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In the aftermath of the Spain Portugal semi-final, I read in the newspaper reports somewhere how Cesc Fabregas, who scored the winning penalty considered it to be a miracle.
“I had a premonition, an intuition that things were going to come off and that life had reserved something for me as nice as this. When I stepped up to take the penalty I said to the ball that we had to make history and it shouldn't let me down. I talked to the ball four years ago [when he scored the winning penalty against Italy] and it didn't let me down.”
It made me think how that’s how most of us live our lives. In the hope of minor miracles that will help make the difference in our lives between failure and success. The spin of the lottery balls in the tumbler, a sudden attack of temporary blindness on the policeman holding the speed camera, or the way an inanimate object might wing its way from my foot and bend and twist into the back of the net. We find ourselves, whether we have faith or not, offering up instant and urgent prayers to some superior being to intervene “please don’t let it happen!” or “please let it be so, this time!”
And the tragedy of all of this, is that in all of this quest for minor miracles to happen at a time of need, we ignore the Major Miracle that makes everything happen in the first place. For in Him we live and move and have our being. He is before all things, by Him all things were created, and in Him all things hold together. ** Men will scoff at the idea of divine intervention on the grand scale through the saving power of Christ on the cross giving us life for all of eternity, while at the same clutch at the straws of a talking ball that will somehow help me towards the winners podium on a football field.
Now, I have no idea about Cesc Fabregas’s religious affiliation or spiritual outlook, but that kind of vague superstitious belief that something somewhere is out there looking out for me, and will intervene on my behalf, if I’m lucky, or am kind to animals or something, is so so common. So if you’re ready to believe in talking balls, why not consider something miraculous that is a lot more rational, and with hugely more significant benefits.
** Acts 17:28, Colossians 1:17
Yesterday, it was all flag waving, horns and cheering, across the capital, in the build-up to the Euro 2012 semi-final against Spain last night. Spain - our nearest neighbours, closest cousins and biggest rivals. The form guides and the bookies predict a Spanish victory, a repeat of the last time the two met in the World Cup two years ago. And so it has turned out, though not quite as expected. Portuguese resilience kept the scoreline to 0-0, and the verdict had to be settled with that infamously random contest of the penalty shootout.
So the drive back from where we had been watching the game with friends in Cascais, was eerily subdued and quiet. But a comment today from someone posting on Facebook this morning caught my eye as being quite perceptive.
"We are portuguese, and this is our "fado", we will be sad for a bit, but we still have our sun, our ocean, our fish! Tomorrow we'll be fine again...”
Fado, roughly translated, means fate, and of course, it’s also the name for that musical genre of melancholy that is so essentially Portuguese. But, not only in regard to football, also down through history and even in the current stoic response to the massively serious financial crisis that’s hitting us, it marks out the character of the Portuguese. A readiness to accept whatever comes our way, and get on with life nonetheless. This is a great strength. But this same “fado” can also be the downfall of a people who seldom seem to really rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity to believe in themselves and become really great.
With the news of the passing of Ray Bradbury this week at the age of 91 yesterday, I had to pull my copy of “The Illustrated Man” off the book shelf and have a read. Ray Bradbury is mostly known as a science fiction writer, famous as everyone would remind you for “Fahrenheit 451” and the “Martian Chronicles”. Even Bugs Bunny (”) refers to his novel “Something Wicked this Way Comes” in the classic “Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court! Buts its a shame, if this writer is consigned to the SciFi shelves of the local library, (In between Western and Popular Romance) because there’s a lot more lyricism and beauty in Bradbury’s prose than first meets the eye.
I will always remember him as the author who opened my mind up, as an impressionable teenager to a sense of wonder in the things of the everyday world, and also to finding the potential for horror and mystery in the most ordinary of subjects. The dark spaces between the lamplights on the way home from school, through Bradbury’s imagination, became peopled with ghouls and monsters. His “Dandelion Wine” in particular evokes a world, on the surface normal, even humdrum, and at the same time, full of mystery and wonder. Probably why, quite often, his short stories are set in a funfair or a circus, where the weird, the ghoulish and the over-the-top theatrical are plonked right down in the middle of a mundane suburban neighbourhood. Hope people will still be reading your books a generation from now, Ray.
The financial crisis continues to wreak havoc across Southern Europe, and the church in Lisbon is not immune. Over the past couple of weeks, we have heard one friend talking of plans to move to Mozambique, another of a job possibility in Switzerland, and another who actually moved to London temporarily last week because an opening for work suddenly came his way.
Young professionals are leaving Portugal in significant numbers as career prospects and job security become a rare commodity. In a small fellowship like ours that can have a major impact. At the very least, it’s unsettling. What about all the time and effort invested through relationship building and discipleship courses. Is it all lost. Well, “lost” is not the right word to use here, because we’re working for the kingdom, and not just for a single church. But you do feel a certain sense of loss, if the person you felt was going to play significant role in the future of the church finds he needs to move on.
But God, is also sovereign, and according to Paul in Romans 8:28, does everything well. So, where He guides one person in a different direction, He will always bring in others. That’s the way he works. Over the next few weeks, we will be looking at “Soul Psalms” in our Sunday evenings, focussing on the intensely personal struggles David and others went through and expressed through the inspired poetry of the Book of Psalms.
