The Sovereign Mother

Look at the picture and ask yourself : “If you came from another planet where nothing was known about the Christian tradition, what would you conclude about the procession seen here? - That it was about a humble mother cradling the body of her son, who was in fact the Son of the Living God and had just vanquished evil and death by giving up his life? - Or that it is some sort of conquering queen triumphing over the man she has just managed to vanquish?

I mean, look. The expression on her face for a start. Here’s this lady with a crown on her head and flowers all around her, and there’s this poor guy, all scrawny and bloodied. Okay, its only religious art, but somebody must have created it in order to convey a certain meaning. And what is it supposed to mean, exactly? Because I’m afraid I don’t quite get it.

And what of the event itself, that happens this and every Easter weekend in Loulé, Algarve, when, practically the entire population of the town turn out to celebrate "A Mãe Soberana" . Yes, that's what they call her - The Sovereign Mother! It's a procession that appears to all intents and purposes to be a coronation of Jesus mother, rather than a celebration of His own resurrection!

And she is the one that is crowned at Easter time? Crowned by whom? And when? And what is she now Queen of? Can it be that the interpretation of a curious verse in Revelation (12 v.1) is enough to justify proclaiming Mary Queen of Heaven or Star of the Sea or whatever? That sounds to me too much like Iemanja, Goddess of the Sea in Brazil, or any of a number of female demi-gods from cultures around the world. Far removed from the Mary of the Bible.

I prefer to see the Mary at the side of the cross, vulnerable yet strong, and very definitely without a crown on her head - a devoted follower and yet still the mother of her son (as so thoughtfully portrayed by Olivia Hussey in the 1977 film version Jesus of Nazareth). * In our Sunday fellowship, we’ve been looking at the seven words of Jesus from the cross, and the one that impacted me most powerfully, surprisingly enough was Jesus words to Mary and to John “Woman, here is your son” and “Behold your mother” (John 19 v.26). You never stop being a parent, even when your child is full grown and exercising his independent ministry. Something we have found with our own adult children. The relationship does not stop being that of parent and child - it just develops.

Jesus was helping his mother manage her impending grief . That sword of which Simeon had spoken so many years previously, was about to pierce her own heart also. (Luke 2:35) Jesus gives her his best friend John to mother. A new focus to fill up the void his passing will create. Over Easter weekend we watched “Rabbit Hole”, ** an excellent film about grief in which Nicole Kidman sensitively portrays a bereaved mother. At one of the central points in the movie for me was when Kidman asks

her mother (of grief) “Does it ever go away?”

“No. Well, it changes, the weight of it, I guess. At some point, it becomes bearable. It turns into something that you can crawl out from under and... carry around like a brick in your pocket. And you... you even forget it, for a while. But then you reach in for whatever reason and - there it is... Which... is kind of ...good, actually.”

For Mary, even though he rose again, and, even though she would end up spending more time with him before he ascended, the grief would still be there, the grief of losing the son she had mothered and it would continue. But it would be a good kind of grief.

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4B5OWBW7SQ

** http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0935075/

Between the Lightning Bolts

Last Night was both weird and also wonderful. We were supposed to have been (well if I had been a bit quicker and on the ball we would have been) in the Auditorium of the Gulbenkian Museum for Bach’s St John Passion played by the Amsterdam Baroque orchestra and choir. But by the time I had noticed it was on, the tickets were already sold out. So instead we were at home, observing he impending storm from our ninth floor window. Rolling up the River Tejo from the direction of Palmela and the Arrabida, occasional flashes lit the night sky, along with rumbles of thunder, and then the rain came, hammering down on the balcony.

We slept with the window open, and smelt the freshness of the night air. It had been dry for several weeks, and the farmland of the Alentejo was beginning to show its thirst for water. Great drops of rain fell from the heavens and flashes of lightning illuminated the room. Trawling randomly through youtube, I discovered a version of the Passion according to St John not by J S Bach, and that I had not heard before. It’s by Arvo Pärt, a 20th Century Estonian composer (he’s still alive, so I suppose he’s also 21st Century) whose minimalist approach to sound and music I have grown to appreciate through his works “Spiegel im Spiegel” and “Tabula Rasa” in particular (the latter piece making me feel like I’m swinging on a garden gate with a rusty hinge on a hot day in high summer).

