Two Poems. Christmas 2020

YB Yeats – The Second Coming (1919)

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Yeats wrote this poem in 1919 as the world lay waste in the wake of the Great War, and as Ireland held its breath to see how the British would respond to its independence movement, and as his wife lay sick in bed, apparently dying in childbirth, having contracted the Spanish flu. The poet expresses his real anxieties about both the future of the world, and about his personal and domestic peace.  What is to become of us, he muses, if the centre cannot hold, if the falcon can no longer hear the falconer’s voice, if every sense of order and meaning that one might have once counted on is no longer there? What if anarchy takes over and the notion of a common good is replaced by the rule of the angry mob or, worse still, the rule of  some kind of monstrous sphinx-like dictator who cares nothing for life or for common decency? Is the monster a man, or is it a virus, some kind of cosmic force? The poet doesn’t know. But he has a deep sense of foreboding and wonders whether an anti-Christ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born in a grotesque mockery of the birth of Christ. 

Greg Weatherby 'Birth of Jesus'

There are equally anxious voices out there in the ether right now, on this very night.  For it has indeed been the worst year many of us are able to remember. The Australian bushfires that raged from late December to mid-January were the most destructive on record, destroying 9 million hectares of forest, farmland, town and residential country in the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. In some places, the fires burned so hot that stone structures melted and even the biomatter below the surface of the ground was utterly obliterated. Ecologists are now saying that in such places, nothing will ever be able to grow again. Even where this is not the case, in parts of the forest where regeneration is possible, whole ecosystems – millennia in the making - have been utterly laid waste. It is also estimated that over 1 billion native animals perished in the fires, many of them belonging to species already close to extinction such as koalas and mountain pygmy possums. A large portion of those animals apparently died either because the fires were travelling too fast or because they could not make their way through fences erected by property owners.  The response of government is to continue to bury its head in the sand and go ‘la la la la’ with regard to the now decades of warnings about climate change that have been coming in, across the airwaves, from scientists and Indigenous peoples alike.  2020 has been the warmest on record, and next year will be warmer, so get used to the Australia you know going up in flames or being washed away by floods and gale-force winds.

And then there’s the pandemic. Not the Spanish flu this time, but Covid-19. To date Covid-19 has killed 1.8 million people and sent the global economy into its worst recession since the early 1930s. The disease has been cruel in the choices it forces upon both governments and individuals. Some have continued to work, to keep their businesses open, to meet with friends and family in the same way as we’ve always done.  The cost of this choice is very often contracting the disease and passing it on; many who chose this path have died.  The other choice is not so good either, really. To stay at home, to cease working in the social way we have been used to, to stop meeting up with friends and family in order to slow the progress of the disease through the community. But, for many, embracing this second set of options – often in the name of caring for others – has unleashed unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and, for some, a life and death struggle with that equally merciless killer, depression.  To avoid one kind of pandemic, it seems, many of us have had to throw ourselves into the path of another.

Climate change. Pandemics of body and mind. We could go on to consider the impact of these things on the refugee crisis, the plight of Indigenous peoples, international students, casual workers and so on. We could talk about Trump and Sco-Mo and Boris, we could talk about populism as a symptom of anxiety. But I will refrain.  You get the point. There’s a lot of anxiety out there, and the anxiety is not a response to things that aren’t actually there. There are very good reasons to feel anxious.  There are good reasons to believe that the centre can no longer hold, that the order of things we have come to take for granted is about to go belly-up.  Very good reasons.

I want to point out, however, that when Yeats wrote his poem in 1919 he conveniently forgot a few things. He forgot that the British has been brutalising and starving the Irish for several centuries already, and that the prospect of a new crackdown on the independence movement was therefore hardly unexpected.  He also forgot that the Great War was not the first conflict to have devasted Europe. It was simply the latest in a continuous series of conflicts that had already killed or maimed millions and destroyed economies utterly. Hardly new. He also conveniently forgot that the Spanish flu was not Europe’s first pandemic. There had been plagues and 'black' deaths for centuries.  Again, hardly unprecedented.  All of which is to say that whilst Yeats brilliantly captures the anxiety he felt in 1919, his poem can hardly be taken as a witness to something entirely new or unforeseen in the story of humanity. 

