Wildpeace again

 

There is a plant called the Oxford Ragwort.  I’m not a botanist or a gardener; some of you may well know more about it than I do.

It is bright yellow, a distant relative of the Daisy.  It has nothing to do with Oxford.  It is native to the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna.  But Eighteenth Century plant collectors did bring samples back to the Botantical Gardens in, yes, Oxford.  From where it was said to have escaped.

I don’t think it ‘escaped’.  I think it did what any plant does.  It produced prodigious amount of seed.  Most of which landed where it was never going to grow.  But a few seeds found the cracks in the limestone walls of university buildings to be ideal places for it to do so.  So much grew that, yes, it came to be mistaken for a plant native to the city.

The next bit of the story is the best.  The railway came to Oxford.  And the beds of the railway tracks turned out to be the best things since the slopes of Etna, all the better when ash fell from trains.  Oxford Ragwort followed the railway across the country.

It was less than welcome in most rural areas.  To cattle, it is quite poisonous.  Farmers have come to spend a lot of time having it pulled up.

But elsewhere large quantities ended up growing at the end of railway lines, including around the docks at Hull.  And, after the Second World War, it came to love and colonise the bomb sites of the city.  Etna Ragwort.  Oxford Ragwort.  Railway Ragwort.  Hull Bomb Site Ragwort.

When I pray ‘Thy kingdom come on earth’, I’m not sure that I pray any longer for an ideal setting shaped just as God would want it to be.  I think I think about tips of green emerging out of rubble.

When I pray for those in whose lives some sort of bomb has gone off, I’m not sure I can pray that the pain and consequences will be magicked away.  But I think I can pray that new things will begin to seed and sprout.

And my recent prayers for the peace have been shaped by newly released U2 music which includes the use of a modern Hebrew poem which is weary with unremitting generations of conflict and ends up asking simply let wildpeace come like wildflower.

I say all this because among all the possible things to pick up from the scripture read at this service one strongly draws attention to itself as the most difficult – Jesus says I came not to bring peace but a sword, I came to bring hostility within families.

What can be going on?  A few chapters earlier Jesus had said Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called children of God.  John’s Gospel even has him say My peace I give you.

It might be an example of a saying of Jesus for which we have lost the original context.   

The original context might be an expectation that when the Messiah comes there will be a new world of justice and peace.  Jesus is recognised as that Messiah.  So why have things not changed?   Perhaps because the expectation was also that the inauguration of the new age would be traumatic.  Elsewhere Jesus himself compares it to the pain of giving birth.  

It is worth looking at the context in which Matthew then sets the saying.

Jesus is sending his disciples out for the first time.  We had an earlier part of this chapter last week.  Say a word of peace to every house you enter.  If it takes seed there, all well and good.  But if it is not the right place for it, let it rebound onto you.

The implication is that there will be many places where peace does not find a home.

And when Jesus says I came not to bring peace but a sword, I came to bring hostility within families that second bit is actually a quotation from the prophet Micah.

Micah is one of the places where we find the lovely image of war being redundant as swords are are beaten into ploughshares. 

But three chapters after that it is Micah who is weary – God’s people are not open to this possibility and Micah can see that closest to him are often those we can be trusted least to be faithful interpreters and practitioners of the way God.

So it doesn’t feel as if Jesus has an actual preference for bringing conflict within families.  It feels more like a warning that praying for, seeking out, God’s new kingdom of peace is going to involve resistance and conflict.

Perhaps there is a hint of the modern idea of us living in ‘bubbles’.  To advocate a fresh understanding or a new path can feel like a  betrayal to those with whom we share our settled ideas and approaches, sometimes even to a relationship-breaking extent.

But the peace-greeting, cross-carrying, cup-of-water-sharing hints and examples around us are more subversive and surer guides than my habitual approach or the consensus of my family and society.

There is a verse in the letter to the Hebrews which says For the word of God is alive and active.  Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

As it happens, it is exactly the same word for sword there as in our passage for today.  To be active God’s word may need to cut deep into me, let alone into those I love and admire most around me.

Perhaps a Parable of Etna Ragwort is there even for peace-resistant people and places, like me, sometimes like those closest to me.

