A while ago I wrote on the Missionary Virtue of Talking Over People. In that prior post, I argued that:
Missionaries need to talk over people. Regularly. Frequently. With godly vigour and fervour. I’ve been through some soul-searching over this one, people, but the kingdom of God requires rudeness beyond measure, inconsideration like we have never dreamed of. Yes, we need to start interrupting monologues with witty comments and jokes. Brothers and sisters, divert the flow of verbal sewerage into the decontamination plant of conversational purity with well-placed questions. Ah yes, even questions that have nothing to do with the conversation whatsoever. Place a gag in those overworked gums of that child of God, fill that space where they drew breath with a barrage of your own trivial stories…
Well, maybe I got a bit sweaty about that one, a little extreme. So, in the interests of paradoxical truth, let me know speak of the opposite. Keeping my trap shut is a lovely phrase, which I’ve never thought about until now. ‘Trap’ being my mouth….now that’s an intriguing metaphor. What does my mouth entrap exactly? Most of the time, myself. Little wonder that short passage in James has become so famous.
Yet, I feel strangely unmotivated writing about shutting up and letting someone else talk. ‘Being a good listener’ has become such a part of “good” Christian identity that I am loathe to add to the mass, or morass, of verbosity about why we should listen and how we should listen and that listening to people’s stories will change the world. It’s all so…polite, which is probably why I vented my spleen previously.
But, I will manfully try to justify why keeping your trap shut is a missionary virtue:
- I don’t often have anything useful to say: in mission, you will often befriend people who are in pain. They may be isolated, unemployed, ill, mentally unwell, oppressed, abused, dirt poor; often simultaneously. I haven’t experienced this kind of enduring multiplicity of pain, my daily experience of hardship being lack of chocolate. Talking much in the face of this pain is harmful; the best we can do is make sure they know we’re listening
- When I do have something useful to say, it doesn’t need many words: in graced moments, the right thing worms it way through thickets of useless platitudes. Our words and the situation of the person happily congeal. When this happens, stop. Keep your trap shut. Say your bit and don’t wreck it by (my personal downfall) repeating the same truth in 3 other ways.
Well, that’s about all I can think of at the moment.
Bike Butcher, the social enterprise run by Ali Turnbull and Finn den Otter in Long Gully, has been getting some attention in the local Bendigo press. It’s one of 2 social enterprises in the Seeds Network – the second is the Urban Bean cafe in Norlane, run by the Urban Seed. In addition, the Seeds Bendigo mob has initiated a business forum for Long Gully. For a network primarily interested in relationship & hospitality, why are we supporting businesses?
For those of you who know me a bit, you will have heard me rave about “The Social Entrepeneur”, a book by Andrew Mawson, an English clergyman who turned his decrepit church into a centre for social enterprises – initiatives that are based on the following principle:
We know that every human being has a unique talent. By applying these talents in local communities it is possible to make them strong and vibrant instead of soulless and “deprived”. What matters is backing people before structures.
Andrew sought out people in his disadvantaged area who were passionate about an idea, and supported them to get it going as a business. I cried when I read his book. It wasn’t sad, rather the joy and hope that sang through his stories got to my heart. He was describing truly Christian community development.
Welfare Mentality vs Social Entrepreneurship
One of the sad things about Christian community work is that it often gets dependent on handouts, just like the people it aims to serve. Once dependent, we stick with programs that will ensure the transfusion of funds that we need. We eventually find we have strayed from our original purpose. We internalise the same Welfare Mentality that afflicts many of those we serve and become unable to break free of its bonds.
Social Entrepreneurship rejects this way of being and working. It starts with what people are passionate about, not what gains funding. It supports that passion, but always with the aim of self-sufficiency. I think this is incredibly important in poorer communities, because independence from outside help breeds confidence, dignity, responsibility and generosity. The constant supply of government benefits, cheaper housing, food handouts etc breeds apathy, boredom and self-loathing.
