The Lesson around the lessons

I was chatting with a friend last week about ministry issues. He was telling me about some incident he was involved in that could only be described as bizarre. I forget what it was but his closing remark struck me as all too true, he said, 'You know, sometimes in ministry you find yourself in these WTH (What The Heck! Yes, let’s keep it clean) moments, moments when you are called to do something that nothing in your ministry ever prepared you for; there was no seminary class, no tutorial, no weekend retreat that covered handling this particularly odd-ball circumstance.

It reminded me of one of my own WTH moments. A family in a church in which I used to serve basically employed me as their personal chaplain (some families in churches sometimes do that, ask any minister) and so I was called to the pre-wedding party, to, you know, open in prayer. Now, half the family was Christian and so wildly celebrated my presence there, the other half - devoted to another religion - not so much. They occupied, to a person, the body of seats either side of the aisle, Capulets to the left, Montagues to the right. It became clear as the evening unfolded that I was part of a PR strategy to reach the non-Christians. As with unfolding nightmares, these kind of details are made clear as the process unfolds usually just too late to do anything about it; it is part of the nature of a nightmare. There was a marquee, there was opulence, there were lights, there was grandstanding and copious amounts of food and then there was me, there to seal the deal for Jesus. As I was about to 'take the stage' the patriarch of this shindig turned to me and said words along the line of, 'you don't mind emceeing this function do you? Sing a song or two, crack some jokes, keep it funny.' At that last remark he may even have clicked his fingers and moved his hands in that dealing cards kind of way reserved for revving people up before they head out to perform. Now you may be thinking, why did I not just say no? Well, I am clinically incapable of saying no; I am a people pleaser of some repute. In fact, if I am arrested for multiple homicides sometime in the future, I would not be at all surprised if my defense ran along the lines of, 'well this stranger approached me with a gun and a mandate and I just couldn't say no.' You may also be thinking, this is preposterous! Not true! It is. I promise. Every word. It happened.  And this is the thing, I've had to stand and deliver, as all ministers do, in some hairy situations - first funerals where you're praying not to pronounce the dead person's name incorrectly to speaking your call before bishops and ministers. Nothing, nothing, nothing has ever put the fear of God into me like this single request. Now anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm not a naturally funny guy. I don't have that x-factor that will turn an occasion like this into a laugh-fest. I knew it was going to be a bloodbath before it had even happened, another natural part of an unfolding nightmare. Sometimes, you see, with ministry, people presume things, they presume you always want to be front and centre, they presume you love public speaking and crave any occasion to 'lead the flock' when in some moments you profoundly don't. You find yourself a bit like Lawrence Olivier who - as a person once remarked about a man who, in fact, was quite a retiring personality - had the unfortunate habit of always backing into the limelight. So I headed out, by that I mean the force of the patriarch's push in my back out-weighed the force of my finger-tips against the door frame.

 And a blood-bath it was. I cracked some jokes, said some prayers, even sang some songs. They had organised a backing band: four sorry looking individuals going by the name 'The Gypsy Kings'. They were so relaxed, too relaxed even. The sax player played his alto out of the side of his mouth, like it was a dual-function saxophone/Turkish hookah pipe; he winked at me and said, sing anything, we can play it. So I sang, 'She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes!' now what on earth possessed me to sing this song, I have no idea. My friend to whom I was telling this story interrogated me long and hard on this point and I honestly cannot say, maybe it was the fact that I knew most of the words to this song without having to descend into an endless flow of Beatles-like lalalas in place of the chorus. I'm not the kind of person who carries around a filing cabinet full of lyrics in my head. It really was that or kum ba yah (which, as I think about it now, we might have sung after my prayer.) Or maybe in the moment I thought it had cross-over potential, I don't know. Whatever you think of it does not matter, the fact is 'The Gypsy Kings' played it with aplomb, side-mouth-sax and all.

There comes a moment on occasions like this when all is lost and every shred of dignity is gone - the jokes have bombed, the glass-shattering rendition of songs have left people mortified - where you kind of relax into the role at the precise moment the audience are reaching for cheap objects to hurl at you. The Christians were sullen; you could almost see them forming arguments in defense of the gospel: 'well mamaji not all ministers act that way.' The non-Christians looked like angry minions. I could have gone on but for my friends who had also stopped laughing now and were indicating with thumb swiping across neck that either I needed to end this thing or my life was in fact in danger, or both.

Not these Gypsy Kings, the other Gypsy Kings...

