On statues and monuments (in Budapest)

Budapest is a city of history, a brooding city as a friend of mine who recently visited the place described it. It is also a city of statues and monuments. I was unaware of the full extent of Budapest’s and Hungary’s troubled history until I arrived. We were being carted from the airport to our residence and I tried to engage our driver in conversation. Rather rudely he spoke only Hungarian. I asked about sport and football. He dismissed this with a shrug that suggested Hungarian football is rubbish.

‘What sport do you follow?’ I asked by way of exaggerated hand signals and by speaking English really, really slowly and loudly, which as we all know passes as a foreign language to an English speaker. 

‘Basketball.’

‘Interesting,’ I replied. This didn’t look like the land of Kobe Bryant. 

I wasn’t about to engage him on the political situation in Hungary. But the buildings kind of gave it away. This was my first taste of a post-Communist country and you could see it in the architecture. It had all of the lifeless functionality and bankrupt creativity that came to epitomise so much of communist life. But I’m intrigued by old buildings and new life out of old buildings. This wasn’t off-putting in the least, more intriguing. 

 

One of the tourist attractions in Budapest is Memento Park; a giant park somewhere on the outskirts of the city; the glossy brochures hinted at the occupants of this park: inside it were all these monstrously large statues of the great socialist leaders – Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels and the like. As I recall the brochure actually advertised it as such. A kind of frozen political-historical vaudeville experience. One of them, as I recall, had a worker striding forward, flag in tow, like someone caught somewhere between breaking into a run and doing lunges. ‘Come see the range of jack-asses that left us with a billion dollar debt!’ More seriously, their minister of Education (1998 – 2001), Zoltan Pokorni remarked, “…I studied the plans of the Memento Park project with great interest. I find it a promising plan to keep our historical memory alive and to strengthen citizens’ sense of responsibility and commitment to sustain democracy." It was a part of their history preserved, a lesson not to be repeated. Our wonderful guide who showed us around the Buda side of the city sighed, ‘You know the Russians came and liberated us from Germany and then forgot to leave for forty years.’

And so it goes.

We never made it to Memento Park, it was just too far out and there was far too much to do in Budapest. But walking between Pest and Buda we quite by accident stumbled across the most contested memorial in the city. It was built to commemorate Nazi Germany’s occupation. It is a giant, midnight black eagle attacking an angelic figure; people were protesting in front of the statue, laying down flowers, original pictures of Jewish family presumably killed in the war, placards and speakers organised around the clock. The central, and vociferous, lament was that this memorial represented a form of denialism. The argument, as I could gather, went something like this: don’t pretend we were all victims of Nazi Germany. We were complicit. Our government, our people played their part. Don’t now turn around and blame a force somewhere beyond ourselves and our leaders.

The added lament was that the statue was an eyesore. It seemed an oddly aesthetic complaint in the midst of a politically charged debate. Not only is this an intentional historical misreading but the damn thing looks like the back end of a bus.

And you know, on re-considering that sentiment, I found it to be true, at least for myself. It was garish. This was also the first time I had considered that there might be some kind of code book for this kind of thing, creative criteria that statues and public symbols must adhere to in order to be considered art. I wondered what they were, and for that matter, who drew them up? But not knowing this I would have to agree, this statue was horrid in an obvious way; less a statue and more propaganda as I looked at it. I don’t know the criteria public should adhere to but, by process of elimination, this would be one of the first to be ruled out. In my book.

But the one that left the most indelible impression must have been the shoes on the banks of the Danube. These shoes, bronzed, came in all sizes – children’s shoes, adults, historically accurate renderings of shoes of those Jews dragged down to the bank of the Danube, Jews who were told to strip naked, who were then shot by a Hungarian fascist movement known as the Arrow Cross, and whose bodies were dumped into that great river. As our guide, who took us around the Jewish Quarter remarked in passing, ‘Strauss was wrong, the Danube doesn’t run blue it runs red.’ It was a poignant moment, sacred in a way that things that commemorate rather than celebrate often are.

