BOOK LAUNCH: SAWDUST & SOUL by John de Gruchy

THE CENTRE FOR CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY

Invites you to the BOOK LAUNCH

'SAWDUST & SOUL' - John de Gruchy

Woodwork, creativity and spirituality…

We launch John's new book with William J. Everett going under above mentioned title with a talk by De Gruchy on 'Christianity & the Arts', comments by Peter Storey and responses by Lerato Maduna.

Monday, 13 April 7pm

The venue for this site-specific event is:
{fleld office} Coffee Shop, WOODSTOCK EXCHANGE, 66 Albert Rd., Woodstock. Parking secured and directions to follow.

Book for R30 your space at info@christianspirit.co.za or 021 686 1269
Refreshments and books for sale.

Meditation: THE GOD WHO BRINGS US HOME - by John de Gruchy

THE GOD WHO BRINGS US HOME

Luke 15:11-20

"He ran and put his arms around him and kissed him."

We know the story Jesus tells very well.  A father, and presumably also a mother, has two sons.  The younger grabs his inheritance and sets off to find freedom, fun and fortune.  He is glad to be shot of his elder brother who is a self-righteous pain the neck.  The elder son says good riddance to bad rubbish.  He now has his parents to himself and will make sure that when the old folk die he will not only get his share of the inheritance, but the house and all its contents as well!   But each day the parents anxiously wait for news from the far country.  They hear nothing. Their prodigal is too busy using his freedom and inheritance to have fun. No time for SMS' or e-mails.  He is also making bad choices, bad friends, and finally ends up in a bad place, his life spiralling downwards.  When he hits rock bottom he know he has made a terrible mistake, but a homing instinct gets to work, picks him up and leads him back home.  The parents are overjoyed. They welcome him with embraces and kisses, and throw a party to celebrate his homecoming.  Meanwhile the elder self-righteous brother who played by the book and diligently and scrupulously kept the rules, is peeved, complains that his father is far too lenient, is now  ignoring him, and in a huff refuses to join the party.  He slams his door shut and plugs his ears to keep out the sound of the celebration.

Some early church interpreters thought the parable was about the relationship between Jews and Gentiles.  The son that stayed home and obeyed the rules represents the righteous Jews who remained faithful to the Law of Moses and at home in the household of God; the son who left home, broke all the rules and wandered in the wilderness, represented the Gentiles, estranged from God and aliens in the household of faith.  In the context of the early struggles between the church and the synagogue we can understand why the parable was interpreted in that way. 

But the story is universal,  We immediately recognise the characters.   We might even recognise ourselves in them.  For it is about us, our relationships and what we do with our lives.  Whether we focus on the prodigal or the elder son, it is about human self-centredness,  our self-centredness; it is about the culture of me and mine.   The prodigal is hell-bent on self-gratification; the elder son is equally hell-bent on self-righteousness.  In his desire for personal freedom the prodigal broke of the rules that make freedom possible.  In his desire for self-righteousness, the elder son made a fetish of the rules.  He forgot that all they are summed up in the law of  love.

The parable is also about God as parent.  Not everyone understands God in this way.  I have sympathy for atheists who are honest enough to say they cannot believe in God, at least in God as understood by many people who claim to be believers.  Give me an honest atheist any day, especially one who is concerned about justice and serves those in need, than someone who believes that God sanctions war, approves racism, and condemns people to hell whether in this life of or hereafter.  If that is who God is, then I too am an atheist.  I want my freedom from the shackles of such religion; I want my inheritance as a human being; I want to get as far away as possible from the church that proclaims this God,  and make my own way in the world.  If my elder brother wants to stay home, go to church, keep all the rules, and worship that kind of God, good luck to him.  I need fresh air!  Not rules that dehumanize both me and others.

The story of the prodigal son can also be read as a journey of self-discovery, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who has to leave home in order to find herself.  As such it is a story about the awakening of self-consciousness, the  dawning of adolescence, the time when we discover that Father Christmas and the tooth-fairy are childish fantasies and that religion is a threat to well-being -- it is time to move on, to discover the wide world, find freedom and stand on your own two feet in freedom.   By contrast, for his older brother,  the way to negotiate adolescence is through religion -- but religion as  a set of rules and traditions that answers all questions with absolutes, providing status and security.   Not for him the wide horizons and risks of experience, or even the risk of loving someone as foolish as his brother.  He is comfortable in his isolation from those unclean, has no doubts only certainties.  But he is beginning to doubt his parents' sanity.  Why are they so extravagantly and foolishly  welcoming his brother home, and making such a fuss about him?  Have they lost their senses?  Whatever happened to all the family rules?  They are forgiving even before his brother is repenting; they are embracing him before he has even taken a hot bath to wash away the dirt and smells of his sojourn in the pigsty of iniquity. 

