew declared ‘near to the broken-hearted and saves those whose spirits are crushed.’

I removed badges and patches from my jacket. 

A great many causes and movements will need to do without my endorsement for a time.

I’m listening to very different music and reading very different books.

I said to myself, ‘find out who you are, apart from all this’…

                                                                       ---

The people are still there, but they look different.

The 'Palestinians' and the 'Irish' that I cared for in the abstract have become people again. They are are still there, but now they are individual brothers and sisters, in Bethlehem and Belfast, who message to say that I am in their prayers...

---

I, the teacher, am leaving aside my teaching for a time.

I have only one thing left to teach:

Know God; know yourself;

Be just and do good…

But don’t neglect your deepest heart while you do it…

'Preaching the Gospel': What To Say (and what not to say...)

Extremist Christian cleric (I’m sorry but there’s really no other descriptive term for him) Pastor James McConnell of the Belfast Tabernacle Church has been given an official warning for hate speech by the police for his comments about Islam, made during a sermon in May of last year in which he said ‘Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.’

McConnell was defiant over the warning, saying he did not accept it. ‘The police tried to shut me up and tell me what to preach', he said. 'It’s ridiculous. I believe in freedom of speech. I’m going to keep on preaching the Gospel.’

I wrote a post about this in May of last year, so I’ll not go into great depth about how unacceptable McConnell’s words are, but simply reiterate that they are the worst form of sectarianism, in that they dehumanize and (literally) demonize an entire community specifically for their religious belief.

His words are not simply intolerant; they are intolerable, particularly in a context like Northern Ireland, in which incidence of racist-related crime are so disproportionately high.

But I’d like to examine McConnell’s response to his police warning, because I think it makes some spurious claims that need to be challenged:

‘The police tried to shut me up and tell me what to preach’

Although it’s becoming more and more common for certain Christians to immediately play this particular ‘persecution’ card, in fact the police are not telling McConnell what to preach. He can say anything he wants in his church, his pulpit, or his home.

The specific charge against McConnell has to do with a breach of the Communications Act 2003. Simply put, he broadcast his sermon online, which is a very different matter.

 ‘I believe in freedom of speech’

So do the rest of us, but ‘free speech’ is not, nor has it ever been, the right to say anything you want, about anything or anyone you want. The law recognizes that some speech- in some circumstances and about certain subjects- is unlawful. Hate speech is a real thing, an actual criminal offense, in that it does actual damage to society by placing certain people at risk of harm.

As has been famously said, freedom of speech does not give you the right to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded cinema.

McConnell yelled ‘Fire!’ in the most crowded cinema there is- the internet.

He declared some of the most vulnerable people in our society less than human and demonic. The police think he broke the law and now he’ll have his day in court.

‘I’m going to keep on preaching the Gospel’

This is the strangest bit of McConnell’s comments because, if my memory serves, nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus ever say anything- good or bad- about any other religious faith.

This is an important point, as Jesus lived in one of the most multicultural- and multi-faith- regions in human history, and yet the biblical text never has him uttering a peep about any of it. We can assume that, like any observant Jew, Jesus might have disliked images of the emperor or other deities but, crucially, the biblical text never explicitly mentions it.

The Roman pantheon; Mithra worship; Zoroastrianism; various Gnostic and Wisdom religions that flourished in the ancient near east…

It all goes unmentioned.

And yet, oddly, many Christians obviously believe that passing judgment on the religious beliefs of others- often to their face- is an essential part of ‘sharing the Gospel’.

It’s not enough that the Gospel be good news; it must be better news.

It’s not enough that the Gospel be true; all other faiths must be definitively false.

We don’t see this in the biblical text. Jesus never argued that the Father who sent him was superior to Jupiter. Certainly, as time went on, the Christian faith did set itself definitively against all other faiths, and went to unbelievable lengths to minutely explain why every other faith was wrong- even evil.

But we don’t see that in Jesus. The biblical text seems to imply that the Gospel that Jesus did preach- food for the poor, sight to the blind, release to the prisoners, freedom for the captives, life for the lifeless, a voice for the voiceless- need never publicly weigh in on the faith of anyone else.

If we say what Jesus said, and seek to do what Jesus did, I don’t think we’ll ever need to weigh in on the faith of anyone else either.

McConnell can hold any belief he wants about Islam.

He might even believe that he should publicly declare his belief to whoever will listen.