The moral of the story? This is life.  This is the inexplicable. Interspersed between stretches of the mundane lies the bizarre and it reminds us in life that there really is no such thing as normal. In the words of the inimitable graduation song, Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen), The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.' A word on worry. I worry about Christianity, a lot. I worry about some Christian's obsession with the idea of normal  - as if there is a normative - this is the way things must be, people must believe like this, and they must act like that. When I think that heaven might be populated with people just like this, like it's the Stepford Wives but this time for eternity, I want to leap off a cliff. There is no scope for creative thought or out-the-box thinking, and so some Christian messages, when they grapple with the world, often seem to do so with a certain defensiveness, a latent fear. Just check out your local Christian magazine and see how many of those articles are chasing spooks.

The best thing my parents did for me was send me to Wits in the 90s; you can't study humanities at Wits without learning to celebrate diversity; the post-modern theory of Derrida doesn't make sense unless it comes out of the mouth of a over-the-top third year wearing black mascara and sporting two nose rings, who goes by the name John and considers his faith as lying somewhere between high Catholicism and Hinduism. I was lectured by a young gay man, Buddhist in fact, who had eczema so spent long stretches of each class with his hand down the back of his pants scratching the back of his knee; why he needed to go through his shorts to reach his knee I will never know. I spent long stretches of those same classes finding ways I could politely recommend skin creams to him. You see, I too have eczema. He took us for Pauline epistles and he was exceptional.

The staple argument that is rolled out tirelessly and, frankly, creates a gag reflex in me, is the ol' slippery slope chestnut. Ooh, you're on a slippery slope. Start dabbling in people with other worldviews and before you know it, you'll be killing cats. If you begin to listen to that speaker or read those books, before you know it, your faith will be gone. Can I propose something here? Maybe the worst sin is not dropping the F-bomb in a moment of high stress. Maybe the worse sin (if sin can be categorised like this) is creating fear where fear need not be. Sin is a sinister, malicious son-of-a-gun and this kind of mindset is right up its alley. It is sin’s far more nuanced form and far more difficult to detect but then sin doesn't, we should know, under-estimate our intelligence.

You see, if it was true that really conversing with the world would automatically land said person on a slippery slope, why do I love Jesus more today than ever before? I love people who are radically different from me, I love listening to their opinions and worldviews, I love the colour of it all, but I still love Jesus more, and I love Jesus in them more. In my experience of Jesus, he has never moved me away from diversity but always towards it, he has never encouraged me to deny the unknown but to investigate it. And this is hugely liberating.  With my lecturer, it wasn’t just the lessons that were awesome, it was the Lesson around the lessons; those moments when I got to chat with him one-on-one and found a person who genuinely cared. It was the Lesson I learnt when he marked a script of mine which, unbeknownst to me, was the exact topic of his Masters dissertation – he basically used any white space on my paper to re-write his own dissertation but still found it within himself to give me a considerate mark. Life is a lot about the Lesson around the lessons, isn’t it? When you engage in life you begin to learn all sorts of things about yourself and you are humbled and you are inclined to open yourself a little more. It was through this guy that I learnt that my previous attitude towards his orientation was far more offensive to God than his orientation itself.

If you are going to follow Jesus and be scared you just can't be too careful, demons are lurking everywhere and you'll be forced to extend the fruits of the Spirit to include hysteria, paranoia, fear and ignorance, among others. Jesus has always encouraged me to look at things differently and to explore, in its fullness, this world, this world in which Jesus 'lives and moves and has his being'.  These, of course, are the words Paul, spoken in Acts, used in explaining the nature of Christ, as my gay, Buddhist 1st year lecturer would have taught us.

a Jew a Muslim and a Catholic walk into a bar...

I cracked a joke in church yesterday. I was making some point about joy/complaint and thought of an age old joke about a guy who goes to a silent retreat centre, vows to keep silence all that time and is allowed to speak only 2 words every month to the abbot. After month one he exits, looking disconsolate and remarks to the abbot, 'bed hard' and promptly disappears back into his cell. The following month he exits again, now disconsolate and irritated and remarks, 'food cold' before disappearing again. At the end of the following month he comes out, beyond disgruntled and remarks, 'I quit.' The abbot retorts, 'I'm not surprised, you've done nothing but complain since you got here.' Well, the congregation laughed, not as loudly as say, when I lost my way in the Lord's Prayer like I did last week when we had overseas visitors with us. No. Rather, they laughed like people who had heard this joke before, that is politely, with that half smile that encourages the idea of moving along.