The Kingdom & Social Entrepreneurship
The links between God’s reign and social entrepreneurship need to be teased out. But some preliminary thoughts are:
- God created humans with passions and desires to create. Social Entrepreneurship taps into those passions and desires, whereas Welfare Mentality drains passion and desire from a person.
- Dependence, as in Welfare Mentality, is the flip side of domination. God did not create people to be dependent on others, but interdependent. Social Entrepreneurship enables people, especially the poor, to contribute to others as well as receive.
- God created humans with the need to give. Welfare Mentality focusses on receiving, which makes us bloated and unhealthy. The gospel motivates us to give, and when we do we find that feel more human than ever.
More to think about here…
But for now, if in Geelong go to Urban Bean, and if you want to support Bike Butcher, buy a cool fixie.
In an effort to inject a smidge of reality into our family Christmas celebration, we’ve been trying to get hold of a quality nativity scene lately, and finding it pretty difficult. Australia is apathetic towards the Christian meaning of Christmas, so we’ve been looking overseas. Catholic countries in Central America do a roaring trade, and there are nativity scenes from many different cultures.
At the same time, I’ve been organising publicity for a Christmas Eve celebration, and wanted to find a nativity image for a poster. Corny, cliché, soppy are words that come to mind. Finally, I found one by Fritz Eichenberg, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became a Quaker. He also contributed many wood-gravings to the Catholic Worker.
This engraving is called “Christmas”, and I want to reflect on it briefly.
Firstly, apart from Mary and Jesus, the people’s characters are ambiguous. The figure on the right is probably Joseph but the trio could either be the shepherds (indicated by the sheep) or the three kings. Secondly, there is a combination of biblical story and an urban context. The scene is dark, Mary and Jesus sleep on a bed of hay, farm animals surround them (though not actually in the text) and an angel sings above them. However, the backdrop is urban and Joseph holds an oil lamp. This is a consistent theme of Eichenberg’s religious imagery. I immediately think of “Christ of the Breadlines”, in which Christ stands in a line of men waiting for food. Eichenberg repositions biblical stories and themes into poor urban scenes.
Thirdly, and most intriguely, there is an ‘underground’ meaning to this image, and that’s where it differs from any other nativity scene I can remember. Beneath the scene of familial bliss, albeit poor, is a disturbing scene. Literally under the floor lie 3 beasts, from left to right, 2 crocodiles or dragons and a pig. I’m not sure what the pig means (link to a Roman military cult), but I think the crocodiles represent Egypt. The Egyptians feared crocodiles so much because of their ubiquity on the Nile, that they had a god, Sobek, who was the deification of the crocodile. In some versions of Egyptian stories, he crawls out of the ‘waters of chaos’ to create the world. There are resonances with the Nativity story in a couple of ways. Egypt itself is the archetypal enemy of the people of God. The crocodile’s presence introduces the memory of freedom from oppression. It also brings to mind the holy family’s flight to Egypt from Herod’s massacre. Sobek’s creator status beings into view an ensuing battle of myths.
I admit that I could be reading a little into Eichenberg’s intentions here, but a the very least he is inserting a minor note into a peaceful scene, reminder of the violence that is soon to envelop the destiny not only of Jesus’ infancy, but of his life.
My mother takes listening very seriously. As she sat on the phone during another long pastoral conversation we would mimic her repetitive ‘mmm’ing gleefully. She modelled, and I learnt to listen to people carefully, and respond to what they say. My parents instilled in me the respectful practice of allowing people to say their piece without thinking of the next thing to say or interrupting with my similar, but more interesting, experiences. Listening well is important to me.
Which is why it pains me to say that, yes, missionaries need to talk over people. Regularly. Frequently. With godly vigour and fervour. I’ve been through some soul-searching over this one, people, but the kingdom of God requires rudeness beyond measure, inconsideration like we have never dreamed of. Yes, we need to start interrupting monologues with witty comments and jokes. Brothers and sisters, divert the flow of verbal sewerage into the decontamination plant of conversational purity with well-placed questions. Ah yes, even questions that have nothing to do with the conversation whatsoever. Place a gag in those overworked gums of that child of God, fill that space where they drew breath with a barrage of your own trivial stories…
Having got that mini-sermon out of my system, let me continue. In my neighbourhood, there are many people who cannot stop talking. It seems that once verbal momentum is gained, attempting silence is akin to inhaling while underwater. Some people are just glad to talk to someone who will listen, others have axes to grind, others are nervous, others have stories they wish to repeat now and forever, others want to dominate the situation or haven’t had attention like this in too long. All these are perfectly rational reasons for talking continuously.
