Uncommon Grace

I listen quite regularly to Desert Island Discs. It’s one of those old radio programmes that has continued to be broadcast by BBC Radio 4 since time immemorial. The formula consists of an interview with a well-known personality linked with their favourite pieces of music and what those pieces have meant to them at certain times in their lives. It’s a simple formula that has stood the test of time, and hardly changed since the fifties. 

I was very impressed with the interview Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, gave on the programme last month. There are certain people in this life, and in history who cut across the neat Christian theological distinctions of common and special grace. (That distinction is, that, whereas all of humanity enjoys a common sense of the grace of God, special grace belongs to those who, through faith and repentance, have trusted in the redeeming  power of the  blood of Christ, and as such, confess Jesus as their Lord and Saviour). 

Aung San Suu Kyi is not a Christian. Her Buddhist faith is very important to her. And yet she displays in her bearing, in her statesmanship, in her conversation, an uncommon grace, and it’s impossible not to be aware of the image of God in her. At the end of the interview, when it is standard for the interviewer to offer any choice of a book, besides the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, to take with them to the desert island, Aung San replied that she would treasure the Bible, seeing that she often used to read it aloud to her maternal grandfather when his eyesight was failing, as he had previously converted to Christianity.

But I was struck by something she said about the nature of sacrifice. She was asked about the price she had paid for her political principles in terms of an almost lifelong separation from her husband and family. 
“When you have chosen a certain path in life” she said,  “you should walk it with satisfaction and with determination and not try to make it appear as a tremendous sacrifice. That can be like looking for something back in return for the sacrifice.Whatever you do out of your own free will that, in itself, should be the gift you give to the cause and to those you love." 

Whether it’s out of political motives, or from a religious or missionary calling, that’s a good principle to reflect on when you’re tempted to think that God, or the world, sort of owes you something for all that you’ve done and given up.

A River Runs Through It

At the weekend, we travelled to Bucharest for the wedding of Sam and Ioana. The Air France flight took us via Paris, and the takeoff from Charles de Gaulle on a crisp winter morning afforded us a magnificent view of the Seine curling through the city, and the famous landmarks of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame. 

I like to get a window seat when flying in Europe. There’s something magical about rising above the streets and buildings, and out into the cloud filled blue. And what stirs the imagination most for me is the sight of these great rivers, whether Tejo or Thames, Seine or Danube, snaking their way through the intricacy of the urban landscape. The river running through it gives the city it’s soul, creates the dividing line between the natural architecture of creation and the concrete and glass. And for getting around, is always there as a snaking landmark, giving you your bearings (which is probably why I never seem to enjoy Madrid that much - it just seems to be one big urban sprawl).

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God”. Psalm 46 makes a clear connection between the River and the City - the river as a source of life and freshness, the river cleansing and gladdening the heart of man.  From my ninth floor window, with the sun shimmering over the surface of the River Tejo as it passes through the city of Lisbon, I can well understand that imagery. This great body of water, passing beneath the bridges on its way to the sea, brings in fresh supplies of water every day, and carries all the waste and dross of the city out to the ocean.

Biggest Wave in the World

Some people come to Portugal with a single purpose in life - to be able to surf on some of the biggest waves in the world. Last week, Garrett Macnamara  flew half way across the world from Hawaii to do this, and broke his own previous world record, entering into the annals of surfing legend by riding what was believed to be a 100 feet monster in the Atlantic off the coast at Nazaré!  He described the experience as  “.. like snowboarding down a giant mountain. You're just chattering, flying down this bumpy, bumpy mountain. Your brain is getting rattled.”

It made me think about what drives a man (or a woman) to travel half way around the world like that to ride a monster wave. Anna also voiced it by asking “Now, how did he happen to know that by coming to Nazaré on the 28th of January he would find his record wave?” Of course that is as much down to a bit of scientific know-how as anything else - ocean topography, currents and weather patterns and all. But the fact is that Garrett, and many others like him, will dedicate their lives, their income and their relationships to following the surf.

Question I am pondering. How much do I dedicate my time and resources, and how much do I research and seek to understand, in order to ride the wave of God’s will in my life? For, if you talk to any surfer, it’s the thrill, the energy and the power that they want to experience, and that makes them follow. Well, what greater power is there in life, than following after the Creator of this world, in His plan of restoring all things to Himself? My, I need to get onto that wave!

Man of Steel

The Fifth Chapter of Romans talks about character being built out of sufferings. The theme came to my notice when reading Nicky Gumbel’s daily devotional last Friday, which caused me to think about the process we need to follow in the direction of Hope.

We have this hope of the glory of God, but it doesn’t just drop out of the sky into our laps. It’s is forged through suffering, which, by way of perseverance, produces that thing called character, and hope is then born - a hope that is real, living, vital and communicated through God’s love, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

The very same morning, I happened to read about Saeed Abedeni, an Iranian Christian, though now a US citizen, and whose predicament under trial in Iran was splashed across the media  over the weekend. I was particularly struck by what the article reported of Saeed’s response to his sufferings. it said :

Saeed has been detained since his arrest last September; he has endured beatings, torture and threats at the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. In a moving letter to his wife, published last week, Saeed wrote about his ordeal:
“One day I am told I will be freed and allowed to see my kids on Christmas (which was a lie) and the next day I am told I will hang for my faith in Jesus. One day there are intense pains after beatings in interrogations, the next day they are nice to you and offer you candy.”
Saeed also reflected on how God is transforming him through these mixed experiences:
“I always wanted God to make me a godly man. I did not realise that in order to become a godly man we need to become like steel under pressure. It is a hard process of warm and cold to make steel. These hot and colds only make you a man of steel for moving forward in expanding His Kingdom.”
So what is talked about in the Bible is mirrored in real life. God has a foundry for manufacturing steel in our lives, and it is often through the people he places around us. Sometimes through persecution, sometimes ridicule and at other times rejection or simple frustration, we’re poured into the melting pot of God’s steel furnace. In order that he might make us into men and women of steel....like Saeed.