That’s his opinion.

But it is not the Gospel.

Ireland's 'Yes': Converting the Church to Christianity

It won’t come as a huge surprise to regular readers that I’m absolutely delighted with the results of Ireland’s referendum to amend the Irish Constitution to legally affirm same-sex marriages. The scale of the vote- 62.1% in favour- was, in one way, unbelievable, and in other ways, what anyone watching closely would have expected.

Many figured that rural Ireland- and there’s a lot of it- would be close run, with ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ battling over ever inch; in the end, rural Ireland swung ‘Yes’ by a wider margin than any ‘Yes’ campaigner could have hoped.

Many thought Evangelical immigrants from Africa and Asia- barely ever noticed by the media, but often the most populated churches on any given Sunday- might have come to the ‘No’ campaign’s salvation; this didn’t materialize.

Many thought that it’d be close; it wasn’t even close.

Only Roscommon/South Leitrim- the one constituency to scrape out a ‘No’- kept it from being a clean sweep. I’m a ‘Rossie’ by way of my gran’s family and her people, so that was a very personal disappointment… But trust me, I’ll get over my grief!

Make no mistake: this was a loss in every way for the Irish Catholic Church. The church that bore us, baptized us, confirmed us, raised us, taught us… and taught us… and taught us… They told us to vote ‘No’, and we said ‘no’ and voted ‘Yes’.

The Church’s reaction has been as deaf-eared and thoughtless as ever, summed up in two of its most senior figures.

The Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin declared himself ‘deeply saddened’, going as far to pronounce the result not just ‘a defeat for Christian principles, but a defeat for humanity’.

His solution? ‘The church must take account of this reality’, he said, ‘but in the sense that it must strengthen its commitment to evangelization.’

More of the same, just with more emphasis, then…

Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, was, to his credit, a little more nuanced and circumspect. ‘The Church needs a reality check right across the board’, he said bluntly.  ‘We have to stop and have a reality check, not move into denial of the realities. We won’t begin again with a sense of renewal, with a sense of denial.

‘Have we drifted away completely from young people?’ he wondered aloud. ‘I ask myself, most of these young people who voted “yes” are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the Church.’

Both of these men are working from a flawed premise. They both seem to think that the problem is that the Catholic Church has failed to adequately get its message across. Somehow, they seem to believe, the message- gay people are ‘intrinsically disordered’; gay people are a social and theological problem; gay people must be instructed, managed, regulated, and above all else, kept in check and in their place- simply needs to be stated more lucidly, more clearly.

What neither man seems able to grasp- though Martin does come closer- is that Irish young people have indeed gotten the message.

They have heard it loud and clear… and have rejected it.

They heard the endless rhetoric about the danger that marriage equality posed to ‘the family’ and, in the end, they just didn’t buy it.

Why? They simply know too many gay people.

LGBT issues are no longer an abstract issue for them. They are friends with gay people; they are the brothers and sisters of gay people; they are the nieces and nephews of gay people.

They now know that gay people live, dream, feel, buy furniture, have birthdays, hate pickles, borrow your pen and don’t return it, make incredible pasta sauce, play their music too loud, are brilliant at helping with the difficult maths homework, pick thoughtful Christmas gifts, can make them laugh, cry, be incredibly silly…

… and yes, they can fall in love.  

The Catholic Church repeated endlessly that LGBT people were an existential threat to our families; but most Irish people have known for a very long time that LGBT people were our family.

There is also a dark side to all of this, and the fact that the Church still doesn’t get it shows how spectacularly thoughtless they can be.

It eventually threads back to the Ryan and Murphy Reports and the systemic, organized, and structured abuse the Church visited on the Irish people.

The clerical child abuse scandal within the industrial schools run for decades by the Catholic Church in Ireland have for years been an open wound  for many Irish people, whether they be Catholic, lapsed Catholic, never-Catholic, or would-be Catholic.

The Ryan and Murphy Reports finally threw official, detailed light onto the devastating full scale of the child abuse:

over 800 known serial abusers;

over 200 Catholic institutions;

over 35 years;

abuse not accidental, sporadic, or opportunistic, but methodical;

not a tragic failure of the system, but, horrifically, the system itself-

We now understand why the scandals are referred to, I believe without an ounce of hyperbole, as ‘Ireland’s gulag’ and ‘the map of an Irish hell’.

