A subject for retreat at Bishop's House, Iona
16-21 April 2005


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RETURN TO 5. Healing at the frontiers - part 1


5. Healing at the frontiers - part 2

Healing Powers

Let us move on to healing powers. Or better, healing the powers. We haven't been too explicit about the powers this week, though they have always been there in our reflections. The powers that be - the principalities and powers. The kings who have their way in the land. The corporations, the local and international business people and politicians. Those who do the dispossessing; those who can turn settlers into slaves.

How such great powers can be healed is an enormous question, which scripture speaks about very often. Though in terms of corporate sin - the sins of whole cities and nations. Jesus calls for Chorazin and Bethsaida and Capernaum to repent, and weeps over the sins of Jerusalem. He is in the tradition of the prophets who similarly called whole peoples to repent of what they had done - together, as powers. It would seem that healing the powers in our day and age brings us close to protest; interesting to ask ourselves whether we think protest and healing go together.

Healing Powers through listening

But the powers must be listened to - if we are being critical of the powers then we must not repeat the mistake of the minister who thought he knew what Gerry Adams would think about the Orange marches ... what the powers say must be heard properly, for only then can we understand what is at their heart.

Healing Powers through walking

The powers must be walked with. Physically as well as symbolically. How better to understand what a corporation is about than to spend some time inside it; in its manufacturing plants, alongside its office staff, in its shareholders meetings, listening, learning, observing.

And the powers can be walked against - there is a long tradition of marches and rallies, in which people of faith have been instrumental, which have helped the powers to see other points of view. Perhaps the rally in Edinburgh this July, under the banner Make Poverty History, will be another of those historic occasions where walking brings healing.

Healing Powers through words of healing

And we must understand that there are words of healing for the powers. It does happen in today's world that when people of faith and goodwill raise issues with the powers, and persist, sometimes the powers relent, repent. President F.W. de Klerk was asked whether it was international sanctions which had brought about the end of apartheid. He replied, 'It was not the sanctions, but a deep self-analysis on our knees before God.'

And when the powers repent perhaps the role of the church can be to help them find words to express this. Sometimes the church has to do it first to help the powers acknowledge their need to - such as the Anglican Church of Japan apologising for the behaviour of the Japanese nation during the second world War, at a time when the Japanese leaders would not acknowledge or admit to any atrocities being committed.

Healing Powers through symbolic acts

And sometimes in the healing of the powers the church can help with more than just words, but by helping to create symbolic actions - the most notable recent example being South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which has enabled over 20,000 people to tell their stories about their part in injustices under apartheid, has enabled the nation to establish patterns of restorative justice rather than retribution, and has helped the nation to experience forgiveness and reconciliation which might have been impossible without the vision of the churches helping to make it work.

Smaller, perhaps more confrontational symbolic acts may also help bring the powers towards healing. The peace movement uses these a lot - vigils at the gates of arms manufacturers, where law enforcement officers are offered friendly snacks and drinks and where songs of peace are sung; cyclists and children reclaiming the streets in traffic protests; people singing hymns outside the embassies of errant nations. Again, many Christians involve themselves in helping to heal the powers in these sorts of ways.

Healing Church

And finally, we come to how these sorts of approaches may be employed in bringing healing to our church. As I suggested earlier on, the church is already full of wanderers and sojourners, the exiled and dispossessed, or those settled ones who have found themselves enslaved; no wonder our churches are often uncomfortable places, where our behaviour towards each other seems to fall very short of the great words of reconciliation in our liturgies, of our Lord.

I shan't be prescriptive about how we may go about this; I'd rather be suggestive and free you to go away to work out what all this might mean for you where you are, in your place. And much that needs saying has already been said.

Healing Church through listening

On healing our church through listening, I would say that this would best be an individual commitment - and a corporate one. Each of us might commit to listen better and more, to become trusted listeners by consciously ditch our preconceptions about others, to be truthful in speaking and to be genuinely open to hear their truthful story. And the group might explore how to share its common story together. Russ Parker is good on this. He says each church has a group story. Just like those churches Jesus addresses in the book of Revelation, so too, our churches have a unique and distinctive story. Sitting down - perhaps with some material such as the workbook Russ Parker and Michael Mitton have produced - might be the start of a very interesting process of listening together, to the story of which we are part.

Healing Church through walking

Healing our church through walking, might be about rediscovering some of those wonderful traditions I mentioned earlier - pilgrimage, beating the bounds, Good Friday processions, prayer-walking. Pilgrimage, perhaps, you are doing this week here, many miles from your home church, but maybe there are places nearby to home, which used to be places of pilgrimage. Or perhaps you might identify other places in the area which could be walked to in a day, the process and the experience, the shared activity, the conversation, all being healing in some sense.