The whole “St John” piece lasts 70 minutes (amazingly available for free to listen to in it's entirety in 8 youtube videos) and is based solely on the Latin text of the Gospel of John Chapters 18 and 19, ending with a resounding “Consumado est!” “It is finished”. I felt drained listening to it through the early hours of the morning, and thus entering into Easter Week, with a strong sense of the wonder of this moment of ultimate sacrifice and eventual salvation for us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YhFmIZi978&feature=related

PS I stood for several minutes on our balcony in an effort to get a proper photo of the lightning strikes, but to no avail, so the image is unashamedly someone else's!

Andorinhas

"One swallow doesn’t make a summer”, we tend to say in Ireland, but here its more like one swallow doesn’t make a spring”! Way before they hit the shores of freezing Northern Ireland, they’re already flitting around the Anema’s farmhouse in the Alentejo by the end of February. Their shrill calls to one another is a clear signal that winter’s on its way out. They’re a bother to Elisabeth building their nests in the eaves above her front door and decorating the porch with their droppings, but pure joy to watch.

They’re called “andorinhas” here in Portuguese, and there’s a lovely little song by the Portuguese group “Madredeus” currently going around in my head called “Andorinha de Primavera” (check the link below). Sometimes, like yesterday, I’m just overwhelmed by the privilege of living. I was down by the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum near the city centre to meet someone who didn’t show up. I was about to return home, when I thought - well here I am in these amazingly beautiful surroundings. Why don’t I just have some time for me. So I did.

Wonderful. Just me and the swallows. Wheeling about overhead, screaming their joy to be alive. And the ducks. And the doves. Dozing on the grass in the warm sunshine. And God. And one or two locals on their lunch break. And a party of school children. And the sunshine. And the buzz of the nearby traffic. And the sense that I’m alive. That I’m chosen, loved and with a great and awesome purpose to be here in this place, at this time. What a privilege to be alive

Little black winged swallow where are you going?
You who fly so high
Come, take me with you up to the heavens,
For from there I will greet my love

Oh little swallow
of Spring
Oh how I wish I could also fly
how great it would be

Oh little swallow
of Spring
to also fly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0jOgx4CafE

Is Portugal Going to Die, Mummy?

The columnist Inês Teotónia Pereira, in Saturday’s paper recounts a conversation she had with her children at the kitchen table. “Don’t be silly” scoffs the older brother, “Countries don’t die... except maybe Libya..” he adds. Writes Ms Pereira, we know that we’ve arrived in a crisis when even the youngest of our children become politically aware at an early age, realising what it means when the IVA (VAT) goes up and puzzling over the departure of the Prime Minister. “Will Mr Socrates give all the money back that he took? What if the people elect him again? [older brother] “Oh, he won’t come back. He’s tired of being Prime minister. He wants to do something else.”

I found the column interesting with its insights into a child’s eye view of what’s going on in our country at present. In her blog she has an interesting piece which I thought I would try and translate and include here

The Tragedy of Portugal

retold for children

in the style of H C Andersen

The fridge is almost empty, there’s nothing in the freezer

and the sell-by date on the yoghurts expires in June.

The parents, always irresponsible, never paying the electricity

or the water, have fled, leaving piles of unpaid bills.

The children are home alone. They know the neighbours

will only help them if they promise to spend the rest of their lives

working for them, carrying out the rubbish, cleaning the steps,

doing the shopping and washing the cars. The ladies from the

Social Security could arrive at any moment to take them to an

orphanage, but the children don’t want to call for help,

because the parents had told them never to talk to strangers.

And the food runs out in June.

Time, then, for the Portuguese to give up hope? No. Time rather to call on God and find in Him the true source of all hope. The devastating Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 shattered faith throughout Europe in a good God, who has prepared for us the best of all possible worlds (Voltaire). Perhaps these seismic shockwaves in the economy of the 21st Century will bring us here in the south west corner, and indeed the rest of Europe, back to a realisation that our lives and our economies are ultimately in the hands of a God who sees and knows, and who is above all, compassionate and loving to all He has made.

http://aummetrodochao.blogs.sapo.pt/231738.html

The Tables are Turned

Yesterday on Facebook all our Brazilian friends (well, at least three of them) posted a link to a column in yesterday’s Financial Times which was picked up and reported in the Portuguese press. The FT columnist (probably with tongue firmly in cheek) proposed a radical solution for Portugal’s current economic woes, suggested that Portugal should become an offshore province annexed to Brazil!