Now what if, for Jesus, the parents represent his understanding of God?  Who is this God he is talking about, who seems to break his own rules, the God beyond conventional religion and customary morality?  The God who sets us free to be ourselves, to be more truly human, to be there for others?  This foolish and weak God, as St. Paul describes the message of the cross.  This is not only the God who waits for us to return home, but the God who comes running to meet us, embracing us with kisses.  The God who forgives us in advance, already sensing that we are sorry  The God who prepares a banquet so that we can all celebrate the home-coming with music and laughter. 

But what about the elder son who is still sulking in his bedroom?  His parents love him equally and long for him to come to the party.  He stayed home  but has yet to discover what home is about, and he won't do so until he joins the celebration.   Maybe he, too, in time, will also come to his senses and know that faith in God is not primarily about rules and religion, but about grace and forgiveness.   It is not even about me; it is about us.   Only when the elder son learns that, and loves his brother truly,  will he be free of the shackles that bind him and able to join the party and truly be at home. 

So what does the parable tell us about home?  Is home a place?  Yes, of course, in some sense it is a place.  But it is far more than a place.  When Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz returns home from her wanderings in a far country,  home is still the farm she had left.  But she sees it differently as though she had visited it now for the first time.  Home has become the people she loved. Yes, home is that network of relations that gives meaning to our lives.  This slowly began to dawn on the prodigal in that far country; it had yet to dawn on his elder brother even though it was staring him in the face.  And, of course, in coming home we recognise at last that God is no longer the God of our adolescence.  God is the One who was with us in the pigsty as he was on the cross, the One who meets us on the road to bring us home, the One who is yearning for us to get out of the box of bad religion --  for God is the One in whom we "live move and have our being," the home towards which we are led, and where it all comes together.

John de Gruchy

Volmoed 26 March 2015 

THE CENTRE FOR CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY INVITES YOU TO

BOOK LAUNCH: 'SAWDUST & SOUL' - John de Gruchy
Woodwork, creativity and spirituality...

We launch John's new book with William J. Everett going under above mentioned title with a talk by De Gruchy on 'Christianity & the Arts', comments by Peter Storey and responses by Lerato Maduna.

Monday, 13 April 7pm
The venue for this site-specific event is:
{fleld office} Coffee Shop, WOODSTOCK EXCHANGE, 66 Albert Rd., Woodstock. Parking secured and directions to follow.
Book for R30 your space at info@christianspirit.co.za or 021 686 1269
Refreshments and books for sale.

ALSO

THE FOURTH STEVE DE GRUCHY MEMORIAL LECTURE

Monday 20th April 6.30 for 7.00 p.m.

Rondebosch United Church, Belmont Road.

Roderick Hewitt, Jamaican theologian and author, currently teaching at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

“Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption song’ in conversation with Steve de Gruchy’s ‘Olive Agenda’.

Refreshments after the lecture

Meditation: FROM CRUTCH TO CROSS by John de Gruchy

FROM CRUTCH TO CROSS

I Corinthians 1:17-18

John 19:13-18

"For the message of the cross ...is the power of God."

For the past few weeks, at the request of the Abbot, I have taken the phrase "turning the soul" as the theme for our Lenten meditations.  Lent, I said at the outset, is about conversion. Turning us around to follow Jesus more faithfully and in the process being shaped into the person  God intends us to be.  Then as you turn a bowl on a lathe you soon come to the heart-wood, that which gives the piece of wood its character and sustains its life.  The heart as metaphor refers to who we really are, what is central to our lives, that which makes you, you and me, me.  Lent takes us on a journey both into  who we really are, uncovering the masks behind which we hide, and deeper into the mystery of God whose broken heart is uncovered on Good Friday.  Lent is the season of breaking hard hearts so that we can learn to love again, a time to recover the church as the broken hearts club, the AHA community that stands with God in solidarity with the struggling people of the earth.  And then, last week we considered how vital it is in woodturning and in life to achieve balance.  Lent is a good time to regain balance in our lives through getting centred in Christ as we contemplate the gospel story anew. 

