marramgrass

Reuben William Alexander Goody.

Matthew 21:1-11 (NIV):

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: “Say to the Daughter of Zion, ‘See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Hosanna in the highest!”

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”

The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Cheering crowds, not the normal prophet’s welcome, because they expected something very different to what they would get. In a few days the crowd would be cheering in a less welcoming tone, and still he came.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

• Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Tuesday, symbolic of the last blow out before Lent begins.
• Elsewhere, Mardi Gras and Carnival are celebrated for the same purpose.
• Ash Wednesday is named for the liturgical practice of being marked with ashes as a sign of repentance.
• The ashes used are from the burning of the palm leaves or crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday.
• Lent is the season of fasting, prayer and reflection leading up to Easter, which is forty days long not counting feast days (Sundays) when the tradition is that the fast can be broken.

The various churches and traditions observe the season and the fast in different ways, including abstaining from certain foods, more rigourous fasting, different patterns of worship and liturgy, or other forms of abstinence. Last year and this year I’ve known people observing Lent by abstaining from some form of technology, for example internet access outside of work. Virtual Methodist proposed a full-on Lo-Tec Lent, but I’m not sure how many takers he had (and he has himself admitted defeat).

Lent and Easter are times when some churches who would normally run from such things let their liturgical side show a little, and the Lenten fast seems to remain a fairly common observance in these parts — anecdotally, of course, since I haven’t carried out a detailed survey! Perhaps its popularity is connected to the waning of New Year’s resolutions two or three months down the line, as inspiration to put that chocolate bar down?

Years, that is.

New Year has never been terribly significant for me. In our family, Christmas has always been the big occasion, and my New Year’s Eve has been marked by a quiet evening formerly in the company of Mr Kelly, and then of Mr Holland. Of course, I’ll be heading out the door in a couple of hours to join in slightly more than a night in front of the TV.

I’ll remember some things from 2008, in, as they say, no particular order:

• Our first foreign holiday in a while.
• I, and others around me, have spent rather a lot of time in the City Hospital. I was only visiting, but others in my family were the ones being visited.
• I’ve met many great people for the first time.
• I’ve been aware of my outlook on various things changing dramatically.
• Most memorably, 2008 has been the year when my wife and I discovered our impending parenthood. (See previous point :-)

So. 2009, then. I’m not one for resolutions — they always seem doomed to failure — and I tend to be hostile to too formal goal-setting. Instead, I have a few what you might call hopes-becoming-intentions for the coming year.

• In 2008, I read fewer books than in any year since I was in my early teens. I’m not happy with that, but it’s a matter of time and priority. In 2009, I’d like to read more, but I’ll settle for becoming comfortable with not.
• I hope to write more — for profit (of course) but, more importantly, for fun. I am under definite orders from my wife to enter at least one competition this year.
• On that subject, I’d like to break my habit of constructing sentences with such a confusing number of paranthetical clauses :-D
• I’d like to attain a slightly closer to normal body mass index.
• It’s my intention to photograph more. At some point around our move back to Northern Ireland, I stopped taking pictures just for the fun of it. More on this one next week.
• Then there is everything that will come with the birth of our child. I’ve no idea where to begin, there.

There it is. One year on its way out, one on its way in.

Sunday 30th November, 2008: the First Sunday in Advent.

My brother has developed a family tradition whereby he will, on roughly this Sunday, haul his fiancee to my parents’ house and put up their Christmas tree. If you haven’t seen my mother’s tree, look out your window :) It stands about seven feet tall in a low-ceilinged room, and I don’t know how many lights are on it — possibly more than are on the tree outside City Hall. (Actually, given the feebleness of that tree, I wouldn’t be surprised.) My father likes to joke that if you listen carefully you can hear the wheel in the electricity meter speeding up.

The evening, including a visit to see my gran in the City Hospital, was a reminder that alongside the liturgy, the longing and the waiting in darkness, this joy and these lights are also true markers of the season, and — if I can say it — offer a little taste of Kingdom. There is room for laughter in the observance, an accompaniment to the hope of the day.

I’ve seen the signs that Christmas is coming. Shopping centres have tinsel everywhere, we’ve started buying gifts and Starbucks have rolled out the red cups and the “seasonal” music on repeat. Days are shorter and the deepest of winter is getting nearer.

It’s still the first half of November.

Since we got married, each year has brought a few more decorations, a bit more time and effort spent on the tree, a few more twinkling lights. I play the humbug, but the truth is that I love it. I love the carol services and the decorations and the music and trees and lights. I wish it would snow on Christmas day and I get that daft, growing excitement as Advent rolls into Christmastide.

But not yet, because it’s still the first half of November.

I won’t rail about the de-Christianising of Christmas — that’s just silly. Christians are just one group who feast in late December; the bottom of the year can’t but be a significant point in any calendar. More than that, we can’t pretend that Christmas hasn’t become a cultural event completely apart from our remembering the Incarnation, however deeply our culture has a Christian seed somewhere in its past.

(Not saying that’s not the heart of the season for me, but there’s more than me around, y’know.)

This is my question: what does it say about our need for celebration and a little joyfulness that the preparation and decoration and everything else was starting in mid-October, more than two months before Christmas day? We’re desperate for something, aren’t we?

Do we run the risk of being heartily sick of it all by December 25th? What good does a celebration do us when it’s been diluted down to nothing?

Think about it, and I’ll come back to you in a few weeks. Advent is my favourite season, after all.

Some reflections for you on Armistice Day:

Glenn talks poppies, twice. As do Jonny, Cheryl and David.