So how am I to respond? Being in a neighbourhood where crowded houses, arguments and noise abound, my middle-class nicety of waiting for people to finish talking is a disability. I have to interrupt, I have to verbally counterpunch. If I don’t, I will have a ministry of nods and mmms. There are valid reason for talking over people:
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to get the conversation on an open track, because nonstop talking is often a defensive manoeuvre to keep the other person at arm’s length
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to teach dialogue, not only conversational but intellectual
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to enable the other person to see me as someone having a valuable contribution to their life, not so that my needs can be fulfilled, but that they can look to others for enrichment
nb. To be followed by a post entitled “The Missionary Virtue of Keeping Your Trap Shut”
A comfortable viewing experience Revolutionary Road is not. Though set in the 1950s, the skewering of romantic delusions is just as awkward and painful as if it happened right now.
A young couple (Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet) are brought together by their dissatisfaction with the American dream. They marry and plan to move to France, an exciting plan they share with their jealous friends. The plot consists of this plan painfully unravelling, unmasking their true desires.
Revolutionary Road is parabolic. In Jesus’ parables, we are sucked into the world of the story, which is then given a twist that shakes us into a new way of seeing reality. The classic in this tradition is the Good Samaritan. The wounded traveller is passed by the priest and levite, whose distancing reaction to a possibly dead (and therefore unclean) body in totally understandable within Jewish culture. The listeners are lulled into the story, waiting for the 3rd person to come along, who will provide a punchline – and the punchline is a Samaritan, the epitome of uncleanness.
In the same way, we dream with the couple of Revolutionary Road, encouraged that they are breaking from the stifles of hack job, domestic trivia and superficial relationships. I found myself (perhaps naively) willing them on as they bought the tickets and prepared to fly. And I found myself experiencing the same heartbreak as their plans fall apart, mainly due to the husband’s bluster which hides an insecure man.
He is the villain of the piece, as he inspires his wife with dreams of a heaven outside their current drudgery, and then refuses to follow through. The film is a tragedy, and the last few scenes are painful in their inevitability.
I take some local young guys on outdoor trips as a way of opening up their lives to new experiences and opportunities. We sat down to ‘frame’ the experience of climbing a mountain, so that they could see the mountain in metaphorical terms. One boy was being really disruptive until I mentioned an observation of him I had made. He shut up immediately and listened intently. My observation was pretty mundane, but he didn’t care – he simply loved being noticed.
After returning a young man to his residential unit (where he lives), his 2 housemates both started mooning our car, despite the best efforts of their workers to raise the level of the conversation and their shorts.
What we give to get noticed! I get noticed all the time, having a job that involves facilitation and training groups, but I always like it. As a secondary school teacher, I found that young people were always trying to get noticed: through acting up, excelling at something. Even those people who seem to love hiding away in a corner so no-one mentions their existence appreciate quiet acknowledgement.
It’s not just young people and children who love attention, though. Adults seem to thrive on it. I know I do. I think it comes back to the fact that we are mostly cowards. When people notice our efforts it gives us the courage to keep going.
In the gospel of Mark, the disciples ‘strain at the oars’ as they pass from Jewish to Gentile territory. In the Old Testament, this journey was the last step in the 40 year freedom walk from Egypt. In the New Testament, it is used by Mark as a metaphor for the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, carried on by Paul. In Long Gully, the Jordan is not so much religion. Many of our neighbours are hostile to Christianity, but many more have a history of involvement with the church. The Jordan for us is culture and class. The culture of Long Gully is not consciously ethnic (though overwhelming anglo), but is formed by a common history of unemployment, alienation, addiction, powerlessness, mental illness, stigmatisation and family breakdown, feeding into and causing each other, forming a lifestyle.