Beating the bounds can help a church better understand the area it serves, better relate to it, as well as being a very visible act of witness, similar to the Good Friday procession, showing local people that the church is in that place, helping those who take part in it explore and express their sense of mission to that place. And prayer-walking, done in perhaps a less demonstrative way, a small group of people almost invisibly taking prayer out of the building into the streets, helping to heal any division there may be between an insular church and its outside community, helping the participants to see the place as God sees it, to engage with the place as God engages.

Healing Church through words of healing and symbolic acts

And finally, how do we approach healing the church through words of healing and symbolic acts. this is a coals-to-Newcastle question. It seems to me that our church tradition is steeped in words of healing and symbolic acts. Our eucharists shine with words and acts of reconciliation. The confession, the absolution, God's healing word to us; the peace between brother and sister; the invitation to Jesus' table; the shared meal; the blessing. Thank God for the healing we can know in these services.

And our lectionaries are full of the names of wonderful saints who have shown us the way to care for our places and each other - Francis, Patrick, Wilberforce, Anselm, you think of your own favourites. Thank God for the healing we can know through their example. Perhaps we simply need to ask God to keep them fresh for us, to help us take them more and more into our hearts. Thank God that we are not short on words and symbols for healing in our places of worship.

This is not to say that there is no place for new words and new symbolic actions in our services and our mission work. If we follow the creator then we will be endlessly creative ourselves; if we are keen to respond to the ever-shifting story of our place and its people then we will have a rich seam of material from which to draw new energy in worship and witness.

Back home I have been deeply impressed by a city-centre Methodist minister Barbara Glasson who has developed a whole new congregation first by spending a year walking around the city listening to people, getting to know them, and then opening up a room above a bookshop for the simple activity of bread-making. People come in, help Barbara make bread, and of course, once baked, they help her eat it too. Her congregation has shifted a lot, and is a fascinating mixture of city-centre office staff and homeless people, folks from the city's fringe club culture and people from the suburbs commuting in. With them whole new words and whole new activities have been created to express their faith and thanksgiving in relevant ways.


... So it was, five years ago, that I took the train into Liverpool city centre convinced of only two things. Firstly that God had better be there ahead of me otherwise we were all sunk and secondly that we were called to make bread. You can make up your own mind which of those two seems the most ludicrous. Each day for a year I took the train to town and walked around.
As a woman within the church it has taken me too long to begin to give value to my own experience. Mostly I have tried to tailor what happened to me into some kind of acceptable norm. In this case I could not opt for that. I was in un-chartered territory and had no option but to let the experience of the city centre come towards me. Quite naturally, however I began to reflect on what that might mean and brought into play all my powers of reflection and analysis. This process, I have to say, was not simply an academic theological exercise but a survival technique. The nature of such an intense urban experience is that it can quickly become overwhelming. Sometimes arriving in the early morning I met the first tide of people approaching the common ground known as a city centre. Cleaners, road sweepers and a few drunks left over from the night before brought the city into life in readiness for the next wave of smartly dressed shop and office workers. The first cheap train of the day brought in the babies and pensioners. Big Issue guys appeared depending on what day of the week it was ­ never around on Thursdays because that is benefit day. I got talking with Mauricio who sold the Issue at the bottom of Bold Street ­ a Italian guy who spoke four different languages, and Tony from Glasgow soon started to look out for me. In Lewisą I discovered the remarkable ministry of the Śwomen in wigsą and visited the pensionersą tea party in BHS. At night there was a lull in proceedings at around 7oąclock ­ as if it was a moment for the city to take breath before the influx of younger people that would dance and shout their way into the early hours. Contact with the police revealed that this was so well orchestrated that the city centre was, despite the occasional shooting, far safer than the suburbs at night. It was in this way that I discovered the city as an organic reality, it had a heart beat and a pulse, there was a rhythm to the day with high and low tides, it danced and washed and breathed its own breath. Similarly, what I had previously considered to be simply Śinstitutionsą also began to have a human face. It was possible to talk about the scandal of the store credit card with the manager of BHS because we got to know each other. And I learned that being an asylum seeker wasnąt just about an issue it was about Ben ­ a gay Iranian who had fled for his life from his home.... [1]

What Barbara has done is a radical example of what we all can do, perhaps in more modest ways, in getting out into our place, learning about it, learning from its people, allowing its shapes, forms and expressions to influence the things we say and sing, pray and ponder in church.

How might this translate iunto the place you'll be returning to this weekend? What new prayers might we create to say in that place, for that place and its people, what new symbolic, healing acts might we attempt?

In conclusion, let this be our prayer: Please God turn us around so that our places of worship can bring healing words and healing symbols to the places in which they stand. Please God turn us around so that we can let the places in which we stand bring healing words and healing symbols into our places of worship.


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NOTES
[1] Barbara Glasson: Approaching church - an ecclesiology of expectation and experience! - a paper for the Urban Theology Unit Institute for Urban and Contextual Theology, July 2004