The poppy keeps coming up in conversation, along with the question of how to remember rightly. Brodie thinks carefully about the meeting of pacifism and Remembrance, leading up to what I’m sure will be a useful examination of solidarity and neighbourliness. It’s Brodie’s final point that rings most true for me:

Fourthly, remembering is not a glorification of war but a lament. Lament is a very scriptural practice and one that at times for the health of a nation needs a national expression.

Brother Maynard is also worth reading.

Every year I think about how I relate to our corporate Remembrance, and every year I seem to get further away from a conclusion. Perhaps our agonising at such length tells something about importance.

On holiday last week we spent some time with friends whose church has been talking around the idea of a possible future church plant in Glasgow Harbour, a newish development by the Clyde.

As we talked, and as we had a look around by the new blocks of flats, I noticed the similarity in intent between Glasgow Harbour and the much talked-about Titanic Quarter development in Belfast.

Both are marked by a very upwardly-mobile, idealised dream of stylish waterfront living, and both question any ideals we might have about what it means to live in community with others: next door, locally, and across the city.

If you want to talk at length about the potential impact Titanic Quarter will have on the wider area around East Belfast, crookedshore is your man, but as I talked with our friend last week I got a little disturbed by the way TQ’s cousin at Glasgow Harbour is shaping up.

The development is sold as a heavily media-inspired lifestyle. The financial cost alone is worth questioning, but as we talked and teased and picked at questions about the place of church in such an environment — even more essentially, what church could possibly look like in that environment — we wondered at how everything about the place seems designed to minimize personal contact.

If you have the money you can have your own designated underground space in which to park your sports car; from there you’ll get into the keypad-protected elevator that takes you to within yards of the door of your self-contained apartment. Access to the buildings is on the waterfront, shielded from the city behind by the rest of the development and by the Clydeside Expressway. You’re obviously intended to arrive and leave by car — public transport’s only half a mile away, but look at all that prestige parking space. It will be interesting to see how the public green space around about is developed and used; you could call me skeptical.

In an environment like this, which seems to make any form of local community difficult, what for church?

If church sits somewhere between expressing existing community and inspiring and coalescing something new and greater, how can this be fulfilled in Glasgow Harbour? Surely such a disconnected and closeted lifestyle will be damaging for those who choose to live there; it’s already too easy to draw away behind doors, screens and keyboards…

It is clear, and here again we touch on our conversations of last week, that it will require some creative thinking about what church might look like, but also perhaps a recapturing of the very basic notion of a group people choosing to be together, sharing what they have in common and what they don’t, without too many of the religious extras by which we’ve become distracted.

When we drove around Glasgow Harbour last Thursday evening, it felt half-finished: hoardings still surround building sites, scaffolding still waits, a significant number of windows are still dark. It felt bleak, like something out of near-future dystopian fiction, but hopeful — wanting to be bright and joyful. The only way to satisfy that hope will be a stirring to communal living which challenges much of the philosophy behind the place, a call to something more real, more immediate than the smiling models and stock photography of slick marketing.

How do you market that? More, how do you make it happen?

I am not poor. In fact, by any sensible measure, I am a very, very long way from it. If you’re reading this then the odds are pretty good that you, too, are a fair way from poor. The technology that mediates between us all but guarantees it.

Three-and-some years ago I took part, with thousands upon thousands of others, in the makepovertyhistory march through the streets of Edinburgh. I’m sorry to say that by now my pride at being there is tempered by the fact that most of what I remember about that weekend was the carnival atmosphere. Surely that’s the wrong thing to recall? It was easy for us to participate; we were living in Edinburgh and it cost us little more than a couple of quid for the bus into town. We know others who travelled from all over the UK and beyond, determined to make a statement.

Perhaps that’s worth remembering? 225,000-odd people were motivated enough about an issue to ride for hours in ferries and coaches.

That was more than three years ago. Money is very much in the news again as our credit-based economy starts to judder a little. It’s been said, I can’t remember where, that most of us are only a month or two’s pay cheque away from poverty. That’s probably true — I know what our finances are like.

It hasn’t happened yet.

We’re still rich: we have a roof over our heads, cars in the drive, mobile phones, laptops, games consoles… I don’t understand what it’s like to not have food, shelter, warmth. I’ve never been there, and I hope I never will. Not everyone can say that, and they’re not all too far from home, either.

What can one person do? Little things, I guess. Give money, consume responsibly and thoughtfully, campaign loudly and persistently, learn about how the world works and how the world doesn’t work, learn about what goes on in your own village/town/city. You’ll be surprised.

When you learn, please let yourself be moved.

(If you’re in Northern Ireland, I can point you to some folks who are always glad of a hand. I have the privilege of getting to spend time with women and men who are completely dedicated to tackling the the flaws and consequences of how this society works.)

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day 2008, when (as I write this) 8626 bloggers have signed up to post on the theme of poverty. The idea is to raise awareness of issues and to spark discussion (although does that make “Blog Action Day” a slight misnomer?).

I added this site to the list what seems like a very long time ago, although I’m sure it’s only been a couple of months, if that. I think it’s fair to ask why. After all, I have asked and will continue to ask about the inherent disconnection between online conversations (and often those in the media in general) and what goes on IRL — at least or most especially in those real lives most intimately acquainted with poverty and all its consequences and other attendant issues.

Yet reflection-out-loud and an attempt to generate some discussion can’t hurt, so tomorrow I propose to reflect a little on the intersection between my own life (middle-class, male, white) and questions of poverty, both global and local. Please join in the conversation, either here, on your own blog, or on one of the eight-thousand-and-some others participating.

Let’s talk.