Quite simply, there has never been a ‘centre’, some kind of cosmic or moral order, that is suddenly falling into rack and ruin. Rack and ruin has been the name of the game from the beginning. There has always been war, there have always been bully-boy politicians, there has always been poverty. There has always been illness and death. At the time when Jesus was born, for example, the Jews had been ruled by foreign powers for three centuries already.  They knew well that everything had gone to pot. The life-expectancy of your average landless male peasant was around 30 years, and just 40 years if you happened to have a trade, such as carpentry. Most of the Jewish population now expected that life would be short, and it would be brutal. You were born, you worked yourself to the bone to keep your family from starving, and then you died very young, and usually left a widow but hopefully some sons and daughters who could take over the family business and do it all again.  To a family like that, just like that, Jesus was born.

It’s easy to give into despair. Very easy. Most days, especially in the lead-up to Christmas, I am sorely tempted to go there. Afterall, my own people were colonised by the British and felt the savagery of the moral 'order’, the ‘centre’ they wished to impose. I still carry the trauma of that in my mind and my body. So, too, this stolen ‘country’: our lands, seas and waterways. There are deep wounds in our dreaming-places wherever you turn. But I don’t go there: to despair, I mean. And the reason I don’t is actually very simple.  I believe that in spite of all that is wrong, there is a power in the world for right. That is spite of all that is brutal and cruel, there is a power in the world that is caring, and knows how to offer love and succour to all who are hurting. I believe that in spite of the darkness and ignorance that floods our country and our lives, that there is a power in the world for light and life, and for living with country as kin, as family. That this power is here with us - that it is all around us, that it waits patiently to seep into our minds and hearts at the first indication that we are willing and in need - I can never prove to anyone. Not in the unassailable manner that many expect, anyway. But I can testify to its reality, to its power, and to its essential character: love, kindness, welcome, shelter, hospitality.  I see and feel and know these things every single day.

Rather than rabbit on and on and on about love, and about Jesus as the way in which love shows itself to the world, I want to read another poem: a poem, this time, from a humble parish priest from the Welsh countryside, a place somewhat subaltern to the English seats of power. 

RS Thomas - The Coming

 

And God held in his hand

A small globe.  Look he said.

The son looked.  Far off,

As through water, he saw

A scorched land of fierce

Colour.  The light burned

There; crusted buildings

Cast their shadows: a bright

Serpent, A river

Uncoiled itself, radiant

With slime.

               On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky.  many People

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs.  The son watched

Them.  Let me go there, he said.

The Son did come here, to live amongst us, to teach us his way of love, and to save us from the worst excesses of our inhumanity and hatred of country. It is that coming, the coming of light and love and kindness and compassion, that we celebrate tonight, and to which we commit ourselves anew for a more hopeful future.

I wish you all a holy and most joyful Christmas.

Garry Deverell

Christmas Eve 2020

Bushfires and Colonial Mismanagement

The Australian bushfires that raged from late December to mid-January were the most destructive on record, destroying 8.5 million hectares of forest, farmland, town and residential country in the states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. If that number is hard to get your head around, my dear North American readers, think of an area the size of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island combined, then add a little bit more.  In some places, the fires burned so hot that stone structures melted and even the biomatter below the surface of the ground was utterly obliterated. Ecologists are now saying that in such places, nothing will ever be able to grow again. Even where this is not the case, in parts of the forest where regeneration is possible, whole ecosystems – millennia in the making - have been utterly laid waste. It is also estimated that over 1 billion native animals perished in the fires, many of them belonging to species already close to extinction such as koalas and mountain pygmy possums. A large portion of those animals apparently died either because the fires were travelling too fast or because they could not make their way through fences erected by property owners.