Now at the door after the service one of our members told me a story about a monk (local) who told that story in his monastery. It was seen to be in such poor taste that they made him lie prostrate on the dining room floor for days on end while the other monks walked all over him. That struck me as a little harsh and comes across as an awkward thing to demand; after all, if I was walking over somebody I'd be forced to ask a whole host of questions - where do I stand on this monk? Do I gently apologise after each step? Do I run quickly and hard or slowly and lightly (kind of like entering a cold swimming pool)? Which of those two things is less painful? Do I know have to clean my shoes every morning and before breakfast? And if I personally appreciated the joke, is it hypocritical of me to stomp all over the messenger? - and all that because I wanted an extra slice of toast. It just doesn't come across right.


I think what really got me was the fact that this joke did not crack the top 10 bad taste jokes I have told. Just this week a good friend told me about a joke he told that played, in true innuendo style, on the word 'ass' ending with the line, 'nun announces her ass is wild and free.' The joke was in such blindingly poor taste I sat there shaking my head in disbelief. He told me his congregation hosed themselves. Now I am no Puritan, but I would never have let fly with that joke in my pulpit. Then again my friend does belong to a particularly liberal church. It got me to thinking, if he had cracked that joke in that poor monk's monastery, he might well have been drawn and quartered, or at very least made to lie on the dining room floor, this time face up.    

What hope looks like

I mention all this because I think this is one off the real dangers of the church or religions in general. We are prone to a nauseating level of self-importance and at times, a complete absence of humour. Every now and then this breaks through. I was sitting in a coffee shop once and looked up at the TV. Pope Benedict was speaking though the sound was down; this afforded me the opportunity of not considering what he was saying but how he was looking. He just looked like a little old man in a purple hat. He might well, in that moment, have been railing against some evil in the world, dodging an apology for clergy abuse or fighting global poverty. He may even have been re-hashing some ancient, shaky argument about why woman shouldn't be standing up in church and offering opinions, who knows, but because there was silence it struck me in that moment that we really are all in this thing called life together. Some of us wear funny purple hats because we're special, some of us wear hats sideways because we're cool, some of us wear no hats because we have gel and an expensive stylist, and others of us (the Irish ones, like me) wear hats for less obvious reasons, like keeping the sun off ourselves. As I sat there looking at the mute Pope I thought maybe that is what we should all do: mute the planet for a day and just look at each other, and maybe then some honesty might sneak in and, who knows, a little humour. We mess things up sometimes with too many harsh words and unforgiving opinions.

The best fraternal I've ever been to brought humour and human foible front and centre. Sometimes fraternals are tiresome affairs where us ministers come together to preen and pose and boast about the size of our churches. They can be scarily competitive. By God's great mercy, this particular fraternal went down differently as somebody started to share about all the things they were getting wrong in their ministry. This started an avalanche of like-minded stories from the rest of us where our utter failure to carry out our duties effectively left us looking like the sorriest bunch of religious practitioners south of the equator; and this is the thing, we laughed till we cried. It was a holy, gracious moment.

So I want to posit a theory. It is not a new theory, but an old one that warrants a recall, and it goes like this: spiritual maturity does not take you to an overly serious place, it takes you to a joyous place; a place of warmth, humour and mutual lightness of being. One of our great ministers George Irvine once remarked, don't take yourself too seriously, take Jesus seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously. I love that. 

We have spirit yes we do we have spirit how about you...

Nosipho winning award. First in grade.

So we had prize-giving at KwaDinabakubo High School yesterday. For the many who do not know, this school holds the sixteen children that have become precious to me, so precious in fact, that I have learnt all their names. Lorina and I were invited as the masterminds of the much appreciated Nyusa Project. Well, let's say it was nothing short of surreal. It started really with the emcee; actually no, it started 2 hours late with the emcee. When planning our attendance, the headmaster - a softly spoken, gentle, sophisticated man who, it must be mentioned, was ultimately absent from the event - quietly encouraged us not to stick too strictly to the  9am start. So we pitched a magnificent one and a half hours late expecting a dramatic entrance to ensue. We were still a half hour early. Music was a big part of these festivities - this was not choral, not classic, not polite elevator music to fill the space while waiting participants stared meaninglessly around. No, this was club music, or as the older generation calls it (and alarmingly, me too) doof-doof music; it was loud, it encouraged darkness, a queue outside and a stamp on the wrist, ear-bleeding music that causes one to scream at the person next to you as if they're not in fact next to you but separated from you by five hills and a canyon. And then there was the emcee - every time I write that I have to resist the urge to choose a similar, more appropriate word, deejay, for quite simply that is what he was, and magnificent at that. I mean, he bossed it! (And this is coming from a showboater.) Ever seen a guy emceeing an awards ceremony in the middle of the day with Roy Orbison sunglasses? This guy did. Ever see an emcee offer a solo dance routine two minutes long prior to awarding grade certificates between each grade and show-casing new moves every time? This guy did. And when I say dance I'm not talking that shuffle where you groove slowly to the beat hoping people simultaneously appreciate your groove while not actually looking at you. No, I'm talking bump and grind, I'm talking moonwalk, I'm talking Miley Cyrus without the rubber finger. You think the VMAs are avant garde? Try again, come to a Molweni prize-giving. And he was not some hired help to gee up the kids. No, this maverick is a teacher and get this, the kids greeted him like Michael Jackson performing in Moscow for the first time - programs were thrown into the air, kids got up to dance, other teachers got up to dance, it was electrifying! After each stirring 'dancing with the stars' display he grabbed the mic and sternly called for order. A more self-defeating set of actions I have never seen. In my culture we would pay top dollar to get this kind of response, all emcee/deejay had to do was grab the lapels of his jacket with his thumb and forefinger and shuffle backwards and the place went nuts. That was all precursor to the awards themselves. 