Plants native to the hills of Judea are exotic, attractive and collectable.  Brought all the way to England they seeded and spread in unexpected ways along our trade routes.  The way they grow and are used is sometimes damaging, and then needs weeding out.  But elsewhere they can colonises our most harmed and desolate places.  We are called to spot them and seek them, even to seed them and spread them, until they are mistaken to be native to our city.   

Come wildpeace like wild flower.  Be invasive in and around us, come what may. 

Incidental pictures

 

An afternoon lecture at Stow Minster, part of the systematic work to rebuild its Friends and its promotion of and care for visitors.  A strong sense of the Viking Great Army ceasing to raid but instead over wintering at an encampment in nearby Torksey ('turk's island' being between the Trent and marsh) in the 870s.

 

 A day trip to Newark, the premiere church of Nottinghamshire, after significant work during its fourteen months closure.  Here is the work by local schools responding to the visit of Alfie Bradley's Knife Angel.  There would be so much more to tell of the building, and of a wonderful encounter with the Poet in Residence at the neighbouring Civil War Museum.

Four nights in Ravenna, an expensive and well looked after lecturer-led tour group fulfilling a long held ambition to see the Byzantine mosaics.  Pages and pages of Blog posts about it should have filled last month without doing full justice to it, but here instead is Gabriel glimpsed over Mary's shoulder in the ducal palace at Urbino.

A sweeter fifth Sunday of Easter

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever:

the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold:

sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

   Psalm 19.9,10 (in the version Herbert, Watts and Rosetti knew)

 

I got me flowers to straw thy way:

I got me boughs off many a tree:

But thou wast up by break of day,

And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

   From George Herbert’s Easter (among the dozen poems I use most often)

 

Blest Jesus, what delicious Fare!

How sweet thine entertainments are!

Never did Angels taste above,

Redeeming grace or dying love.

   From Issac Watts’ From my thoughts vain world be gone (the verse engraved on a Communion flagon in Haworth Church, and quoted in this Blog before)

 

When I was young I deemed that sweets are sweet:
But now I deem some searching bitters are
Sweeter than sweets, and more refreshing far,
And to be relished more, and more desired,
And more to be pursued on eager feet,
On feet untired, and still on feet though tired.

   The end of one of Christina Rosetti’s Sonnets of Later Life (among the dozen poems I use most often)

 

Begin with richness in the mouth                             

like date-palm fruit, let sweetness speak,                

let each truth, each re-telling, make
guest-ready all our shelters…

   The beginning of my Sukkot poem, responding to the palm branch of the booths representing the taste of the Torah (quoted in this Blog before)

Looking at the sun

 

I was at St Michael's, Little Coates yesterday for the funeral of one of its saints, with a huge wave of affection back and forth.  Several other former clergy were there too which says a lot of what might be said.  And tonight they are putting in a new Rector just as I was put in in September 1999.  An end of one chapter and the opening of another.

And I called in at Grimsby Minster on my way back to the station afterwards, encouraged by its new Vicar to see Helios.  Almost equally overwhelming.  I hadn't realised how transgressive an experience it would be having been taught never to try to look directly at the sun.

Wildpeace

 

Not cease-fire peace,

not image of wolf and lamb,

just weary words,

strain loosing.                                                                            

 

Not rubber-stamp peace

not the din of forging ploughs,

just words spent,

absence foaming.

 

Not healing peace,

not the lion’s quiet grazing,

just silence,

wounds resting.

 

      Call ‘Mummy, look’

      when the toy guns point

      and the dolls tip

      to close their eyes,

 

      until knowing

      we know how to kill,

      makes us sure

      we are adults now,

 

      and orphans’ cries

      are the baton passing

      deftly from our time

      to the next.

 

Wildflowers must come

unexpectedly

to our waste ground,

so come wild-peace.

 

The poem responds to one by Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell) included in U2's Days of Ash released on Ash Wednedsay.  U2 laments the deaths of Renee Good (in the United States), Awdah Hathaleen (in the West Bank) and Sarina Esmailzadah (in Iran), hinting at Christian, Jewish and Muslim perpetrators who are distanced from what Bono identifies as ‘the moral force of Judaism that helped shape Western civilisation’.  

