It is hard to be honoured by people who have seen us grow up. Jesus recognized that. “Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin.” (Mark 6:4). Is that partly because they have seen the difficulties we have had growing up?
So let’s pray for those in their teenage years.
There’s a lot happening in the teenage brain with the unused connections in the thinking and processing part of the brain being pruned away while other connections are being strengthened. The prefrontal cortex is still developing leaving teenagers to rely on the part of brain called the amygdala for their decision making.
The amygdala is all emotion, impulse, aggression and instinctive behaviour. This makes growing up through the teenage years very difficult and leads many to be ashamed and to self-harm. One way of reading Genesis 3 is to see Adam and Eve as teenagers, making impulsive decisions and growing in shame.
Growing up is difficult. Please pray for those living through their teenage years, including
those who are vulnerable, anxious or ashamed,
those who have made mistakes or are troubled or troubling,
those who have suffered mental health issues through the pandemic,
parents
and those in our communities who support and champion teenagers
The Pioneers by Stephen Broadbent in Ellesmere Port, just off J9 of the M53.
For one day only
I thought I’d have some fun with numbers today, (or is it 2day?), 11.ii.21, one month, ten years after 11.1.11 when we launched Headway with an image of one by one forward-peering, prowed-standing pioneers coupled for growing enterprise like two sides of a coin, one complementing the other, one complimenting the other, tied and tethered in affection and imagination. One by one, the perfect team, the first eleven, the prime number no one can divide.
So it is, the perfect eleven, the perfect spell, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant bound in rhythm marching time, beating heart time, one two, one two, two one, one by one partners like Noah’s passenger list and those first gardeners. There is a second eleven, the mourning break, the eleventh of the eleventh, when we remember the one who stood with one and fell, along with all the fallen ones, tragically flat lining when one stood against one as betrayer, the twelfth man making even eleven odd.
A Dutiful Boy is an important book for me – it’s importance measured by the fact that one of my beautiful, dutiful sons singled this book out as my Christmas present. The book charts the pain of a gay Pakistani Muslim’s journey to acceptance, love and flourishing.
The book’s inner sleeve explains that Mohsin Zaidi grew up in a poor pocket of east London in a devout Shia Muslim community. His family were close knit and conservative. He became the first person from his school to attend Oxford University, and it was there that he found the space to become the man he was born to be.
Zaidi talks frankly about his own self-hatred and his prayers to be “different” and “cured”. The tensions and the love of Pakistani family life are well told. Throughout Zaidi is committed to his parents, brothers and his extended family of aunts and uncles and this is one of the most moving aspects of this story. The book is as much a memoir of their journey to acceptance as it is of Mohsin’s.
Counselling helped. I will treasure the exchange with his counsellor, Maureen Zaidi reports. Responding to Maureen’s questions Zaidi admits that he had thought of suicide. Maureen asked: “do you think your parents would rather a gay son or a dead son?” Zaidi didn’t know the answer. “ A dead son they could explain. It would be a moment in time and then they might move forward. They’d live with the shame of a gay son for as long as I was alive.” Then Maureen invites Zaidi to imagine a future in which he has a son.
“Now imagine your son in exactly the situation you are in now – the same history, the same conflicts, the same desires and the same fears. What do you do?”
Zaidi replied: “I grab him. I hold him tightly and tell him that he’s OK. That he is loved and that I don’t give a fuck about religion. That any God who loves me must love him as much.”
Then Maureen asks: “Now think about his sadness, what does that make you feel?”
“It makes me angry … really, really angry.”
“Digging deep into this pit of anger, I felt something shift inside me. My sense of justice kicked in. The anger felt good, powerful. Like rocket fuel. I wouldn’t be stalled by the obstacles put in my path. I would knock them down. I was surer than ever before that I would not marry a woman. I would live my life as a gay man, and, one way or another, there would come a time when I would face my family and force them to face the truth.”
Throughout this journey Mohsin remains the “dutiful boy”. There is secrecy about his gay life and there are enormous tensions along the way but there is integrity in the way Mohsin and his family will not let go of one another in spite of the pain and shame they all suffer and in spite of the distance they put between themselves.