Psalm 62 expresses it well. “God alone is my rock... where I will never be shaken. To others, I may seem just like a broken-down wall, or a tottering fence.... but I will quietly before God and hope in him...” Talking about jobs, I’m so thankful that Colin in Southampton at last has a firm job offer. He still has some more interviews ahead of him, but if he accepts this one, he will be starting in Bristol in September. God, you’ve been good, helping him through this time of uncertainty.
I had to speak about Eli, the old priest, in our fellowship on Sunday, and the way he couldn’t manage his family. (We were thinking about the disfunctional family and how to be better parents, as May is the month of the family).
And as I prepared for what I was going to say the words “comfortably numb” came to my mind, that seem to describe Eli and his inability to awaken his sense of hearing to the voice of God. It’s actually the title of a song by Roger Waters and David Gilmour of the Pink Floyd, that quintessentially seventies rock band, (for those of us old enough to have lived through those heady years). There’s even a live recording of the most unlikely pairing of the band with Van Morrison in Berlin in 1990, Van looking like a middle aged grocer from East Belfast among those long haired rock stars.
Anyway the words “comfortably numb” seemed to fit Eli, who, while heavily involved in the religious business of dealing with the divine, had closed off his mind and heart so totally to the still small voice of the Spirit that it took the alive and listening heart of a young guy, Samuel, barely into his teens, to awaken him. Yes, Eli, there IS someone out there, and he DOES have something he wants to say to you.
Is there not a danger that we might somehow become “comfortably numb” also, in all the noise that surrounds us in our twenty first century way of living. Are we not always in danger of crowding God out with our incessant activity and babble.
The last few lines of the Pink Floyd song, reflect something I’ve often thought, that the “Samuel” in us, that spiritually alive component, that is youthful, responsive and sensitive, can drift from us so easily. Lord, keep me spiritually “youthful”, even in my old age.Help me not become “comfortably numb”
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look
but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
the dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGOTJyE5JPM
Yesterday we made our way out to the western end of Europe - the Cape St Vincent, being the southwestern tip of Portugal. The weather for the last two weeks has been a mixture of clouds and rain, cold winds and periods of sunshine, so I expected a wild blustery experience out there on the cliff tops, with nothing but the boiling sea and way off, somewhere out there beyond the mysterious horizon, Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean.
As it happened, by the time we got there, driving out through bare scrubland out to Sagres, beyond the condominia and luxury resorts of the Algarve, the wind had died down to a moderately easy breeze, and the air temperature higher than it had been. So we found a cleft between two rocks to snuggle down in at the world’s end and gaze out to sea. And watch the seabirds swooping down the cragged cliffs to some precarious ledge on which to perch, build homes and bring up their young. Oblivious, it would seem, to the perils of the foam below and their dangerously precarious position above the crashing waves below.
Makes me think about the lines of an old old hymn, that expresses the sense of hiddenness that the person who finds his rest and security in God knows, away from all the turbulence and uncertainty of life.
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
That shadows a dry, thirsty land;
He hideth my life with the depths of His love,
And covers me there with His hand,
Fanny J Crosby was blind from the age of 6, yet managed to see with eyes of faith, and understand the total security that was hers through knowing a God who personally loves and cares for her. Through the course of her life she produced over 800 hymns, many of which are still known and loved.
We met George on the
very first Sunday we arrived in Portugal over four years ago. Or Jorge,
if you prefer the Portuguese spelling. An affable Afro American guy
settled into life here, married with two kids and involved in the life
of a Christian community out to the west of the city which we had
started going to. An odd job man, painter and decorator, always helpful
and practical, ready to do what he could for you, and when we’d sit in a
small discussion group on some Biblical theme or other, he’d often come
up with a word of deep wisdom
So it’s strange to see his story featured in this weekend’s magazine, “Publico” in a four page spread, all about a forty year flight from justice and the case for his extradition to the US. It’s a story, that would have made a great fiction novel, if it were not for the fact that for the most part, it is true. Here’s the gist of it. An armed robbery in a shop in New Jersey, in which the proprietor dies, incarceration in a US prison, and then escape from prison, involvement with the Black Panther movement, and then the hi-jacking. George together, with a small group of activists hi-jacked a domestic US airliner, released the passengers in Miami and took the plane and with it $1 million in ransom money to Algeria. The plane and the money were eventually returned, but the offenders were released by the Algerian authorities and went to ground, only to be one by one hunted down over the following years and recaptured by the FBI, all except for George. 41 years later they catch up with him in the unlikely setting of Colares, Sintra, and all of a sudden he’s all over the media
Interesting to watch how the media deals with someone you kind of know, and it makes me think about issues of justice and forgiveness, punishment and restitution. The US press paint him out as a villain who needs to come back and face the music. For the Portuguese he’s the smart anti-hero who managed to give the great super-power the slip. Nowhere in the media is there the idea that the man may have changed, that his life could now be marked by grace of God. That, ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, he now walks with the God who loves him, values him and, yes, who does not overlook the wrongs that were done, but decides, on the basis of His son’s death on the cross, to freely forgive.
“Therefore, there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus .. through Christ, the Spirit of life has set me free from the law if sin and death..” “For you died, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Romans 8:1, Colossians 3:3)
