Month: March 2025

Ceasing to be Eathbound

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I have long been a fan of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s masterful creation of an imagined, plausible, and ethical US Presidency. Although the programme foretold the election of a president who was Latino, it did not predict the right wing backlash that would follow. A much weaker version of Donald Trump features in an episode concerning a Republican challenger to President Jed Bartlett, who the sitting Democrat sees off without difficulty. Alas, recent months have seen a catastrophic implosion of the Democratic opposition in the USA, with global consequences.

In one episode of the series Jed Bartlett is asked a question about why Airforce One’s take-off had been delayed. Before giving the prosaic reason, Bartlett eulogises for a moment about what a lengthy night flight can mean:

“A long flight across the night. You know why late flights are good? Because we cease to be earthbound and burdened with practicality.”

I write this onboard a BA flight which is about to leave Cape Town on Friday 21 March. We weren’t sure whether this flight would make it into the air, given events at Heathrow. Perhaps we won’t land in the UK – the equivalent flight yesterday ended up at Barcelona. Nevertheless, we will have a long night flight in all events, and perhaps Bartlett was right that there is something unusual and potentially uplifting and thought-provoking about traversing the planet in this way (albeit with environmental considerations and impacts).

Once again South Africa has been impressive; challenging, and full of natural wonders. From visiting communities that experienced devastating flooding, to the wealthy areas of coastal communities along the Garden Route, we have once again experienced a country of contrasts. A nation where the enduring imprint of colonialism runs wide and deep. During our time there the SA Ambassador was asked to leave the USA and 70,000 Afrikaans have expressed interest in accepting refugee status in America. Making a nation is hard work – especially one so burdened by an evil regime that nurtured division as a basic strategy of education and government.

Perhaps due to the short span of our lives human beings do far too much far too quickly. Nothing appears to have been learned from COVID, recent global conflicts or the history that underpins Western privilege. In South Africa two experiences reminded me of our self-absorption and navel-gazing. One was the opportunity to see and photograph the Large Magellanic Cloud, a ‘nearby’ galaxy containing 30 billion stars, and only visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

The Large Magellanic Cloud

The other, quite different experience, was to go underground and visit the Cango caves. Here stalactites and stalagmites have formed over tens of thousands of years, in some cases forming vast columns when growth up has met with expansion down. Extraordinary beauty created by incredibly slow drips of calcium infused rainwater. A process now slowed by global warming.

What is above us and below us is a reminder that the environment we value has come into being through both unbelievably big cosmic events and incredibly small and sustained changes that over vast stretches of time have a mighty impact. We do not tread lightly upon the earth, expending in a couple of centuries resources that have taken millennia to create. The relentless energy of the systems that we have built do not work in favour of the whole of humanity, or even the few that appear to reap the benefits of extracted resources. We are not living sustainably and the blind optimism of some that we shall always find solutions to the problems we’ve created may, in the end be shown for what it is: a convenient narrative to permit the continuing exploitation of our planet.

Sweet Flying Baby Jesus

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It appears as a small detail in some classical depictions of the Annunciation, but it is not uncommon to find a tiny baby Jesus surfing a beam of celestial light towards the Virgin Mary. We might take this to be no more than an artistic expression of the theological significance of what was unfolding at this critical moment at the start of the Gospel. However, there is more to this illustration than meets the eye.

A middle part of so called Mérode Triptych, created in 1430’s in the workshop of a Master of Flémalle, and kept in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Anyone familiar with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman will know that the clerical author, Laurence Sterne, makes play with the concept of “homunculi”. Developed to a significant extent by Aristotle, this idea centres on the belief that all the physical aspects of procreation resided with the man. Unbelievably small babies were thought to be present in semen which, at the moment of conception, were passed by the man to the woman. It is hard not to interpret this as a startling manifestation of misogyny. Life being so important it could only originate from a man; and pregnancy so inconvenient it must be the perpetual obligation of a woman. In Tristram Shandy this theory is mocked from the first page, when the conception of Tristram is interrupted by Mrs Shandy, who distracts her husband by asking: “Have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” The effect of this is to weaken the efforts of Mr Shandy, and results in irrevocable damage to the homunculus that is, and will become, Tristram.