Mohli. A true leader and well worth his second place.

We stuck around for the grade 8-10 (for that is the category our students fall into) and the enthusiasm did not abate. One kid was carried forward on the shoulders of his classmates like a emperor in triumph, to screaming and wild acclaim, and he only placed fifth. My ears hurt afterward and my voice was hoarse, after all you can't be in that environment and not start yelling yourself. In fact I too would have made a paper plane of the program except that I was sitting next to the deputy head and that might have been a step too far, although probably not. When all was said and done, five of our children finished in top ten positions. We celebrated, we hugged, we extended congratulatory slaps on the back and felt warmth of heart. Although we've only been working with these young people for 8 months, the success felt like ours. 

Nokubonga with her certificate. Also a top ten finish.

 
I tell you this because we take a beating in this country. We're struggling. We have a president who is demanding I grow a third hand to count his number of wives. Violence, crime... I get tired just typing this stuff. Other countries look down on us, people from other countries speak down to us, cluck-clucking. Trust me, I know this from a first hand encounter just this week as a First World Foreigner (a FWOF, if you will) thought it appropriate to lecture me on how to run my circuit and church - her two days in this country had apparently afforded her unparalleled insight. (There are also only so many times you can utter 'it's complicated' before you fall to the temptation of leaping across the dining room and ripping off limbs.) But this one thing we have, spirit. And I mean all of us. Even us whites who sheepishly try to hide it away, even we've got it. I turned to my friend in the midst of this wild awards show and said to her that I felt a little out of place. Her reply was along the lines of, rubbish, you're loving it. True, I was. I felt very much at home in that high school in Molweni. This is the thing you see, sure, I was the only umlungu but I knew some of these kids. There they stood sheepishly waving from the back hoping we would notice them, there was Mr. Mdimiso who we first met, trying to get into the school, looking as nonchalant as if this happened everyday, or Mrs. Ngwengwe who has since left the school but greeted us so warmly and her new substitute Gugu. And then there was Wonder, he's not officially in our program but so stellar, he is coming Friday, he's about to be adopted. So yes, I never felt out of place. You don't have to have the same skin colour you just have to know a few names, care about a few lives and the belonging comes in it's wake.

A past headmaster of another school once told me that he saw a smartly dressed young black man cross three lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Resplendent in a three piece suit and black leather briefcase, he darted through to the other side. Once there he put down the briefcase, pumped his fist in self-congratulation, straightened his tie, picked up his briefcase and smartly went on his way. That is what I mean when I say spirit. I wanted to stay longer. There was an item on the program called 'top 3 students' and I was seriously tempted to see how this gathering celebrated top student. Short of shooting the deputy out of a human cannon, it couldn't possibly get any more energetic or theatrical, could it? As I got up to leave the deputy head pulled me in and screamed in my ear (first place was being danced forward by his Maths teacher) saying, 'we're trying very hard.' I felt like saying, 'Mr. Mdimiso, don't try too hard, don't try too hard.'         

    

I knew you when you were old

I knew you when you were old,

I saw you pushed in that chair,

Waiter making you comfortable,

Young you are now and beautiful,

Old you shall be then but still beautiful,

Why this sadness then for what will be?

Why a sense of loss?

For you are now vulnerable but not frail,

And then you shall be both,

A hint of future lost ness,

Of this now most brilliant time,

Ghosts of future reaching back,

Slowly methodically stirring the tranquil waters of now,

Oh yes, I knew you when you were old.