As we journey with Jesus and the disciples towards Jerusalem and the cross we are once again helped to find the centre around which everything else turns -- God's love and grace towards us in Christ through which we find forgiveness and wholeness again.  In this way we might even be  turned into something beautiful for God.  And it is this sense of being turned into something beautiful that leads me to share with you a story told by Bill Everett in our book Sawdust and Soul.  I tell it in his own words:

A few years ago Beth Follum Hoffman participated in a workshop with me and others on “Wood, Rocks, and Worship” at Andover Newton Theological School. We had asked participants to bring some wood that was significant to them and that they wanted to work with in the course of the week. Beth brought a pair of old wooden crutches. She had been born with one leg shorter than the other and it had only been through years of painful surgery and therapy that she was now able to walk unassisted by the crutches, which she had stored some years ago in her attic. The course requirement led her to take them out, knowing that these maple crutches were very important but not knowing what she would do with them. In the course of the workshop she transformed these crutches in a way that transformed her in the process. Despite her complete lack of experience with woodworking tools, she discovered that “I had a lot to say to the wood and … the wood also had a lot to say to me.” She decided, with the support, help, and encouragement of the other participants, to re-fashion them into a cross, a third life for the maple tree that would reflect the painful journey she had experienced in her own life.

As she went back and forth between her own experience and the actual shape of the wooden pieces, she began to see a way the crutches might become a cross. In the process she confronted her own struggle to absorb her traumatic childhood experience and refashion it so it might provide a language and symbolism for her own emerging ministry amid the myriad forms of brokenness and healing she was encountering in the lives of people in her church. At the end emerged a cross that clearly reflected its earlier form but in a new arrangement that would absorb its old meanings into a more universal symbol of suffering and new life. She didn’t build a base for it, but wanted it to hang over the (communion table I had made).  It would dance in the air, just as her spirit was lifting her own body, and with it the spirits of everyone who gathered around the table on our final day together for communion. It remains one of the most moving experiences with wood in my own life and in hers...

Beth, Bill goes on to tell us, "is now a minister in Maine, where the cross hangs in her office as a sign to everyone of the transformation that is possible in their lives."

Years ago, in the middle of winter with snow all around us, Isobel and I walked past a church in a small town in Wisconsin and stopped to read the notice board outside.  We were taken by surprised as we read   "In this church the hymn 'The old rugged cross' was composed and first sung."  Yes, at the heart of our faith is not a fine piece of furniture made out of a raw wood, but two pieces of rough, un-planed cedar (I would think) crudely nailed together on which criminals were crucified.  Yet that symbol of punishment and pain speaks to us of God's saving love, of healing and restoration, of forgiveness and grace.  In a strange way, a symbol of death has been transformed into an icon of beauty which attracts us and changes us.  The cross has become the sign of God's power to save and make whole, a means whereby our crutches become transfigured.

When you next visit the sanctuary next door, look again at the Christ figure which Bill Davis carved from a broken tree branch here on Volmoed, now hanging behind the altar.  There is a photograph of it in Sawdust and Soul and an extract from Bill's account of what carving it from a broken branch of a camphor tree meant to him.  During Lent we bring the brokenness of our lives, the pain of the past and present, our failures and our sins, into the orbit of God's transforming and healing love, that we might be made whole, balanced, and turned around in our journey into the mystery of God's love revealed in Christ nailed to the old rugged cross.

John de Gruchy

Volmoed 12 March 2015

Meditation: VITAL BALANCE by John de Gruchy

VITAL BALANCE

Mark 2:1-10

Your sins are forgiven...stand up, take your mat and walk.

There was drama on Volmoed two weeks ago.  A large Pittosporum, whose roots were cracking Old Farm House, had to be cut down.  Professional tree cutters did the job, but near the end a gust of wind snapped a branch which fell across the veranda smashing its roof.  By that time Anton and I had already left the scene with the bakkie loaded up with large chunks of wood which we planned to turn into bowls on my lathe.  We had no idea whether Pittosporum, otherwise known as Cheesewood, was any good for turning.  But it is one of the most attractive of all indigenous garden trees, its  bark is good for stomach ailments and malaria, and its roots are used to treat chest complaints.  So why not give it a new life by turning it into a beautiful bowl?   That was the challenge as we looked at two large pieces on our work bench. 

But first of all we had to cut the chunks with a chain saw and shape them with a power plane to get them more or less round and balanced.  You cannot turn wood on a lathe if it is not well balanced before you start.  Otherwise as it turns and gathers speed your whole bench, even if securely fixed to the floor, will begin to shake making it is impossible to work the wood.  Balance is vital in woodturning.  And that also requires making sure it is centred on the lathe.  The wood can be balanced, but if it is not centred, it will still wobble.  Getting it balanced and centred is vital.