 

The picture was taken in Lincoln Cathedral's Ringers' Chapel. 

Edward Steere and John Hine

 

I was given a particular present yesterday.  It is the copy of R M Heanley’s Memoir of Edward Steere (1888) bought when new by J E Hine.  Steere and Hine were both Bishops of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA).  I was baptised in Malawi by one of their eventual successors, Bishop Thorne.

I’ve read the copy Heanley’s book held in Lincoln Cathedral’s Library.  I’ve also read there Hine’s autobiography.  A retired Professor at Lincoln University took an interest when we talked about them.  Soon afterwards she bought online a copy of Heanley’s book for herself.  It was only when she opened it that she saw J E Hine had written his name on the first page, the year before he first went to out with UMCA.  She appears to have taken particular pleasure in giving it to me.  I couldn’t be more grateful.

There is a bit here about my discovering the Lincolnshire church where Steere was Rector before first travelling out to Zanzibar.

I don’t think I’ve put anything on this Blog before about Hine.  He was Bishop in turn of Likoma (the Bishop who baptised me had his Cathedral on Likoma Island), of Zanzibar (where his Cathedral was the one built by Steere), of Northern Rhodesia (a pioneering task) and then, as improbable as it might seem, of Grantham.  His cremated remains are buried in Lincoln Cathedral.

A constitutional crisis ahead?

 

More than three quarter of those who cast a vote in the only by-election so far in this Parliament did so for either the Labour or the Reform candidate.  One of them got 26 more votes than the other.  It is arguable and ironic that the Rejoin EU candidate’s 129 votes was what won it for Reform.  Our one-member first-past-the-post elections throw up almost random results like this all the time.

Low levels of turn out also produces a further anomaly within our electoral system.  The new Reform MP elected then had the active support of less than one fifth (17.9%) of the registered electors in that constituency.  She is not unusual; my Labour MP had the active support of only 25.5% registered electors at the last General Election.

And don’t get me started on the way more people voted in the 2019 General Election for parties offered a ‘second referendum when we can see the terms of a Brexit deal’ policy (including Labour, Lib Dem and SNP) than for those which offered a ‘get Brexit done now’ one (including Conservative and Reform).

But something worse may be coming.  It is quite possible that the next General Election will have an unworkable result.  And it will do so just at the point at which it becomes even more obvious that no Government can deliver something which meets both the population’s wide spread aspirations and its desire for manageable levels of taxation.

Assume turnout is as poor as 60%.  This is plausible given recent General Election figures and political disconnection.

Assume that each individual who votes will vote one of five ways: for the present Government party (Labour); for the previous Government party (Conservative); for the ‘third’ party by current number of seats (Lib Dem); for the ‘third’ party by who is doing best in current polls (Reform); and for any one of the wide range of further alternatives (including the Greens and the Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh parties).

The split in votes won’t be exactly five way (12% of registered voters for each of the five options), but whatever it is it will produce some quite eccentric outcomes in terms of the split in seats.  It is plausible that no single party will achieve a quarter of the seats (compare the Conservative’s present 18.6% of seats).

Present polling gives the possibility that Reform would do much better than one fifth of the votes cast and be the largest party.  Even then the polling doesn’t suggest it would have an overall majority of seats, and with the Conservatives (their only realistic coalition partner?) perhaps at their present level of seats. 

What if no plausible coalition would achieve 50% of seats?  Not just a Reform-Conservative one, but also a Conservative-Lib Dem one or a Lib Dem-Labour one.  What would we do then?

Reform are among those who are clear that the 2016 Referendum (when 37.5% of registered voters turned out to support leaving the EU) produced an unchallengeable democratic mandate.  What is they are clear that they have a democratic mandate to govern (27% of votes according to present polls, the active support of 16.2% of registered voters if turnout is 60%) but are being denied the opportunity to do so?  And no alternative Government can be formed either? 

It is hard for people to see the detail of the Lincoln Imp high up at the Cathedrals west end, but the huge pub sign at the Lincoln Imp on the city’s Ermine estate is very clear.