Reading those reports- and I have read them- is like staring the antichrist full in the face.

Reading them finally confirmed to me why someone as compassionate as the Jesus of the biblical text would ever suggest such a cruel and unusual use for a millstone.

Reading them left me sad, sick, and enraged.

Beyond that, the Church’s reaction was- and continues to be- I believe the very embodiment of the word ‘inadequate’. First, there was silence, and where there wasn’t silence there was noise- obfuscation, platitudes, and rationalization.

So make no mistake, this referendum was indeed about looking the Church squarely in the face and saying, 'Don’t you ever again tell me what is right, good, or appropriate for my life, my nation, or my family, ever.’

In spite of it all, it does not mean that there is no God. I care deeply for my faith and my Church. I believe in redemption, in salvation, in conversion.

What does that look like, in an Ireland with a church and a populace so thoroughly alienated from each other?

My work exploring the legacies of Latin American liberation theology leads me to believe that we need to think about the process of evangelization and conversion differently. In the midst of systemic oppression and marginalization of the people of Central and South America, the relationship between the people and their Church needed to be re-imagined. Brazilian priest and theologian Frei Betto described the relationship thus:

After (Vatican II and Medellín in 1968)... It wasn’t so much a question of the Church’s opting for the poor as of the poor’s- forced by the repression of the people’s and trade union movements- opting for the Church. In other words, the poor turned to the Church in order to remain organized, articulate, conscious, and active... the poor invaded the Church (and) Catholic priests and bishops began to be converted to Christianity.

What I believe this means in our context is that, wittingly and unwittingly, the Church has damaged LGBT people and their families. That is the ‘reality check’ that the Church must explore.

Beyond that, the Church needs to be converted to Christianity, to the Gospel of Jesus- food for the poor, sight to the blind, release to the prisoners, freedom for the captives, life for the lifeless, a voice for the voiceless.

The ‘Yes’ result can be the beginning of that conversion.

LGBT people of faith, along with their families, friends, and allies, can be part of that conversion, as Betto suggests, by invading the Church and converting it to Christianity;

It might not happen, and that would be perfectly natural. The social and political situations are completely different, maybe even divergent. The oppressed and the marginalized of Central and South America ‘needed’ the Church; LGBT people in Ireland have achieved any liberation they’ve achieved without the Church; indeed, they’ve achieved it in spite of the Church.

Most poignantly, there are the experiences of LGBT people who have suffered immeasurably from the myriad of cruel and unusual processes of trying to square a gay circle, the endless bogus therapies designed to 'fix' them, 'repair' them, blasphemously referred to as 'conversion'.

It is not they who need to be converted; it is the Church. 

But there is a chance. There are devout Catholic people, gay and straight, who care about our Church and are concerned for its soul.

The Church is our mission field. We feel the need to be her ‘Easter people’.

We wish to see her evangelized, to see her converted to Christianity, to see her repent, so see her raised from death to life, to see her sin set aside, and her life restored.

The Church does not deserve this. She does not deserve our love. She does not deserve salvation; she does not deserve Christ’s love. She despised and rejected the very least among us, and has therefore despised and rejected him.

Simply put, the Church doesn’t deserve grace. She doesn’t deserve forgiveness.

But that is part of the Gospel of Jesus as well. St. Paul saw it as the heart of the Gospel: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…

Against all my thoughts, feelings, and maybe even my better judgement, I’m willing to extend grace, to begin that forgiveness process, and to be part of the evangelization of the Church.

It’s my way, I suppose, of saying ‘Yes’…

St. Joseph the Worker: A Reflection for International Workers' Day

Today is 1 May, International Workers' Day.

Today is also the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

The feast was decreed by Pope Pius XII in 1955, specifically to counteract International Workers’ Day, a day originally declared to commemorate the Haymarket tragedy in Chicago in 1886, which came out of the fight for the 8-hour working day, and now a day of international solidarity for workers, trade unionists, and activists struggling for safety, security, and justice for all working people everywhere.

Unfortunately, Pius’ decree had little to do with commemorating the struggles of the past or those of his own day; as ever, this was about controlling, regulating, directing.

Joseph, from the hierarchy's point of view, needed to serve as the ‘patron of workers’ the ‘model of workers’.

And what was that model? 