Many years ago as a student in Chicago I took a course on ministry to the mentally ill.  This required that I spend one day a week for a semester in a psychiatric hospital interviewing patients, then discussing these in a seminar with the professor and other students.  The patients were graded according to the types of mental illness diagnosed.  We had to go through a series of locked doors to visit them. So those through the third door were badly disturbed, prone to violence and almost incapable of communicating, and labelled accordingly.  We did not often go through that door.  But even so I came away after each day totally drained by the experience.  

At that time I read one of the latest books on psychiatry entitled The Vital Balance written by a leading psychiatrist, Karl Menninger.  Menninger was against labelling mentally ill patients because that  led to treating them according to a label rather than as unique individuals, and also led people to think that they were incurable. Diagnosis was necessary for medication, but labelling could impede healing.  The truth is, Menninger argued,  just as we all suffer from some physical ailment, to some extent we are all mentally ill or unbalanced.  For Menninger the aim of psychiatry was using the illness as a starting point to help his patients to become more centred and therefore more ba;anced,  and therefore, as he put it, "weller than well."

As we grow older we begin to understand the importance of balance.  My balance is not what it used to be.  I am not talking about my mental balance, though some might think that is in need of help, but physical balance.  I can no longer stand on one foot for any length of time without some kind of support -- as I regularly discover when I go to gym!  But balance is vital, and the ability to recover balance is essential to prevent one from falling and hurting oneself.  It is precisely what infants learn when they begin to walk, or when we begin to ride a bicycle.  In the same way, learning to balance is fundamental to coping with life, just as a chunk of wood needs to be balanced before it can be turned.   But balance is also vital for our spiritual journey, for "turning the soul" if you like, and that requires establishing a firm centre around which the rest can revolve.  In fact this is critical for our physical and mental well-being as a whole.  For if there is no centre, or the centre does not hold, the rest becomes unstable.  This is equally true for society. A major reason for the world's ailments is the loss of an integrating moral centre that holds things together, and without which things fall apart. So the rich get richer and the poor, poorer; people become dysfunctional through bad social conditions and parenting, and turn to drugs, crime and violence, and nations go to war. 

Jesus' ministry of healing, of making us whole, is all about helping us recover our vital balance in which the spiritual, mental and physical aspects of our lives are integrated around a centre or core that holds everything together.  That is the message of the gospel story for today.  "Your sins are forgiven...take up your mat and walk!"   Healing the body and mind, and forgiving sins are part of the same process of healing.  Inner healing, the healing of memories, dealing with guilt and the past, restoring relationships through forgiving and accepting forgiveness, learning to trust and to love, discovering hope, even becoming a child again in order to get fresh perspective and learn to walk again  are the keys to the way in which Jesus wants to make us whole.  And we can recover this vital balance even if we are not physically as well as we would like, or our mental faculties are beginning to weaken. 

What is fundamental for a balanced life according to Christian faith  is that our lives are centred in Christ.  That is why we are here today sharing in this Eucharist.  That is why we read the gospel day by day.  That is why we pray. That is why we have AHA moments when we share with those in need.  And in doing so, each day we regain our balance and become whole.  You can't become a balanced person without becoming centred day by day, just as you can't learn to ride a bicycle unless you keep trying.

Lent is a good time to work at restoring balance to our lives because it draws our attention to the spiritual disciplines that are so fundamental for doing so. how to meditate on the gospel, get centred in our prayers, practice the presence of God, and live lives of compassion and caring.  Lent is not meant to make us pious ascetics through much fasting in order to prove how spiritual we are.  Its purpose is not to batter our bodies, though some of us might need the equivalent of a chainsaw in order to get balanced.   But as we journey with Jesus and the disciples towards Jerusalem and the cross we are once again helped to find the centre around which everything else turns -- God's love and grace towards us in Christ through which we find forgiveness and wholeness again.  In this way we might even be  turned into something beautiful for God. 

 

John de Gruchy

Volmoed 12 March 2015

Meditation: TURNING THE SOUL by John de Gruchy

TURNING THE SOUL

Isaiah 64:1-8

Matthew 9:9-13

"We are the clay and you are the potter."

"I have come to call not the righteous but sinners."

The Abbot, who recently read my new  book Sawdust and Soul, asked me to give a meditation on "turning the soul."  So I have been obedient and prepared one.  But first I want to demonstrate how not to interpret the Bible, just in case some of you missed the workshops on Biblical Interpretation during the past fortnight. We know that we can prove most things from the Bible, and we also know that it is not a good idea to read into the Bible what is not there.  And that, of course, was the danger in doing what the abbot asked me to do.  For where in the Bible is wood turning mentioned, let alone turning the soul?