I visited Greg recently to invite him to lunch at 12pm. He asked me what the time was, as he had no clock and the one on his DVD player was wrong – he had no clock. Middle-class time is so important that I was momentarily gobsmacked by this small but significant clash of cultures – it meant that Greg would always struggle to turn up to anything on time. Think about the implications for relationships, health and employment.
In the Seeds community here, we are all middle-class. Our experience has been smudged in places by the same factors that affect our neighbours, but not in combination and not for long. Though we are trying to be in solidarity with the poor, our class loyalty is still to the middle-class, which distracts us in many and specific ways from our stated desire to be amongst the poor. I say this bluntly because unless I swallow this bitter pill, this dynamic will corrupt and deflate many of my efforts to love my neighbour.
‘Class’ and ‘Culture’ are abstract terms, but they jump out when we uncover some fairly ordinary items. How does our middle-class loyalty manifest itself?:
1. Spending time with the middle-class: we know the codes of middle-class relationships (when to speak, what to say, what not to say, how often to swear etc) but we don’t know how to spend time with those who live in generational poverty. Do watch the TV that’s always on? Is laughing at crude jokes OK? Should we ask personal questions? Because we have meetings to be at and people to see, we middle-class people have a sense of time which is cut up into segments for apportioning. Sitting for an hour on someone’s dirty lounge while watching wrestling seems like a waste of time.
2. Refusing the food of the poor: food is crucial to mission, as Jesus the glutton and drunkard attests. It connotes hospitality, connection and welcome. Even in our culture, refusing to eat someone’s food is extremely rude. People often offer me a beer or a Beam and coke can at their house, but this year I’m not drinking alcohol. The issue of accepting alcohol has nothing to do with ‘getting down to their level’ (what a hypocritical phrase of misplaced superiority) but of accepting the hospitality of those who we serve. We want to extend hospitality to them, but not the other way around…well, maybe it would be OK if they would only offer nice food. In my area, people generally eat unhealthily, and their children do too. This is a sensitive issue for middle-class parents, who understandably don’t want their children eating sugary and fatty foods. Is the price of mission paying for dental work?! I don’t have children, so I’ll leave someone else to give a definitive answer.
These are just 2 examples – others are entertainment, physicality, sex, clothing etc
I don’t raise the issue of class because I want us to forget our family and friends, but to remind myself that cross-class solidarity is so difficult as to require regular self-scrutiny. Our middle-class upbringing is not evil, but has instilled norms of purity which seem as natural as the sun rising. Our desire to serve Jesus in the poor can’t be sacrificed for our middle-class sensibilities.
A friend of mine is called the ‘Bulldog’. Doglike? Aggressive? No. She’s a chaplain, and has been so for a long time. She got the nickname at her former school, recognising her dogged ability to advocate for young people in the school. She is a shining example of the missionary virtue of bloody-minded intractability.
A couple of friends and I were comparing missional efforts we’d been involved in, and seeing what lessons we could learn for our current situation in Bendigo.We quickly concluded that our previous efforts, while recognised by others as ‘innovative’ and ‘radical’, were still mainly reliant on people coming to us…to our houses and ministry spaces. In the part of Bendigo where we live, people hardly move from their couches, let alone out of their houses. People tend to be wary of coming to things, even the front door when you knock. We re-realised* that we needed to get out to people’s houses. If we meet someone, find out where they live and visit. Call people up to come to events. Get to know as many people as possible, shallowly. Get to to know a few people deeply. Just keep doing it.
When Kylie and I moved to Long Gully, we spent the first 6 months visiting the neighbourhood centre once a week. Every time we would try to talk to them about our desire to volunteer, and gave them our contact details. It took 6 months to get a response. It took doggedness. For the last 18 months, I’ve seen a bloke in the street – and I just smile and say g’day. A few weeks ago, I saw him again, and the Spirit prompted me to introduce myself – turned out I was the first person in 2 years to do so.
