27 February: The Open-handed Missionary V

St Augustine on an Algerian stamp.

Vatican II presents the Church as an ongoing story; the Church is a pilgrim, living; she has a mission: we have all lived a chapter or two. The Church comes from the Son and the Spirit, according to the Father’s word. It is not the theology that lies behind the story, but the story that lies behind the theology. So how do we tell that story? My dear local Arians – the Jehovah’s Witnesses – knock on doors every month, but the Council Fathers realised that:

sometimes … there is no possibility of expounding the Gospel directly and forthwith. Then, of course, missionaries can and must at least bear witness to Christ by charity and by works of mercy, with all patience, prudence and great confidence. Thus they will prepare the way for the Lord and make Him somehow present. (AG 6).

This preparation is what each of us may be called to do at any moment of our lives. Can we in effect tell a story to the little girl or the troubled young mother, starting with, ‘Once upon a time I met a girl called _____ and she was good and beautiful.’ That is Good News, and if our script makes it plain ‘by charity and by works of mercy, with all patience, prudence and great confidence’; that is part of Evangelisation. One man sows, another reaps, but before they can do their work, someone else has prepared the ground.

Richard Bawoobr, of the Missionaries of Africa, the society who welcomed the Uganda Martyrs into the Church, distils Ad Gentes into two activities: Proclamation of the Good News of Jesus, and Witness to this Good News. These complete each other and need each other as the left hand needs the right hand or the left leg the right. Both are essential to our Mission and emphasising one at the expense of the other is detrimental to the Mission itself.

But the Missionaries of Africa have worked in North Africa as witnesses rather than proclaimers for a century and a half; making very few converts, yet achieving a mutual respect with their Muslim neighbours, to the extent that, for example, the Algerian Government helped pay for the restoration of Saint Augustine’s basilica in Hippo, recognising him as a great Algerian. Despite the witness of their martyrs in the 1990s, the Fathers are berated by evangelical protestants for not actively seeking converts by their preaching.

Elsewhere in Africa, despite terrorist groups like Boko Haram, the story is more often one of a peaceful and respectful dialogue of life. A community in a slum area of Dar es Salaam with 70% Muslims reports:

Poverty is a bond between Christians and Muslims. Faith is respected. Coexistence is pacific. Interreligious dialogue is experienced through daily human sharing between neighbours. Christians and Muslims mutually invite each other to eat at the religious festivals: Christmas, Easter, Eïd (after Ramadan)… There is great solidarity at funerals and wakes. The Christian community shows no prejudice whenever help is needed by underprivileged Muslims. The majority of the poor receiving help from parish-based Caritas and World Food Programmes are Muslims. There are many examples of love and trust in a compassionate living together. At the same time, strictly theological dialogue is almost non-existent.

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20 December, Advent Light XX: a slow motion dawn.

Margate Beach on a Grey Day

Fr Tom Herbst OFM, an early supporter and contributor to this blog, died on 8 November. Here is one of his Advent reflections, well worth reading again and appropriate for the Solstice. RIP, Fr Tom, and thank you!

Here, well up there in the Northern Hemisphere, the approach of the Church’s great winter feasts is met by ever shortening days, grayish sunsets subtly shaded with pastel colour, and the gathering shadows of storm-rattled darkness. Even now, as I look out from the giant bay window in my flat toward a slate gray sea, it feels like a slow motion dawn rather than what the clock prosaically states is high noon. And the Church, in her time-tested wisdom, has properly situated the purple cloaked season of waiting and hoping within a test mirrored by nature herself- will the Son of Man ever return; will I ever witness the eastern blaze of a 5:00 AM springtime dawn seen through the very same bay window now shrouded in a feeble mist? One can hope, but for now all I can do is walk my two bemused dogs in the bookended darkness of a seven o’clock dawn and four thirty afternoon sunset.

I have had critics of the Church, harboring grave suspicions of pagan flashbacks, point out the total lack of biblical witness for the date of Christ’s birth, the unlikely probability of shepherds out in the fields in the dead of winter and, far worse, the close congruence of the decadent Roman Saturnalia with the newly minted Feast of the Nativity. Shopping frenzy beginning at mid-November and a near-universal expansion of waistlines don’t help- as a kindly Jehovah’s Witness picture framer said once, utterly confident that I would agree. It seems, though, as if the whole point has been missed. It is the ritual celebration of Christ’s birth and the expectation of God’s promise fulfilled – born of an indestructible hope- that are being celebrated and the vast stage of nature herself hosts the drama. Yes, the shortening days followed by the magic threshold of the Solstice, when that longed for flicker of light begins to wax stronger, formed the reason for the Saturnalia but this has been embodied by the small child laid in a manger; the hope for Emmanuel realized at last.

TJH.

16 December, Advent Light XVI: unexpected lights.

They like bikes in Belgium! Not that they are always the most appropriate means of transport. This is the story of an overloaded bike in Canterbury and what happened next.

We begin with Will parking his bike against a rack where there was already a red lady’s Dutch style bike, not unlike the one outside the shop above. When Will had finished his shopping, the Dutch bike had gone, but there was a red purse on the ground. It had an address in it, a few minutes’ ride away, so off he went. It was shortly before Christmas.