So how did the fires start and why did they burn so hot?  The short answer is that the continent of Australia is on the front line of the battle over climate change. Increasingly mild ‘cold’ seasons and increasingly hot ‘warm’ seasons over the past thirty years have left the driest continent on earth (after Antarctica) even drier. Periods of drought, always an issue in this sun-burnt continent, have become progressively more severe over time to the point where even the wettest places on the continent - temperate and tropical rainforests - are becoming tinderboxes. When dry lightning comes along, therefore, there is little to stop entire forests, along with any farms and towns on their perimeter, going up in flames. And once the fires start, even the world’s most prepared and well-resourced firefighting services cannot stand in their way.  There is little to be done except to evacuate residential areas and pray for rain.

But how did we get to this point? How did an apparently ‘developed’ nation such as Australia, allow the situation to get so out of hand, possibly to the point of no-return?  Obviously climate-change is a global issue. Even if Australia had a progressive government which takes climate-change seriously (which it does not) the only possible mechanism that will make a difference to global policy is international treaty. And the world’s largest polluters have not yet signed any of the protocols generated by UN conferences such as Kyoto or Paris. Notwithstanding this fact, I believe it is incumbent upon nations such as Australia to recognise that we find ourselves in these catastrophic circumstances primarily because we have failed to recognise the wisdom of our indigenous peoples.

I am an Indigenous survivor of what some of us are calling, in Australia, ‘the apocalypse’.  Before the British arrived on our shores in 1788 CE, over 500 nations were already living here, and we had done so for more than 100 000 years. 100 000 years is a very long time by anyone’s estimation. When you’ve been in a place for that long, you get to know it very, very, very well. You get to know the moods and cycles of land and seascape. You get to know the seasons, the animals, the plant-life. You get to know the ecological systems which bind that land together and cause it to flourish with life. You get to know how to find food and shelter, and how to sustainably access those resources over many hundreds of generations. The other thing that you do when you’ve lived that long in one place is find a way to preserve the knowledge of previous generations and pass it on to your children. Doing so is crucial to survival. My people preserved their wisdom in a large body of knowledge we now call, collectively, our ‘dreaming’, which consists of songs, dances, paintings, stories and rituals which, together, show us how to live successfully and well in the lands and seascapes we call home. When the British arrived, they apparently did not see the value of our lore – indeed, after only a little while, they devised policies and practices specifically designed to destroy it - and this was the beginning of our apocalypse. During the 230 years of British occupation much of our lore has been destroyed and possibly lost for ever. Certainly we have been systematically murdered or separated from the specific places in which our various ‘dreamings’ belong. And that has meant, worst of all, that most of us are no longer able to fulfil the vocation given us by our creator-ancestors to look after and manage our homes in such a way that future generations may continue to enjoy and live from their bounty.

Of the many skills our ancestors learned and passed on was the management of landscapes and resources through fire-farming. When the British arrived, they thought that the land was ‘virgin’, empty of human presence, cultivation and influence. But nothing could be further from the truth. For thousands upon thousands of years, my people had been modifying the landscape on an epic scale. We had been using fire to create agricultural fields in which we could plant crops, fields where the soil was permeable by both air and water. We had been using fire to create grasslands which would attract game which could then, in turn, be harvested. Crucially, for the current discussion, we also set small fires in order to prevent wildfires. These would be set within large stands of trees, as well as in open fields, on a seasonal basis. The fires would be managed by burning small areas of grassland or forest undergrowth in a circle-pattern, with a large group of people lighting fires at the perimeter and then following the fire into a centre of convergence. The seasonal nature of the burning kept fuel loads under control, but also caused many of Australia’s native plant species to regenerate and therefore provide nourishment for a local ecosystem to survive.