Teachings and stories tend to stress patience, persistence, the value of hard work.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but if Joseph- or Christ, Mary, or any other saint- simply becomes a cipher for dogma and social control, the true meaning of their lives are lost. 

Joesph was a worker, yes.

He was also, like many other workers before and since, a victim of organized state terror who became a refugee with his family- as do many workers today,

the same people drowning daily in the Mediterranean,

or dying of thirst in the Southwestern deserts of Mexico and the US,

Politicians and populists demonize them, raving to ‘their’ workers about how ‘these’ workers will steal 'their' jobs and rob 'their' taxes.

One slogan of the international labour movement declares, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’;

In the biblical text, Jesus declares, ‘if you have done it- or not done it- to one of the least of my brothers, you have done it- or not done it- to me.’

Jesus spent the vast majority of his life- over 90%- as a worker, a tradesman, living in a small village.

What most of the anti-immigrant (should I say ‘anti-worker’?) rhetoric fails to consider is that most people want just that; 

to live in their own country, in their own community, working in safety, security, free from state terror, war, and poverty.

Just what Jesus and his father did for most of their lives…

Does the wealthy West really have the ego to think that people uproot themselves, pay exorbitant fees to traffickers, and take long, potentially- deadly journeys because they are lazy?! 

Because they want 'our' jobs, 'our' benefits', 'our' livelihoods?

The tendrils of domineering foreign policy, global economics, and environmental collapse all work to make life where they are un-liveable for many...

Joseph is the patron saint of these people. He is not the calm, quiet, patient, dutiful, compliant ‘worker’ of the Church hierarchy;

He is the uprooted worker, the fleeing worker, the worker from a small village, occupied by a foreign power;

The worker seeking to raise his family in peace, yet always at the mercy of the whims of governments and officials;

The worker who is part of an empire and an economy he did not create, and over which he has little or no influence.

The Church has very often fostered a theology of regulation and control, but the majority of the world- Catholics, other Christians, other religious groups, and secularists- have rightly rejected such theology.

We owe it to Jesus and Joseph to foster theologies of solidarity and resistance;

Theologies not just of work, but of workers.

Holy St. Joseph, pray for us…

Hitler and Hillary: Sorting Out What's Evil (And What's Not...)

I’d like to begin with a brief reading list:

The War Against the Jews, by Lucy Dawidowicz;

Night, by Elie Wiesel;

A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism, by Phyllis Goldstein and Harold Evans;

The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939-1944, by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research;

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, by Richard Rhodes.

I've read them all, and highly recommend them to give a thorough knowledge of the Holocaust in policy and practice.

One more thing: until you have read them, do not compare Hillary Clinton to Hitler, because you will expose yourself as a spectacular idiot.

I bring this up because of this photo montage that’s been making its way around social media since Hilary Clinton announced her candidacy for the US presidency:

Obviously, the intention is to draw comparisons between Hitler and Hillary in terms of a supposedly shared philosophy. If nothing else, the picture in some ways shows the loathing that many have for Hillary, and the level of danger that many feel she poses for the US if she were to win.

Of course, I’m not supporting Hillary’s candidacy for the simple reason that I’m an anarchist and am therefore not supporting anyone’s candidacy. But regardless of that, I find the photo appalling.

It shows, first of all, a fundamental ignorance of history- the history of Hitler, the Nazi regime, and its official policy known as Die Endlösung der Judenfrage (‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’), which led to the Holocaust, the prolonged, systematic genocide of the Jewish people and other untermenschen (‘inferior people’).

Secondly, I believe it shows a profound deterioration in political discourse in the US, an inability to disagree without immediately resorting to labelling a political adversary in the most hateful, malevolent descriptions available.

Finally, it constitutes a basic misunderstanding of the nature of evil. In his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), published in 1925 and 1926, Hitler laid out his political philosophy and his vision for the future of the German people. At its core is a monomaniacal loathing for the Jews and his belief that destroying them was the ultimate destiny of the German people. It is a vision of hatred, war, power, and racial dictatorship, laid out for the world to see long before he had the means or the power to implement it.

It is an evil book which led to unimaginable evil actions that led to global war, not unintentionally but by design. It led to evil so great that its survivors could only think of one word for it:

‘Holocaust’, ‘all burnt’…

Regardless of any of this, the creators of the meme would undoubtedly argue that they want to point out what they see as similarities on a policy-making level and a basic philosophical similarity between Hitler and Hillary. This cuts absolutely no ice with me. Anyone who believes a policy-making or philosophical connection can be made between the Third Reich and a moderately center-left(ish) establishment Democrat does not understand what went on during the Holocaust.