The door was opened by an older lady, dressed in red, pleased to have her purse back: ‘My basket was too full, I am silly!’ now she was ready to press me to take tea in her winter-wonderland front room. A red settee and armchair, flashing lights and a glorious fake tree, a few copies of the Watchtower. The Watchtower magazine of Jehovah’s Witnesses? The same.

Yes, Mrs S was a Witness. Will had always believed that Jehovah’s Witnesses stood at a distance from Christmas and all things Yule. There had been the time when our regular witness missioner, Joe, had knocked on our door at 1.00 p.m. on December 25th with a personal delivery of the magazine. Obviously Christmas day was nothing to him. There had been more than one year when Witnesses expected a Christmas tree, given by a family, to be removed from a shared bay of the hospice where Mrs Turnstone worked. No surrender to other people’s sensibilities there, even when the other people were dying.

‘I came late to the Witnesses through my late husband,’ she explained. ‘But I like to put up something for Christmas to welcome my friends and neighbours. And the lights are a lovely, comforting sight at this time.’

‘What does Joe have to say about it?’ I asked. ‘He knows I take round my share of leaflets. He doesn’t have to know that I have a Christmas tree!’

And perhaps her Christmas tree and hospitality were as powerful a witness as her magazine.

16 March: All ye that enter in at these gates. Gates V.

The word that came to Jeremias from the Lord, saying: Stand in the gate of the house of the Lord, and proclaim there this word, and say: Hear ye the word of the Lord, all ye men of Juda, that enter in at these gates, to adore the Lord.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts the God of Israel: Make your ways and your doings good: and I will dwell with you in this place. Trust not in lying words, saying: The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, it is the temple of the Lord … you put your trust in lying words, which shall not profit you:

To steal, to murder, to commit adultery, to swear falsely, to offer to Baalim, and to go after strange gods, which you know not. And you have come, and stood before me in this house, in which my name is called upon, and have said: We are delivered, because we have done all these abominations. Is this house then, in which my name hath been called upon, in your eyes become a den of robbers? I, I am he: I have seen it, saith the Lord.

Jeremiah 7:1-4;7-11.

If Jeremiah was preaching at a gateway like this, he would get noticed; even if other preachers were getting pushed to the side by impatient passers-by.

Occasionally there are preachers around Canterbury Cathedral’s main Christ Church gate: mostly they seem to be ignored, as the churches themselves are much of the time. People say I’m too nice to them if I stop and chat, or engage with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Someone Else called the Temple a den of robbers, and drove the moneychangers out of the courtyard. They were no doubt raking in a tidy profit, in effect making Mammon, or money, at home in God’s House; going after strange gods, as we are tempted to do today. We may not be directly sacrificing children to Baal or to Mammon but there are many children whose all-but slave labour contributes to our comfortable lifestyle. Think of clothes and shoes made in Asian countries.

Willy-nilly we are caught in a web of sinfulness and can do little to escape it. At least there are some fair trade products on the market that we can buy, and we can hope that the shops we use do indeed check all the way back along the supply chain to see that workers are treated fairly.

Congratulations to Naomi!

Naomi Billingsley, who writes for Agnellus Mirror sometimes as NAIB, has just had her book published. We haven’t yet had time to read it properly but thought we’d tell you about it at once, in case it sells out before you get chance to buy it.

Our friendly Jehovah’s Witnesses often point out to me what they see as ‘design’ in Creation. My reply has always been to say, yes, but designer is just too inadequate a word. It conjures up a drawing board and ruler  and compasses, whereas Blake, according to Naomi, sees God as an artist, a being bursting with loving imagination.

WT.

Here follows the review on the publisher’s website:

William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible.

But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence?

These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake’s paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake’s is thus a distinctively ‘Romantic’ vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived.

From King’s College London, where Naomi completed her MA:

Naomi Billingsley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research is at the intersection of the histories of Christianity and art in Britain, especially in the Romantic period. Her current project ‘The Formation and Reception of the Macklin Bible’ examines an important illustrated Bible, published between 1791 and 1800.

Naomi completed her PhD at the University of Manchester (2012-2015) on the figure of Christ in William Blake’s pictorial works. She was then Bishop Otter Scholar for Theology and the Arts in the Diocese of Chichester, and taught Art History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Naomi is a graduate of the MA in Christianity and the Arts (2011) and holds a BA in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge (Magdalene, 2010). 

The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination
Naomi Billingsley

I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2018.

 

Abraham and the JWs

Abraham was still on my mind, when I met our Jehovah’s Witness Missionary. I wanted to suggest that Abraham was not a spotless paragon, but that God still worked out his will through him. Not that I was trying to paint the Patriarch as wicked.

When I mentioned Abraham’s deceit, letting the Kings think Sarah was not his wife, my spiritual sparring partner countered: ‘But he had to do this because Sarah was so attractive, she could get from the Kings what they had and Abraham did not, and Abraham would not lose his head’.

As ever, I came away frustrated that discussion did not happen at all. The uncertainty factor implicit in discussion – neither of us may be completely right, both of us could learn from our conversation – was unwelcome.

Indeed uncertainty can be hard to live with. But Abraham surely lived with it:

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. (Genesis 12:1-2)

Abram’s leaving home to cross the desert, was a true act of faith, I agreed, but God is the most active one in this whole story.

My encounter did one good thing: my wife was sleeping after her night shift and was not disturbed by the rappiest knock our door ever undergoes!