It would be easy to underestimate the consequences of this belief. Sterne incorporates into his novel the real-life situation of the Duchess of Suffolk. When her husband and son died in quick succession she was granted administration of the estate. However, when it was contested, part of the appellant’s legal argument was the assertion that – based on an understanding of homunculi – she was not a blood relative of her son. The Duchess lost her right to inherit.

As the Church celebrates the Annunciation on 25th March it is worth asking the basic question: “What was going on?” The classical paintings of a tiny Jesus heading towards Mary imply that the infant saviour was a divine homunculus. The mother of Jesus was simply receiving a delivery from the Almighty, leaving her virgin state unaltered and confining her responsibilities to safe carriage. At its most extreme, Mary would be seen as having a vocation – but no blood relationship with Jesus.

In the classical world divergent views about conception include those of Aristotle, and an alternative approach can be found in the work of Galen. Galen’s understanding of conception sees both the man and the woman contributing seed to form an embryo. As Magdalena Łanuszka put it in a blog entitled “Flying Baby Jesus”, the homunculus interpretation lacks serious theological foundation:

Such a depiction suggests that Christ was incorporated as a human child somehow beyond Mary’s womb and then “placed” in it. That weird In Vitro is of course an idea absolutely theologically incorrect. Jesus’ body was formed entirely out of Mary’s body, not somewhere outside it.

http://en.posztukiwania.pl/2014/06/01/flying-baby-jesus/

In a timely inclusion, the current issue of The Church Times features a review of a new book focusing on the embodied experiences and theologies of birth. Pregnancy and Birth: Critical Theological Conceptions challenges the dearth of theological work done on these major topics. It is not difficult to imagine that if men underwent the experience of pregnancy, the number and variety of titles on these subjects would be immense. In another review of Karen O’Donnell and Claire Williams’ new book, Dr. Emma Percy, a researcher working in this field, offers some concluding reflections:

Pregnancy and all the complexities around reproduction should not be a niche topic, just for the feminist theologians or those who have been pregnant. We are all born from a body that gestated us for months. Jesus, as O’Donnell reminds us, shared this very human experience in the womb of Mary. There is much for all to learn from taking a more realistic look at a bodily experience that is so fundamental to our being human.

Emma Percy book review in Theology. First published online January 8, 2025

Sweet flying baby Jesus should concern us all. How we respond to this framing of the Annunciation and Incarnation is fundamental to our understanding of Christianity, and the God we worship. Sterne turned the evident nonsense of the homunculi into satire, but underneath the wit is a profound question about the humanity of the God in whom we place our faith. From what I have read, it is uncertain whether the writers of the Bible shared a uniform understanding of conception: they almost certainly didn’t. (There’s an excellent article about this by Laura Quick entitled Bitenosh’s Orgasm, Galen’s Two Seed and Conception Theory in the Hebrew Bible). Ultimately, when we lack the understanding of what the authors of Scripture thought when they were writing, we need to arrive at our own conclusions as to whether our interpretation enlarges our love of God and of neighbour, or diminishes it. For me, the idea of Jesus as a foetus implanted in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit undermines a primary doctrine of Christianity; namely, that the Word made flesh is both fully human and wholly divine.

Where the Heart is

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On holiday I am enjoying the time to read three very different books. One is poetry; another a novel; and the third theology. Despite being different, I am also seeing (or making) many connections between the narratives. This is unsurprising in one sense as I am their common denominator: the one reading. Like the handmade and unique marbled pages in each of the first edition volumes of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, we perceive our own patterns as we mark and experience the stories mediated by print.

I came to A Dark and Stormy Night by Tom Stacey via an unusual route. At home we have a sculpture bequeathed by an old friend. In doing some research about the sculptor I came across the fact that her husband was a writer. In this novel, a bereaved suffragan bishop – a Dante scholar – gets lost in a forest in darkness while seeking a redundant chapel. It is notable that the bishop lived with and through his wife’s dementia – something Tom Stacey knew about at first hand. His description of this resonates strongly with what I experienced of my mother’s cognitive decline several years ago. Stacey’s insight evidently comes from deep and costly personal experience:

You are forever packing and re-packing to go home. To tell you we are at home only serves to rile you. This lost inner home of yours is never locatable.