This is a story in which all find their cure and it is a delight to read how Mohsin finds love and the freedom in which he can grow his work. Other people aren’t so fortunate and continue to struggle in cultures which hate homosexuality and seek to change, cure and deny those who are gay. Mohsin and his parents set up a support group for the families of LGBT Muslims.
In the first session his Mum said to the group: “My brother was sick and it … he has taught me a lot. We have so little time with our loved ones. Why waste it? God created my son this way and it is me who had the problem, not him.” His Dad joined in: “Children are not ours to disown, my son is not hurting anyone. He is a good person. I don’t care what anybody says. I know that Allah loves him like I do.”
A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi was published by Square Peg on August 20th 2020
When Aylan Kurdi’s photo splashed across the waves, it was a scoop, a spotlight on refugees, a beacon of hope for better treatment, more welcome ways. It became Sea Prayer for parents casting their children to sea in light vessels. But nothing changed. It was a false dawn. Children keep drowning. Here in Bethlehem, lives are poor, government weak.
A concrete cordon of wall dominates, not for our security mind, but as shutter and blind to lives despised. We are occupied by those whose minds pre-occupied by counting our threat, known by numbers, never names. Our lives are poor, our movement restricted, often imprisoned for raising flag, hand or stone, getting by with our whittled olive tourist trade.
When reporters came from way out east, that was our moment, that Aylan Kurdi flash. Three came. They’d heard our plight. and noted our views, their reports were carried in paper news. Their attraction, they said, was a star, a pin prick in a night sky, inspiration for their camera and that first photograph, a baby captured, strangely focused, fast exposed as a flash of light.
That was the image of us. It sold and sold. going world-wide, framed, kissed and even enshrined, the light of the world, while we still in darkness lie. There was a child, a shot in the dark. Because of that aperture in this little Goliath walled town where streets stay dark and soldiers still count their enemy, we picture endurance in that light relief, that blink of an eye, that pin prick in the night.
This is a reflection on words from Isaiah 44: I am the first and I am the last.
As well as the first I am the last I am the last the victim forgotten I am the last is my name my first word the lasting word beaming hope for the last at last everlasting love
This was written for the Twitter hashtag #cLectio – a hashtag used by some for reflecting on the first reading of Morning Prayer
I had to resort to poetry to respond to the video produced by the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) of the Beautiful Story. This is a film designed “to encourage and enable evangelicals to engage and contend in discussions about human sexuality”. It left me cold, horrified by the voices that have gone unheard.
Beautiful stories are
well spoken. But with respect, Sirs your Beautiful Story so well told is lop-sided, a one-sided story lacking the beauty of the round.
Your voice sounds beautiful. It is, as I said, well spoken. But, big but, there is a violence to the voices which go unsaid.
Voices of ones you corrected with your prescriptive text drown the muffled sounds from the closets you locked.
From basement cellar, closet and the chimney stacked chamber their voices died, but scratched on the wall, blood red, their words
I hesitate to give the link to CEEC’s Beautiful Storybecause it is not as beautiful as it is cracked up to be and becauseit is not for anyone of a sensitive disposition. The Church of England has published resources for Living Faithfully in Love..
How many sides has a coin? When we toss a coin we call “heads” or “tails” because we assume that a coin just has the two sides. On the toss of a coin we are divided into winners and losers. The winners are able to claim that they won fairly (even though only by chance) and the losers have to suck it up. There are two sides now and both know whether they are on the side with greater chance or lesser chance. The losers’ last chance is to overturn privilege – and the odds are always stacked against them.
The 12 sided thrupenny bit was first minted in 1937
But there aren’t just two sides to a coin. There is another smaller side which nobody calls because it so disproportionately small that the chance of it landing on its edge are virtually zero. But then, who hasn’t spent time standing coins on their edge, and who of us of a certain age hasn’t enjoyed making the old thrupenny bit take its stand on one of its twelve sides (as opposed to its two large sides).