By contrast, the British clearly did not know how to manage our lands sustainably. Within the first 50 years of annexation, they cleared the grasslands of its people, agricultural systems and animals, and replaced them with millions upon millions of cattle and sheep which compacted the soil and made it relatively impermeable to air and water. The soil, which could no longer breathe, became progressively less nutritious over time and, when it rained, less able to hold moisture. More grasslands for sheep and cattle were created by cutting down forests, but those stands that remained were poorly managed so that ‘bushfires’ became a feature of the ‘Australian’ experience. Today’s Australia not only has to content with wildfires, but also with deeply unwell river systems, dying coral reefs and fisheries, alarming levels of drought and desertification, as well as one of the world’s most mismanaged native animal populations.

Some policy-makers are becoming interested in the land-and sea management practices of our First Peoples. But they are few and far between. And so we pray to our creator for mercy, and for a change of heart and mind that is able to reverse at least some of the damage. And we do so, some of us, in the name of the one who loved even the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.

Coca-Cola and Christ

Texts:  Jeremiah 23.1-6; Luke 1.68-79; Colossians 1.11-20; Luke 23.33-43

Today is the festival of Christ the King.  It is the last Sunday, and the last word, of the Christian year.  It serves to remind us that, in the end, God will be sovereign over all things. The English mystic, Julian of Norwich, captured the essence of that affirmation when she said, 'all will be well and all things shall be well'.  Now . . .  if you pause to reflect for a moment, you'll realise how laughably audacious that message appears to be.  In the middle of economic meltdown, wars and rumours of wars, in the middle of horrific poverty and environmental crisis . . . 'all shall be well and all things shall be well'?

Please, tell me if I'm wrong, but I would have thought that it was not God who was directing the fate of the world, but multi-national corporations like Coca-cola.  And I'm being absolutely serious here.  The Coca-cola Company is amongst the most powerful forces in the world today.  It owns and controls more subsidiary food and drink companies than any other.  It employs more people and has a greater cash-flow than many governments.  But what is more significant is the power Coca-cola has over people's hearts and minds.  You see, Coke was the first to create not just a product, but a need.  None of us actually need Coca-cola.  It's a sugary soft-drink with almost no nutritional value at all.  But if you go into the poorest village of India and ask people what you can do for them on a hot day, they are more than likely to ask for a Coke.  Before Coke came along, industries would create products to fulfil the needs of already-existing markets.  But with Coke, something quite new came into being.  Through the power of advertising, Coke actually began to produce the markets themselves.  To create needs that weren't there before.  The need for a sugary cola drink.  A tailor-made product to fulfil a tailor-made need.

Coca-cola's advertising is very, very effective.  It is omniscient.  It is everywhere.  If you're a young person these days, it's almost impossible to feel like you're having a good time unless you have a coke in hand.  Coke is the symbol of youthfulness and vitality.  It's also the symbol of western freedom.  I can do anything I want.  I can be anything that I want.  The Coca-cola market-researchers are very, very clever.  In the last few years they have even tried to tap into the renewed interest in things spiritual.  They present Coke as the pathway into other worlds, the elixir of the gods which can keep you forever young and deliver you from the boredom and tedium of everyday life.  With Coke, life can be an adventure with mystery and intrigue.

The Coca-cola company has used its power very subtly.  But the effects are devastating.  The people of Mexico City are very poor.  They have difficulty finding the money to buy enough food to maintain a good standard of health.  Yet they drink more Coca-cola than the whole of Australia put together.  Why?  Because they have been brainwashed by advertising.  I might be hungry, but if I'm drinking Coke, things can't be too bad.  Note, also, that the Coke company has a rather appalling record when it comes to labour policy.  Most of its operations these days are in the two-thirds world.  Impoverished workers are paid pittance to produce the sugary stuff.  They are hired and fired at will, with little or no compensation or redundancy measures in place.  Workers will therefore do pretty much anything for the company in order to keep their jobs.  Consider, too, that the Coke Company  is a large contributor to the environmental crisis that we now find ourselves in.  Huge tracts of rainforest have been removed, in some of the world's poorest countries, to make way for sugar plantations which supply the Coke juggernaut.  Clearing the forests has led to climate change, an extreme shortage of both land and firewood for subsistence farmers, water shortages, and the kind of landslides that regularly occur in places where land-clearing has become extreme.