Does. Not. Understand.

Trying to compare the ‘quotes’ from Hitler and Hillary is a cynical and preposterous exercise. An un-cited and out-of-context quote attributed to Hillary, in which she says something about the importance of an individuals’ desires being thought about as part of society as a whole, is linked to an un-cited and out-of-context quote attributed to Hitler where he also comments on society vs. the individual. One might as well point out that, because both individuals once said something about 'trees', that they both hold similar ideas about the environment.

This isn’t the first attempt to equate Hillary with Hitler. Have a quick spin around the internet and other absurd comparisons pop up:

That Hitler and Hillary had similar domestic policies;

that Hitler- like Hillary- favoured ‘socialized medicine’;

That Hitler- like Hillary- wanted to ban guns.

Again, to even infer any equality between the two people shows a fundamental ignorance of the Third Reich and its diseased leadership. In short, the destruction of the Jews was Hitler’s domestic policy, the root of everything else. His ideas of 'socialized medicine' were that the destruction of the weak and the sick was far more humane than their protection, that the purpose in destroying ‘the weak’ was to allow for a flourishing of a pure, strong, superior race. Finally, the idea that Hitler banned guns is a complete myth. German Fascism was completely built around the propagation of war and armaments. Re-arming Germany after what he saw as the ignominy of the disarming of Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after WW1 was one of Hitler’s primary ambitions.

But of course, the point of making these comparisons in the first place isn’t part of some intellectual exercise pointing out interesting similarities between thoughts and policies of the two figures;

It’s about lazily and clumsily trying to defame a presidential candidate by associating her with the 20th century's preeminent monster, the man whose hatred of Jews was so singularly fixed that he concocted- and carried out- history's most extraordinary solution to 'the Jewish problem': harness all the resources and industrial might of Europe's greatest industrial society- all government, all transport, all infrastructure, all bureaucracy, all function- to wiping them out. 

And in large measure, he succeeded. The thousand year-old Ashkenzai Jewish society of Central and Eastern Europe- rich in culture, literature, and industry- was utterly destroyed;

All that survived were individuals;

Countries whose pre-war Jewish populations numbered in the millions, by 1945, might have numbered a few hundred...

So, if the meme-makers want to go on about the relative nature of society verses that of the individual, they should ponder that...

As to the spurious notion that a concern for ‘society’ is in some way, not only a negation of the ‘individual’, but also on some level tied to the evil of the Nazis, it might be worth mentioning that the Biblical text does not overly concern itself with the much-vaunted ‘individual’; in fact, no one did until the Enlightenment. The Hebrew Bible gives much more time and attention to God’s relationship with a ‘people’, a ‘nation’, and that through that people, salvation will be brought to the world. In the New Testament, again, the basic framework for the salvation of the world is a new type of society, the ‘church’, made up of all peoples and all nations. Does this mean that there is no thought, love, or care for the individual in the biblical text? Of course not, but the individual is always an intrinsic part of the whole of creation, and the restoration of creation is the work of the people of God.

What does all this practically mean? In the context of political discourse and electoral politics, we need to foster types of debate that don’t rely on demonization, slander, accusation, and hate;

We need to be able to see the humanity in those we politically oppose;

We need to respect the memory of the victims of the greatest crimes committed in human history by not making cheap equations to this or that current political issue;

And we need to draw a distinction between ‘evil’ and what we might believe to be ‘in error’…

Hillary is not Hitler, full stop.

Reflection for Easter Sunday: Burning the Empire Down...

Today is Easter Sunday. Jesus is risen.

He appears to some of his followers; women, to be exact. The women, astonished, tell the men. The men don’t believe them.

Then Jesus appears to the men. Then they believe.

Eventually, the men will make themselves the rulers of the Church and make sure that women never tell them anything ever again…  

But Easter will not be contained. It can’t possibly ever be tamed.

Easter is the revolution- social, political, spiritual transformation.

If Christ is raised, then nothing is impossible. How can we ever say, ‘that could never happen’ ever again?

Nothing can ever be the same. Anyone who thought the status quo could just go on as normal was deluding themselves;

Even those who eventually co-opted Christianity into their imperial structures could never truly diffuse its incendiary message.