Transgressing the boundaries of normal or accepted behaviour is a strong theme of Allan Boesak’s Children of the Waters of Meribah. Boesak is a South African theologian with an abiding commitment to liberation theology.

In a chapter exploring the story in Matthew’s Gospel of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus seeking healing for her daughter, Boesak conducts a masterclass in hermeneutics. Experience shapes both writing and reading. Unsurprisingly, Boesak is alert to the location of this account:

She is a Canaanite, the people whose land had been conquered and occupied by Jesus’s people.

What should have been home was no longer home or, at least, a place now made strange and punitive. The experience of being South African leads Boesak, and the scholars he cites, to read this account with the painful insight of experience. The woman comes to Jesus in a “spirit of protest and reclamation”.

The final book is a collection of poetry by Koleka Putuma entitled Collective Amnesia. It is a work that has set records in South Africa in terms of poetry sales. Inevitably, with a heritage of the Group Areas Act, this is a nation that continues to live with “ongoing collective trauma” for countless reasons, not least the dispossession of peoples’ homes. Putuma writes out of her experience with skill, candour and wit.

You will realise that the elders in the room

Learned the alphabet of hurting and falling apart differently

For you, healing looks like talking and transparency

For them, it is silence and burying

And both are probably valid

And

Then

You will realise

That

Coming home

And

Going home

Do not mean the same thing

From the poem ‘Graduation’ in the book ‘Collective Amnesia’ by Koleca Putuma

Sins of the Fathers

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Until Ash Wednesday I had never thought my ancestry was connected to slavery. My forebears were working class people, engaged in factory labour and domestic weaving. They acquired no wealth and owned no property. Like so many in Lancashire in the 19th century they were caught up in the Industrial Revolution, trying as best as they could to survive. However, their connection to slavery was to spin the cotton that was at the heart of the exploitation of people and the associated growth in international trade.

It may seem odd to think of this as a connection with slavery. The usual focus is on the wealthy institutions that owned slaves, controlled plantations or invested in the transatlantic trade. However, it was a business that involved almost everyone. From governments to the academy, the creation of public libraries and art galleries, the economic benefits gained from slavery are in the fabric of British society. While there is a range of opinion about the precise economic advantage that resulted from transatlantic slavery, it is estimated that the British working class benefited by a small but significant rise in their living standard:

The change in worker welfare is the population-weighted average of the change in the real wage in each location and equals 3.06 percent, implying substantial welfare gains for domestic free workers from the enslavement and exploitation of black Africans in colonial plantations.

Heblich, S., Redding, S. J., & Voth, H. J. (2022). Slavery and the british industrial revolution.

It is understandable that Ash Wednesday made me think of this connection. Isaiah tells us: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” Sadly, one of the most grievous sins of our age is the toleration of inequality and the yawning gulf that exists between rich and poor. At the end of a year living in Argentina, almost 40 years ago, I had a conversation with my Spanish teacher. During my time in South American I had witnessed the severe challenges facing many communities. In my early 20s, I undoubtedly had a more passionate idealism than I do today. I asked her how I could return to my life in the UK knowing about the huge disparities in wealth and power which I’d seen. The answer was: “you’ll get used to it; you’ll feel differently over time”. It was a wise and accurate prophecy. It might be the greatest sin to accept – even joyfully embrace – this kind of moral anesthesia. To remain untroubled by the way of the world or simply wring our hands at the daily TV news, saying: “if only there was something we could do!”

The scriptures for Lent speak about lament that leads to action. We are not required to exhibit our distress, or acts of justice, but we are required to feel the shocking truth of the reality that our world falls far short of the Kingdom of God. It is only when we see and understand the terrible reality of a world which is constructed by entrenched inequality that we can ever hope to find a different path. It is tempting to see ourselves as unconnected from the blasphemous operation of transatlantic slavery, but the economic advantage it delivered is rooted in the institutions of the West (not least the Church). Work is being done to respond to this truth, but it is yet to be seen how successful it will be in achieving any kind of restitution. We speak of both financial currency and the body’s blood being in “circulation”. Money earned through oppression and slavery may be produced in on particular place but, once it is in the financial system, it becomes impossible to point at one part of the economic body and say “it isn’t there”. How would we know with complete certainty?