These are statues and monuments in Budapest but there is a monument in the making in Durban that I do like. Elephants. Right where you would not expect them. As the highway into Durban splits into two, on that island are these elephants. A number of years ago they too were vandalised and I forget the reason now, but I think it is because these elephants were seen to symbolise the wrong political party. Sometimes as South Africans we only seem to ever need half a reason to destroy things. Considering how vulnerable our animals are, this is a statue I think we should keep. Maybe one day the stone will be replaced, and the iron mesh shaping the stone into elephants repaired. Maybe one day the monument will be complete.

On you really caring (but really only you)

‘Can these bones live?’

Ezekiel 37:3

When I was just getting started in ministry, serving as a youth pastor in Alberton, I attended a conference at a small Baptist church one town down from ours. It was led by a strident American, a bull of man. He had that quintessential look of aged success: silver grey hair, still thick and manicured, clean cut and skin slightly tanned – a man whose sheer physicality defied his age. 70 years old? No way! Him? He had written a slight though very successful book on evangelism; a book now nestling somewhere in the lower reaches of my bookcase. I sat alongside other eager beaver men of the ministry, young and old, willing to drink from this exotic fount of wisdom.

I found those two days quite disappointing; maybe I had set the bar too high, maybe this was the beginning of a discernment process revealing that I would have many passions in this multi-faceted faith of mine, but evangelism really wasn’t one of them.

But he did tell one story that stuck with me: as a young man he had been in a church that refused to do anything, no matter what he tried, what he preached, how many visits he did there was simply nothing forthcoming. It was dead as dead could be. Morsdood.

On one occasion, after calling a meeting that no one attended, he headed out into the churchyard. There was a bell on the property, set apart from the church, and out of sheer frustration he began to ring that bell, over and over he rang it, out there in the evening air, under that darkened sky with stars lighting the heavens he rang that bell. Late in the evening the sound of its clanging reverberated through the town. He never did mention how the town responded. He never spoke of anyone sitting inside their home, watching TV but momentarily distracted by that crazy preacher who had lost the plot; he never spoke of a woman sitting in a chair attending to some task but now staring quizzically through the window and down the road in the direction of that sound; or the young girl who stepped into the street, gravel and sand underfoot, dress catching in the slight breeze, who walked quickly spying through the trees that giant of a man tugging on that rope. He could hardly know.

He didn’t even end the story with any measure of success, as I recall. The church wasn’t miraculously full the next Sunday. Although I imagine it did have some kind of happy ending, he wrote a book on evangelism after all which means he must have turned the corner somewhere. (Otherwise it would be the worst book on evangelism ever written right?) Or maybe he did explain it but I lost myself in the sad romance of that story that I forgot to track the point of what he was saying. Or maybe he just spoke the story as it came to him and left it there, hanging. I can’t remember now but I hope he did that.

Sometimes stories exist for a very clear reason; the moral all but jumps out of them smacking the listener across the face with a two-by-four yelling Learn your lesson! Learn your lesson! And then there are other stories that speak to you but at such a depth you can’t really fathom it, as if the essence of who you are understands it but hasn’t bothered to inform the operating room of your life, your consciousness. So you are moved and stirred and you get emotional but you pray no one asks why as you would have a hard time explaining it.

What I do know is that sometimes I struggle to find passion in others for the passion in me and it is vexing in the same moment as I recognise each person is free to follow their own heart.

Do you ever feel lonely in what you care about? Do you ever wish that others felt the same passion for the same things as you?

I don’t know what to say to you but I can lend you a story about a man who felt the same and went out in the crisp night air and rang a bell relentlessly, disturbing his community and awakening his slumbering God; it is a story of a passionate man, a man who stood out there, his reputation as a sane individual on the line, alone, to remind you that you are not alone.

On the days before Easter, Easter, and the day after

Easter is pressure.

I’m not sure Easter is any minister’s favourite time of the year. If it is, they’re no minister I know of. I have a friend in the ministry and between the two of us we have agreed that Easter Monday is our favourite Easter day. It’s not that we don’t like Easter per se, of course not, on most levels, it doesn’t come better than Easter! But Easter never arrives at a minister’s door without asking for something substantial in return.