Add to all that the capacity of Coca-cola to silence its western critics.  Not by the crude means you can get away with in the two-thirds world.  But by throwing around the sponsorship dollar.  An example.  The United Methodist Church in the United States, a church whose rhetoric for social justice is very impressive, tends not to say anything about Coca-cola because Coke contributes a very large sum of money to the running of one of its principal seminary at Emory University in Atlanta.  Now, if the church can be so easily pacified, governments even more so.

In a world run by companies like Coca-cola, where is the sovereignty of God.  How can all things be well, when the world is so obviously coming to grief?  Well, the very same questions were being asked on a hill outside Jerusalem, a little over 2000 years ago.  There, on a Roman cross, hung the man many had hoped would turn things around for the Jewish people.  He had been hailed as the Messiah, the chosen one of God, who would rescue the people from domination and poverty at the hands of the Roman invaders.  But now that particular dream lay in tatters.  There he hung, between earth and heaven, bleeding from the nails in his hands and the scourge of the whip.  Where was God at this moment?  Where was the power of God?  Why didn't God come down from heaven and nuke all those whom had put Jesus up there?  Why didn't God take back the world from the powers of darkness by mounting a counter-invasion?  Why didn't God make things right?

The words of Jesus on the cross give some clues as to why God didn't, and why God doesn't, do such things.  When the soldiers nail him there, Jesus says 'Father, forgive them.  They don't know what they're doing'.   God, you see, is not in the habit of forcing people to do what they are not inclined to do.  God is the maker of that most treasured of human qualities - freedom.  The capacity to do good, or to do evil.  The capacity to love or to hate.  The capacity to create good things, or to destroy.  The trouble with freedom is that all things can very easily come to grief.  And they did for Jesus.  When God created human freedom, God knew that God himself would eventually be caught up in what human beings do.  That God would eventually be nailed to a cross.  But he did it anyway.  And he did it out of love.  Out of love, God is willing to submit to our freedom.  Out of love, God is willing to forgive, and to suffer the consequences of our foolishness.  Out of love, God is crucified with the poor of India, and the disappeared of Pinochet's Chile, and the murdered priests of El Salvador.  And, out of love, God is willing to forgive them all.

You see, the power of God to be sovereign in the world is very different to that of Coca-cola or any of the other multinational powerbrokers.  And it is different to the power currently being wielded by the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania over other councils of the church.  God's reign of peace will come, not as a result of forceful or manipulative practices, but by the subtle and pervasive power of love.  The power of passive resistance.  The power of martyrdom and of prayer.  Christ himself is the trail-blazer in this regard.  He loved the poor.  He healed the sick.  He was a veritable presence of God for the little ones of his time.  And when he was crucified, he did not remain that way.  Somehow he rose to new life.  Not life as it had been, life in the shadow of death.  But life in all its fullness.  Life lived in the peace and communion of God.  The rumour of God, then, has never been put down.  It remains the strongest power in the world.  It whispers in the ears of political leaders.  It challenges the bullying practices of companies like Coca-cola and the Uniting Church.  It beckons to us each time we come to the place of dread, when we realise that life according to the vision of the advertisers is not all its cracked up to be.  One day, we believe, the rumour will cease to be a rumour.  That which has whispered in our hearts will be proclaimed from the rooftops.  Everyone will know that Jesus is the king.  And his glory will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

This homily was recently adapted from a sermon first preached at Devonport Uniting Church in 1998.