One possible text comes from Ecclesiastes " So I turned -- to consider wisdom and madness and folly." (2:8-13)  After all, there is good reason to I go into my workshop to consider wisdom and folly while I turn.  But no, that is not what the text is about however you look at it.  But there are other texts I could possibly use.  "You shall not turn -- to the right or to the left.."(Deut. 5:32)  ""Turn -- to me and be gracious to me." (Psalm 119:132)  "Turn now, all of you --- from your evil ways." (Jer. 18:11), an appropriate text for Lent.   "I will turn ---their mourning into joy." (Jer. 31:13)  And Jesus words: "Turn the other cheek."  It does not take a biblical scholar to know that none of these have to do with woodturning. so it would be a travesty of Biblical interpretation to use any of them for my meditation.  The fact is, the English word "turn" can be used in different ways:  "take your turn," or "he had a turn for the worse," being two more of them, and wood-turning another.  No wonder people who are not English-speakers find learning English rather difficult. Yet there is a connection between the different uses of the word.  For turning means to rotate or change direction.  And both are appropriate in thinking about turning the soul."

Woodturning is all about rotation, for it is as the wood goes round and round that you are able to cut, shape and sand it.  Which provides a clue to what the abbot thinking about when he asked me to talk about "turning the soul?"  Maybe he had just read the following passage from Sawdust and Soul:

You can imagine my excitement ... as a bowl begins to take shape on my lathe, dictating its future form as much as I do, as though I am all the time consulting with the wood, moulding it like clay on a wheel according to its own inbred character. This is the fun, joy and wonder of turning. I also think this is what ... Christian formation is about: allowing the uniqueness of each person to be brought to the surface, enabling the inside core, or soul, to reveal itself in its own way and time, until the amazing grain that lies within is seen in all its beauty and radiance. Turning bowls is a parable of discerning and enabling the growth of embodied soul.

Even though woodturning is not the same process as working with clay on a potter's wheel, there is a striking resemblance. And the picture of clay being shaped by a potter is used more than once to describe the way in which God shapes the life of his people, and our own lives as well. 

This past week or two Anton and I have been making a large eight-seater dining room table.  My main task was to turn the four legs.  There are two basic ways to do that.  In furniture factories they use a duplicating lathe.  This means that every leg will turn out the same, in other words, they will all be identical.  But when you turn each leg separately, as I had to do, they are never identical.  They may look the same to most people, but the wood turner will see the differences.  I guess it is the same with pottery.  What a wonderful analogy this is for our own growth as persons.  We may all be human, just as all bowls turned on a lathe are made from wood,  but we are not clones of one another we are all different.  So "turning the soul" is all about enabling each person to become what God wants and intends him or her to be. 

There is a kind of Christianity which tries to force everyone into the same mould, often described as the "being born again" mould.  When evangelists seek to do that they are acting like duplicating lathes in a furniture factory, producing identical "born again" Christians.  But that is not how God works.  Consider Jesus' ministry as we read about it in the gospels.  Jesus treats each person in a way which recognises her or his uniqueness.  Peter is not Mary Magdalene, nor is Matthew the tax-collector Zacchaeus the publican, or doubting Thomas the single minded Pharisee turned apostle, St. Paul.  Yes, notice my choice of the word "turned."  Paul's whole life was turned around when he encountered Jesus.  Which brings me to the second meaning of turning.  It is not just rotation, but also about starting again, turning a corner, turning a new leaf, changing direction.  Before Peter or Paul, Matthew or Mary, Zacchaeus or Thomas could be turned and shaped, they had to change direction.

A synonym for "turning" in this sense is "converting,"  that is being turned around.  The word used in the OT is "return" to the Lord, turn back or repent.  Which is, of course, the message of Lent which we are now entering.  But now the two meanings: rotating and changing direction come together and help us understand what "turning the soul" is about.  When God turns us around -- conversion -- God respects our individual uniqueness just as a wood turner works with different pieces of wood, turning each according to its own character, grain, texture, size and potential.  You can make a salad bowl out of  a large piece of jacaranda, but not out of a small chunk of olive wood.  Yet each can become a useful or beautiful object.  So, we too, in the hands of the master wood turner, can not only start afresh but also become more truly ourselves.  Rabbi Zusya once said: "When I get to heaven, God will not ask me why I was not Moses; he will ask me 'Why were you not Rabbi Zusya?'"  Why were you not the person you were really meant to be?  That rough piece of wood being turned around and becoming all that it could become?  Lent is all about "turning the soul."  Turning us around to follow Jesus more faithfully and in the process being shaped and formed into the person  God intends us to be. 

John de Gruchy

 tVolmoed 19 February 2015