Just imagine twelve sides. That is precisely what our scriptures imagine – with the twelve tribes of the twelve sons of Jacob finding and founding society in the land they were caused to occupy. The early church shared that imagination, counting twelve apostles and replenishing that number when one fell out. The thrupenny bit represents a design to facilitate concelebration, conversation and dialogue – remembering that there are rarely only two sides to any question and that to resolve conflict many sides have to be considered. Sitting round a circular table is to adopt this design. Each person has their point of view, their side, in a facilitative process which intends to iron out the abuses of positional power.
Pope Francis, in Fratelli Tutti(2020), suggests the image of the polyhedron as the shape of better things to come. Promoting a “culture of encounter” he writes:
“The image of the polyhedron can represent a society where differences coexist, complementing, enriching and reciprocally illuminating one another, even amid disagreements and reservations. Each of us can learn something from others. No one is useless and no one is expendable. This also means finding ways to include those on the peripheries of life. For they have another way of looking at things; they see aspects of reality that are invisible to the centres of power where weighty decisions are made.”
Fratelli Tutti 2020
Colum McCann underlines how tricky it is to get beyond binary thinking about winners and losers and right and wrong in his novel Apeirogon. The title is a mathematical term for an object of an “observably infinite number of sides” – a shape that reflects that conflict can never be reduced to simple opposed positions. Apeirogon is based on the real life friendship between Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, two fathers (one Israeli, the other Palestinian) united in their grief for their daughters – both killed in conflict. They both join the Parents Circle Families Forum – a group of people similarly bereaved who unite in their sorrow to press for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity. Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on and even though the counting will take forever one can still get to any point in the universe in a finite amount of time
from The Apeirogon
And there’s another shape – the circle. The shape of things to come if ever we come to the time of resolution – when there are no sides to join or oppose, when the corners we tend to cling to are rounded off by our encounter with the various truths of any situation. The earth is well rounded as if prepared for peace making.
Angel by Marc Chagall, All Saints Tudeley: another angel helping us see life differently?
Today is Michaelmas – in our Church of England calendar known as Michael and All Angels. One of the best loved poems about angels is by Maya Angelou. That is coincidence that the poet’s name itself is a reminder of angels and their purpose. She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson but later became known as Maya Angelou. Angelou was her married name and Maya came from the nickname used by her older brother as in “mya (my) sister”. Angelou is the Greek for angel or messenger. Maya has its own meaning in the Semitic language of the Amharas; it is a “lens that helps see further”. Isn’t that just what an angel does? Don’t they help us see further than the darkness, the pain, the hatred etc? Don’t they help us feel better? Don’t they help us to see hope, freedom, reconciliation?
Here is Maya Angelou’s poem, Touched by an Angel
We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.
Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.
Did she know there was more to life than lions licking the furred ears of lambs, fruit trees dropping their fat bounty, the years droning on without argument?
Too much quiet is never a good sign. Isn’t there always something itching beneath the surface?
But what could she say? The larder was full and they were beautiful, their bodies new as the day they were made.
Each morning the same flowers broke through the rich soil, the birds sang, again in perfect pitch.
It was only at night, when they lay together in the dark that it was almost palpable – the vague sadness, unnamed.
Foolishness, betrayal, -call it what you will. What a relief to feel the weight fall into her palm. And after, not to pretend any more that the terrible calm was Paradise.
by Danusha Laméris from her book The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014). Reproduced with her permission.
I love Danusha Laméris’s take on “the fall”. We can perhaps sense Eve’s dis-ease as she came to the end of the too perfect day, the moments when the lions licked the ears of the lambs and all that they saw in the mirror was beauty. There was nothing to worry about. Imagine that! You can feel the tension building in their bed as they tossed and turned their temptation. And you can feel the enormous relief of “the fall” when she takes matters into her own hands, when she becomes decision maker even though rule breaker.
And the rest is history. It is life, though it isn’t paradise. Life seems far more interesting than paradise. There are challenges, work to be done, decisions to be made, reconciliations to be won. Maybe it is better to have paradise behind us and before us and enjoy the weight of the fall in our hands in the mean-time.
Grits and Grains 