Very seldom is there this same pressure to perform as at Easter time and the services follow each other like a set of waves rolling in relentlessly off North Beach; no sooner have you kicked your way to the surface than the next one arrives ready to pound you back into the deep, leaving you scrambling and hoping that the direction you are kicking in is up. Only a few days ago I was staring down the barrel of 9 services in 6 days, one of which went on for 4 hours. Look at most ministers a day after Easter and you will notice the subtle signs of someone rather punch-drunk, speaking in monosyllables and dribbling from both corners of the mouth; someone who has attempted once again to deliver a familiar story in fresh and stimulating ways. A minister mate of mine is preaching 7 times in 7 days, enough preaching to make you question the existence of a loving God - an Easter irony if ever there was one.

I recall one bishop, sharing how we all feel from time to time, when in front of a group of ministers he whispered dejectedly while hunched over the lectern, ‘You know, eventually you get to a stage where you just don’t know what else to say.’

It is even harder when you are in a church where there is a certain expectation; things have unfolded so well and for so long you feel the need to improve on the tradition year in and year out, or at least not falter, like a team on a winning streak where the thought and inevitability of a loss is strangely increased off the back of every victory. All it takes is one person to say, ‘Can’t wait for that sunrise service pastor, always so special that one!’ I’m inclined to pinch them. Hard. But lovingly, you know, like Jesus would. Every positive comment of experience in years gone by settles on your shoulders like a weight. Every year at our Taize service I have to refrain from the urge to burn bigger and better candles. ‘Like last year people, only brighter!’ Already our church is lit up in a way that would bring our insurance policy under review.

It doesn’t help that Easter is also holiday season; people move off to do all sorts of things. Young families head off into the Drakenseberg for a few days. ‘Oh, we are off to Champagne Sports Resort.’ I want to weep. 

When the pressure is on I ask, ‘Can I come along?’

‘Haha!’ They reply.

‘No really.’

‘Oh.’

And so it goes.

We have this sunrise service. It takes a lot of logistical effort to set this thing up. I mean a lot. We have to cart a cross down from the church that, no kidding, is not that much different to how the original cross might have been; it is the mother of all Easter crosses. We have to prepare posies to place in the cross at a moving moment in the church service. (Here I am employing liberally the royal ‘we’, having never personally prepared a posy in my life.) Every year we drive it, tied precariously to the back of a bakkie, down to the view site. I’ve often wondered about the spectacular effect of that cross coming off the bakkie. I’ve imagined someone, at Easter, driving along and praying to God, ‘Dear God if you would only send me a sign!’ only to see this air-borne cross with flowers floating around it appearing on the horizon. Now that would be an Easter story. 

We have to get sound equipment down there. We have to arrange electricity and so we have to schmooze one of the neighbours to steal a line from their house. It also leads to canvasing the neighbourhood, dropping flyers and letting people know that, if they hear strains of ‘Christ the Lord is risen today!’ penetrating their bedrooms before sunrise, they are to please refrain from phoning the cops. 

Oh, and we have to get to the view site at 5am.

I mean, this is a mission.

But then alongside all this something else happens almost every year: The sound system has worked, people have received communion and placed flowers in the cross, and now sit happily tucking into hot cross buns cradling warm cups of coffee, and in that moment, it is special. There is little obligation in that moment, less on your shoulders. Sure, the main Easter service is an hour away but there’s a sense that this is under control and the finish line in sight. And in that moment, with the flowers in the cross, and the sun kissing it and all before it ever so gently, it feels a little like Easter. Like most, I’m a sucker for a cool breeze and a rising sun, and a silhouetted cross.

Be kind to your minister this Easter wherever you are. Easter will mean many things to you, but it almost definitely won’t come with nearly the amount of pressure felt by your clergy. The best a minister can hope for is a few moments in a whole week where it all kinda feels right. And I don’t think any of us should necessarily expect more; after all Jesus was dead and then he was alive - One astonishing moment, a blink of an eye easily missed that birthed a new world of possibility.

When that person says, ‘Cant’ wait for sunrise it is always so special!’ Part of me wants to respond with, ‘Urgh.’ 

The more redeemed part of me thinks, ‘You know, it really rather is.’