Smothering Candles

There’s a gentle irony in the fact that there we were sitting on a Saturday evening in the chapel of a convent in Belem out to the west of Lisbon’s city centre, listening to a song being sung in which a Donegal mother cries for her son who had defected from the Catholic faith and become a Protestant minister. The song in question “Fil Fil a Run o” is a popular tune from the northwest, dating from the 18th century, * (it has been recorded by Cara Dillon, the Irish Tenors among other artists). On this occasion it was part of a set being perfomed by a duo called Lumiere (Pauline Scanlon and Éilís Kennedy) from Dingle, Co Kerry. **

The rather sectarian content of the song is buried underneath a beautiful wistful melancholic tune, and you can really feel the mother’s heart beat for her son, and the scandal she found herself in. As the translated lyrics go, she cries  “you denied Peter And Paul, because of the gold and the silver. You denied the Queen of Glory, turned your coat and became a Minister” . And so it made me think about family ties and deeply held beliefs, and the freedom to choose and think and believe differently from your parents. It’s a natural desire that one’s children should share the worldview and beliefs that we hold dear, but it’s not a given, and one of the important keys of parenthood is that, having given the best guidance we can, we allow our kids the freedom to make their own choices and way through life, without fear of rejection or reprimand.

But it it also made me think about the strong manner in which “Mother Church” holds on to her own. Sometimes, it would seem to me, the light the institutional Church, offers to the world, instead of liberating and expanding vision, tends to smother the believer in a heavier atmosphere of tradition. Just as, in the darkened atmosphere within the convent, the smothering candles allow only the faintest glimmer of the world, and that seen through the lens of a particular ecclesiastical interpretation, excluding the light from any other sources. But the music was great anyway!
 
* Interestingly, the song is linked to the true story of one, Dominick O’Donnell, who was a Church of Ireland minister, and whose grave even now lies in the churchyard of Carrigart. 
**  http://www.lumieremusic.net/audio.aspx

One Generation

One of my earliest forays into an appreciation of classical music was an LP (yes, the old vinyl sort) of Handel’s “Chandos Anthems”, which were settings of various psalms for choir and orchestra. Even now, any time I turn to Psalm 145, I cannot read it without the extended phrase “One gen-er-a-tion shall praise Thy name to an-o-o-ther  n-o-o-ther” running through my head. Somehow, the musical interpretation of the phrase, in the 1975 recording I had, matches perfectly the idea of flow and continuity of the message of the Gospel and the adoration or our Creator God, being passed on from one generation to another down across the centuries.

And sometimes, it works both ways - the younger generation informing and inspiring the older to a fresh appreciation of the greatness of our God. It was exciting for us over New Year, to be part of the “Maquina de Sonhos”, (“The Dream Machine”) which was a 3 day Missions conference for Portuguese young people held in a big sports hall across the river from where live. It was great to see a new generation picking up the theme of eternal praise and making it their own.

And just meditating on Psalm 145, I am struck by the number of verbs that have to do with communication that are contained in just four short verses, vs 4-7, and how each verb reveals a slightly different nuance on the business of communicating who God is.

‘Telling’ (‘contar’ in Portuguese) - simple storytelling of the narrative that holds within it the ageless truths about our God, in oral or written form
‘Proclaiming’ - this is the business of the preacher, declaring with authority what the Bible says about God.
‘Speaking’ - a much more informal verb, the art of communicating through our personal conversations, and it's often as much about how we live, as it is about the words we use.
‘Singing’ God’s praise - applying our own artistic creativity to root the eternal truths in a way that is culturally relevant for every generation
And finally, ‘Commemorating’ or ‘Celebrating’ - using events and moments in time as important markers for the memory, so that the message continues to have prominence within the community.

 

Epiphany

Sunday was the Day of the Kings, or Epiphany Sunday. Traditionally here in Portugal and neighbouring Spain, it is a day associated with the arrival of the three kings, and the revelation to them that the promised Christ child, the Son of the Living God, has arrived and appeared unto men.

Much more so in Spain than here, the day has come to be the Christmas Day of present giving and feasting, in place of December 25th. Which is interesting. The reason to celebrate and rejoice becomes then, not so much the fact that Jesus was born in the manger in Bethlehem, but that He is who He is, and has been revealed as such! “Epiphany” means appearance, or manifestation, or a sudden realization of a great truth. In fact this is what it has come to mean in our current use of English. A new insight or enlightenment.

Something we need, not just on 6th January, but again in again in our lives. To wake up in the morning, and have an epiphany - This is God’s day!  Jesus is alive, and reigns on high and in my heart! That makes for a more meaningful Christmastime than a box of tinsel and a tray of mince pies.

So, happy Day of Kings, then!