In a climate of flexibility, got-a-better-offer and continual reform, doggedness seems twee, a bit naff, old-school in a bad way. But, to remix a cliche, if something’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing over and over again. In fact, in contexts of poverty and associated distrust, doing something repeatedly is the very definition of sanity and strategic brilliance. The shell of indifference with which so many people clothe themselves won’t be pierced by energetic church services or enthusiastic, but shortlived, attentions. It will take a long tapping away at the stone until one day it cracks.
I could write masses about this, and maybe I will. Stay tuned for the other unsung missionary virtues.
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* I do a lot of ‘re-realising’ – simple things get lost in my brain.
It’s not a new thought that incarnational mission in Western contexts is fraught because we cannot assume that towns, cities, schools, or even neighbourhoods have a relatively uniform culture. Most practice of incarnational mission involves taking on aspects of the culture I am serving, and affirming the aspects of the culture that are Christ-like. But cultures are not monochrome, not even within a neighborhood. Even in the small housing commission where I live it’s impossible to incarnate in accordance with a dominant culture. Different friendship groups have different norms, there are transient groups, stable groups, elderly, youth etc. And within these groups splintering occurs.
I’m nowhere near working all this out, but one initial thought is: perhaps we need to be a distinctive community that is consistent with Jesus, but endeavouring to be ‘not inconsistent’ (whenever we can) with the norms of the multiple subcultures we are faced with, while at strategic points being deliberately ‘of’ that culture or neighbourhood, and at other points being critical and standing against it. Our practice of incarnation needs to go beyond following the ‘pattern of Jesus’ so that a desired outcome will occur, and into “place-sharing” (Andrew Root) that hopes for transformation but is not beholden to it.
Love is the measure by which we shall we judged. Made famous by Dorothy Day, this quote originally comes from St John of the Cross. I’ve been reading Dorothy Day again, and it made me wonder (The Disappearance of Love) where the talk of love had gone in Christian circles, at the least the ones I frequent. I concluded that we need to talk about it more. Now, talking about something is hardly a solution to its lack, but talking at least gets the subject circulating again. Here’s a few of many reasons to talk about love.
1. We need to talk about love to interpret our lives to others
I used to believe that evangelism would happen when people asked me about my oh-so very distinctive life, and then I would tell the inquirer all about Jesus’ love. I used to think that my life would seem very different to others’ lives, creating interest and questions. I’ve since realised that my life is pretty flawed, and it’s an odd occasion when my life prompts someone to ask about it. Long gone is the time when the majority of Australians see a godly life and connect it with God, when a Christ-like lifestyle reminds us of Christ. We need to interpret the meaning of our lives for others, and the meaning of our common life as followers of Christ, if it has any meaning, is found in love.
2. We need to talk about love to bring to mind (re-mind) us of what we believe.
As we delve deeper into the Way of Jesus, we can fall prey to doing well, more than doing good. As our experience grows, we shunt ourselves into positions of responsibility which have jargon, meetings and protocols that often have little to do with love. Other priorities distract us – family, children, mortgages. Talking about love undermines our attachment to our roles and responsibilities, re-minding us of the vision that they serve, and hopefully calls us to a truer imitation of Christ.
3. We need to talk about love to induct others into the Way of Love
Somewhere along the Way, others will want to follow it too. I know, amazing! It’s a difficult path to follow and I wouldn’t do it for quids, but I’ll do it for love. As we induct others along the Way, we have to tell them the story of Jesus, which at the bottom of it all is the story of love personified.
4. We need to talk this language because it’s being lost
‘Love’ is a word that’s being suffocated under an avalanche of shallow images which are taking on the character of reality. If we want to avoid ‘love’ simply becoming a way of referring to our affection for chocolate, casual sex or our celebrity of choice, then we need to start talking about what love is, and what it isn’t. That’s going to make us look fairly odd, because the ‘love’ of God is very different to the ‘love’ of media culture, described as it is in the stories of Israel, Jesus and the early church. It’s strong, consistent, endures all things, is hardly ever soft, resists lies, is ready to sacrifice for the beloved.