The bonds of injustice continue to shape our world. Visiting South Africa I am reminded once again of the legacies of slavery, not least in the system of apartheid. The abolition of laws is one thing, but the calling to be awake and alert for the ingrained divisions of an unequal world requires soul-work if we are to prevent the slide backwards into attitudes now surfacing in the USA and elsewhere. Restitution is more than reparations and requires a profound recognition of an evil which must be countered step by step, each and every day.

“Slavery cannot end through laws alone. We who survived were taught to hate ourselves, our bodies, our histories. I learned this in the way that I held my body as a thing despised, ashamed. Why do we need a museum of slavery? Surely the cobbles, the walls and the hills scream of that past. But outside all we hear is the forgetfulness of the city. Here, in this museum, we will call again into memory our languages, our resistances, the worlds we made in the city of slavery”

Quotation from Gebeba Baderoon, 2020, in the Museum of Slavery, Cape Town, South Africa

The Sombre Season

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Lent is almost upon us. Somehow, unlike several of our continental neighbours, England maintained the old words for this time, even as the Church’s Latin altered so much of our language. Lent probably came into English through Old Saxon, but its exact history is lost in the folds of antiquity. Nevertheless, the meaning is clear. It is to do with something long, possibly reflecting the lengthening days brought by spring in the northern hemisphere. Maybe, also, the sense that days of abstinence might be long days and, consequently, Lent is a season to be endured. It ends, of course, in Easter – another ancient name from Old English, with origins linked to Northumbrian Eostre. Perhaps the name of a Goddess, or a word for dawn, but in any event adopted by the early Christians of these isles as a fitting word for the new life that awaits at the end of Lent.

While our warming winters have changed our experience of the seasons, we may still see churchyards transformed with a late frost, or layered in a final fling of snow’s fleeting transformation. There is an added poignancy that these occasions are becoming fewer, with such brief visitations acting as a nostalgic reminder of how we once experienced these months. Much of English literature describes the tyranny of enduring and unavoidable cold, when even a hearthside might offer only limited and temporary relief.

Given their appearance in or around the start of Lent, purple is often the colour of choice for crocuses planted amongst the grave stones that surround our ancient parish churches. A fitting sign of both our mortality and also the liturgical season. From this coming Wednesday, until mid April, many churches will be draped in purple, signifying the Lenten focus on “self-examination and spiritual discipline”.

… crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields.

From The Sun Used to Shine by Edward Thomas

Perhaps ‘sombre’ isn’t the right word for these 40 days. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I completed a project last year to write a Lent book for distribution before March 2025. A Sterne Lent refers in many places to the sermons preached by the vicar-novelist, Laurence Sterne. It is estimated that at least one third of these 45 homilies were preached in the time of Lent. This is not surprising as even in the 18th century the penitential season was marked by some effort towards thinking and reflection upon religious convictions and actions. For Sterne the denial of joy for such a lengthy period would have been a trial. Laughter spilled out of the unlikely parson, and a significant proportion of his 42 sermons (there are another 3, but those develop content from previous ones) were preached during Lent.

According to the Julian calendar, Sterne preached his sermon on ‘Penances’ on Palm Sunday 1750. Based on some circumstantial evidence it is probable that it was preached in York Minster. Sterne explores some of his core convictions which, alongside a side-swipe at Methodists, centres on a Deity who doesn’t want us to be endlessly glum, or excessively earnest. We were not created “on purpose to go mourning, all our lives long, in sack-cloth and ashes”. However, Lent is a time when our restraint can:

dispose us for cool and sober reflections, incline us to turn our eyes inwards upon ourselves, and consider what we are, – and what we have been doing; – for what intent we were sent into the world, and what kind of characters we were designed to act in it.

It is in this season that Sterne feels the discipline of Lent is intended to “call home the conscience”. In particular, Sterne is critical of our wasteful use of time. We fill up diaries with distractions, “parcelling out every hour of the day for one idleness or another”, and seem eager that when it comes to time we are endlessly inviting others “to come and take it off our hands”. Sterne cannot abide the idea that we reach older age only to discover we have lived “a life so miserably cast away”.

Lent is a time to contemplate what we are here for; how we spend the time we have been given – but not, as Sterne would see it, to fill up the season with so much dour reflection that there is no space for joy.