They could cloak it, confuse it, obfuscate it, entangle it, bend it, twist it…

But in the end, this was a fire that had only one purpose:

Burn the empire to the ground.

Jesus said, ‘I have come to set fire to the earth; how I wish it were already burning!’ (Luke 12:49)

At the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, we lit the Paschal fire;

From it, we lit the Paschal Candle;

And from it, we passed the fire into the church and passed it to each other, lighting the candles each of us held…

This is a fire that will never go out.

This is a fire which exposes all the structures of power, empire, violence, and greed for the pile of kindling it is.

This is a fire that exposes all the wealth, stocks, shares, bonds, and accounts of the world as mere paper and plastic…

The radical Good News- food for the poor, sight to the blind, release to the prisoners, freedom for the captives, life for the lifeless, a voice for the voiceless- burns every oppressive structure to ash…

Bakunin said that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge;

Jesus told us that the urge to set fire to the empire is a spiritual one.

So have a Holy and Blessed Easter.

Keep your matches dry…

Reflection For Holy Saturday: Jesus Is Dead.

This is Holy Saturday. Jesus is dead.

We spend so much time talking about how Christ ‘died and rose again’ that we fail to meditate on his death. He died. His heart stopped beating, his brain flat-lined and his body started to decay.

And when we do engage with his death, we run the risk of engaging with his death grotesquely or forensically, like the disturbing mania a few years ago over the disgusting gore-fest that was Mel Gibson's ‘Passion of the Christ’.

But for the most part, Christ’s death remains for most Christians a theological footnote, an unpleasant necessity that assuages God’s justice and allows them to go to heaven.

But Holy Saturday is when we come face to face with a dead Jesus. On that day, Christians worship a corpse.

There is no Sunday. Dead bodies don’t come back to life.

To speak of Easter Sunday on Holy Saturday is to not comprehend what happened on Good Friday. It is to understand Christ's death only on a philosophical or theological level. 

However, we must experience Christ's death from the place of the disciples who watched it happen. They did not go home that night saying, 'O well, no matter. He promised to rise.' No, they went away dead men, the most dead men ever, for they had lived with Christ for three years and experienced the Kingdom of God in a way no one ever had. And now it was over… Killed.

The Empire won. Corruption won. It was all a lie. There was no hope; and no hope of hope ever again.

We will never be able to feel as they felt. But we can take this day to meditate what it means to live without hope, to think about those who, in our world, are living with no hope:

the sex slave in a back room of an unmarked building in a back alley of a city whose name they don't know;

the refugee from an African war now living in a camp a thousand miles away from the spot where she was raped as her husband was shot in front of her and was raped by soldiers yesterday and wonders if they’ll be back today;

The detainee in Guantanamo Bay, denied any semblance of universally-recognised judicial rights, who must come to terms with the fact that, even if found to be wrongfully detained, will never be released; 

The woman in an abusive relationship ignored or called a liar because her husband holds a position of power and influence in their church;

the child handcuffed to a sewing machine who will be beaten if they don't meet their quota of designer handbags;

the family coping with disability whose vital lifelines are being cut by austerity packages;

the family of a young child killed by a drone strike which the US government will neither confirm or deny launching;

The Palestinian Christian farmer watching Israeli bulldozers tear up his olive trees to make way for a new Israeli settlement, funded in part by his Christian brothers and sisters in the US;

These are the ‘Holy Saturday people’, the worthless and the hopeless that live in a world where God is dead and will not come back to life.

There is no Easter Sunday without Holy Saturday. It is through the blackness of Holy Saturday that we must see the joy of the women at the tomb, the joy and courage of the disciples.

Easter is about life in the fullest sense. Not theological life or philosophical life, but the life of a man who was dead and then not dead anymore.

The ‘Holy Saturday people’ of this world are looking for ‘Easter people’. The essence of Christianity is not in doctrine or confessions, important as they are. The first Christians, the first ‘Easter people’, had a simple message: ‘Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. We’ve seen him.’

This is what we have to offer the ‘Holy Saturday people’. Nothing is impossible anymore. No system is so evil, so oppressive, so entrenched that we cannot overthrow it. If Jesus is not dead then nothing is impossible. We await no revolution; Easter was the revolution.

But that’s all for another day.

Today is Holy Saturday. Jesus is dead.