More or less in the same breath, Time magazine popped through our letterbox with the headline in the economy section : “Rise of the Rest : With all the focus in recent weeks on Japan and the Middle East, an important economic milestone has gone relatively unnoticed: Brazil has surpassed France and the UK to become the world’s 5th largest economy.”

If that is not enough to flatten the ego of any former world power, and discoverer of half of the globe, along comes Madame President, Dilma Rousseff, recently sworn in as Brazil’s first woman president, over here on her first European visit, and being greeted by recently “ex’ed” Prime Minister Jose Socrates.

Among her words of support for the former colonial master, she expressed her assurance that “...our economic teams have been having a permanent and fluent dialogue on the matter... One of the possibilities is buying part of Portugal's sovereign debt...”

My, how the tables of turned since the days of King Joao VI, Back in 1808, he skilfully avoided confrontation with the all conquering Napoleon by physically moving the seat of the Portuguese kingdom and all his royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, thereby elevating Brazil from mere colony to a sovereign Kingdom united with Portugal!

“The grass withers and the flowers fall, kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall, but the word of our God stands forever” Isaiah 40:8

I Arise Today...

I went down to the river this morning as the sun was rising and cried out “I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, belief in the threeness and confession of the oneness...” St Patrick’s been in my head more or less since the start of this month

This past week has been a rare celebration of my Irishness, what with the weekend filled and the jigs and reels of “Slemish”, and last evening to be invited to a reception at the home of the Irish ambassador. (At which, by the way, we had the rare privilege of being introduced to one of the last living descendants of the Niall of the Nine Hostages and the High Kings of Tara, Hugo O’Neill, who's family has been living in Lisbon under the blessing of the Kings of Portugal since the 18th century). It’s good to see also, on the internet news, the colourful way in which St Patricks Day was celebrated yesterday in Belfast and other parts of Ireland - nicely removed from the sectarian voices of a few years ago.

But it irritated me to see the way the American press laid into the organisers of the New York parade for not acceding to the request of Gay Pride to be included in their march. After all, said one commentator (or words to that effect) wasn’t St Patrick a nice old man who would have sought to include everyone? Back to your history books, I say. You might as well open up the parade to the Ancient Order of the Druids then. St Patrick was a fearless warrior who used every moral fibre in his body to create in the people of Ireland a true biblical morality and a consciousness of a supreme and loving God as revealed in the person of Christ. That’s why his prayer, “St Patrick’s Breastplate”, so focusses on the all encompassing nature of the that glorious person.

“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,

Christ when I arise,

Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.”

Saint Kevin

Here’s a little more Irishness sparked by “Slemish” wonderful visit last weekend - my head still ringing with the beauty of the music, and, yes, the sheer beauty of the lives of those guys lived out for God. They may joke about their reputation as the ugliest band on Ireland, but on the inside there’s a peace and an inner joy that comes through in their music, their laughter and just the way they are with each other.

None better to exemplify this than Kevin Burns, or Saint Kevin-of-the-Burns, as I think I shall rename him, from West Belfast. As he shared his story in two of the venues where they played as a band, it was wonderful to hear how his journey took him from Ireland through Denmark and Germany in his search for reality and truth to eventually find his peace with God through finding it in the reality of the person of Jesus.

It reminds me of an earlier Saint Kevin who lived in the sixth century, probably born around the year in which Patrick died, and lived a life of solitude and contemplation in the wild beauty of Glendalough in the Wicklow mountains. His name meant “Gentle One” and you only have to walk around the upper lake and the lower lake there to get a sense of that peace and harmony with God and with nature.

But, whether you’re a saint of the sixth century or of the twenty first century, the reality remains the same. You get to be a saint, only because of what God has done within you, and what God has declared about you, and not because of anything you have done, or from any decision of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. At the beginning of his letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes them as "...the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints...." - all of them notice. Not just the elders or those in high office, and not just the odd one that happened to have perfomed a miracle, or been extraordinarily nice to the tea lady. Everyone single of them that was in that church was called a saint by Paul. Well, I am very happy to be in that number, even before they go marching in.

http://www.reverbnation.com/slemish