Author: John Davies

Notes from a walk in Liverpool’s Canning area, Sunday 13 June 2010….

(for The Well, St Bride’s monthly ‘celtic’ service)

 

Cinderella and poverty

from Just Church (Lent Programme Activity 4)

 

Most people remember the story of Cinderella – but not everyone realises how it applies to real life. In the fairytale, the spoiled elder sisters had everything they wished, while poor Cinderella was forced to live in rags and work like a slave. Behind all this was the shadowy presence of the evil stepmother (not that stepmothers are naturally evil).

 

By an odd coincidence the Cinderella story bears a remarkable resemblance to life in Britain today. As a nation we are, in a sense, all part of the same family. But, as in the Cinderella story, while many people live in relative luxury, not having to worry how much the supermarket bill comes to, others live in degrading poverty.

 

What Cinderella’s real parents would have thought of the situation their much loved child had to endure, we can only imagine. But, from reading the scriptures, we have a very clear idea what God thinks of the poverty and injustice that flourishes among his children in the real world.

 

Christians believe that God loves us so much that he gave his own Son to suffer and to die for us. But if God is love and if we are called to love God and our neighbour in return, then some awkward questions arise.

 

Just what do we mean by love? Is it simply a warm feeling of kindness and affection towards someone? Or is it to do with actively seeking the wellbeing and fulfilment of the other person? About respecting and valuing them?

 

And, if love is about seeking the wellbeing and fulfilment of the other, how can we say we love that person if we cause them to suffer the injustice of oppression and poverty?

 

Or walk by on the other side when they suffer in that way? Isn’t justice very close in meaning to love?

 

Maybe that’s what Jesus was thinking when he had that great argument with the religious leaders in Luke chapter 11. He told them: “You tithe mint and rue and every herb but you neglect justice and the love of God.”

 

Why does Jesus choose those words? Is he saying love and justice are at the heart of the nature of God? Maybe he was thinking of the Old Testament prophets and the Psalmist. Micah says we are called to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. (Note that justice comes first.) And Psalm 97 proclaims that: “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of God’s throne.”

 

So is a concern for justice for the poor and oppressed just some optional “social add-on” to the gospel? Or is it at the heart of our relationship with God? An essential expression of God’s nature? Could we even say that working for justice is sacramental: an outward and visible sign of the life-giving love of God?

We could go some way towards answering such questions on a walk…

 

Micah 6:8 “God has shown you what is good. And what does the Lord require? To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” 

 

Walking opens our eyes to the everyday realities on the ground: including the realities of injustice;

 

Walking brings encounter with the people who can tell us how things really are;

 

Walking makes us vulnerable to – and therefore open to – challenge and change in ourselves.

 

The Lord, the giver of life

 

Have we not seen? Have we not heard?

The Lord, the giver of life

    is speaking to us.

He is showing us his people

    and their grief.

He is telling us their stories

    and their distress.

He is calling us to discipleship,

    to involvement

    to vulnerability

    to risk-taking

    to commitment.

He is asking us for our hands, our hearts, our souls

    and our bodies.

He is asking us to go out into the unknown.

He is asking us for not less than everything

    until the task is done.

 

Barbara D’Arcy, from The Trampled Vineyard (CHAS/Housing Justice)

from Just Church 

Just walking has many antecedents: from the journey of Yaweh’s exiled people towards and eventually into their promised land to walks of justice in our lifetime – the marches of the civil rights movements in America in the early 1960s, Gandhi famous walk to the sea to challenge Britain’s monopoly on salt production, the CND marches of the 1950s and 1980s, and so on.

 

The sort of just walking I am advocating is far lower in profile – our own walking around our own places, with ears and eyes and heart open to what God might be saying to us through the enviromnet we see and the people we encounter on the way, what challenges these journeys might provoke for us in our own life of justice. 

 

The Just Church prayer

 

Jesus invites us to a way of celebration,

meeting and feasting with the humble and poor.

Let us walk his way with joy.

 

Jesus beckons us to a way of risk,

letting go of our security.

Let us walk his way with joy.

 

Jesus challenges us to listen

to the voices of those who have nothing to lose.

Let us walk his way with joy.

 

Jesus points us to a way of self-giving,

where power and status are overturned.

Let us walk his way with joy.

 

Jesus calls us to follow the way of the cross,

where despair is transformed by the promise of new life.

Let us walk his way with joy.

 

Jan Berry, taken from Bread of Tomorrow (edited by Janet Morley, SPCK)

from Just Church 

 

Do the Canning walk, stopping to particularly reflect on:

 

Huskisson Street – Canning’s highs and lows reeflected in its housing;

    – William Huskisson: free trade / political power associated with land ownership and the position of the landless;

 

Upper Parliament Street – (site of riots 1981) policing / racial justice issues then and now;

 

Falconer Square Gardens – issues of private and public space;

    – where do the shipowners / port bosses now live?

 

The Women’s Hospital(s) – justice issues in health especially pertaining to women.

 

 

Agnes Jones / Blackburne House / Saint Bride – women championing in social justice… 

 

 

….good Christian men too… 

 

… St Philip Neri – ‘like Socrates he travelled throughout the city, seeking opportunities of entering into conversation with people.’ [Wikipedia] 

Catholic Social teaching: justice as an ecumenical work…

end at top of Myrtle Street with view down to the river  / Liver Buildings, reading Liverpool Hope…

 

 

 

 

 

 

LIVERPOOL HOPE   

 

I saw a vision:

it was last Thursday at eleven o’clock in the morning.

I was standing at the top of Brownlow Hill, looking down over the city

and the cold, blue autumn sky broke open over my head

and the Spirit of God breathed on my eyes and my eyes were opened:

I saw Liverpool, the holy city, coming down out of heaven

shining like a rare jewel, sparkling like clear water in the eye of the sun

and all the sickness was gone from the city

and there were no more suburbs and schemes

no difference between Croxteth and Crosby

I saw the Mersey running with the water of life,

as bright as crystal,

as clear as glass

the children of Liverpool swimming in it

 

And the Spirit showed me the tree of life

growing in Sefton Park

 

I looked out and there were no more homeless people

there were no women working the streets

there were no more junkies up the closes

HIV and AIDS were things of the past

there were no more racist attacks

no more attacks on gay people

no more rapists

no more stabbings

no more Protestants and Catholics

no more IRA graffiti, no more Orange marches

because there was no more hate

and I saw women walking safe at nights 

and the men were full of passion and gentleness

and none of the children were ever abused

because the people’s sex was full of justice and joy.

 

I saw an old woman throw back her head

and laugh like a young girl

and when the sky closed back her laughter rang in my head

for days and days

and would not go away.

This is what I saw, looking across to the Liver Buildings,

looking up from the city of death

and I knew then that there would be a day of resurrection

and I believe that there will be a day of resurrection.

First used at Body and Soul, Liverpool Cathedral October 1993

Adapted from Doug Gay, ‘The Prophet’s Speech’, in ‘Words From The Late Late Service‘, Glasgow 1993

Luke 7 – The passion of a woman forgiven first - today's talk.

 

My small share of Jim's books, as mentioned below, now on my bookshelf. There could have been many more, but for the need to reduce my library having just moved to a smaller study. This is a rucksack full, and there were some large photo-books on the Miner's Strike and Salgado's The Children, and some old housing / town planning documentation too. I have given myself two Jim-related jobs to do, both massive tasks: one, read these books, and two: get cracking on getting some of his own writings into publishable form. A labour of love which will take a while – watch this space.

On the fringes, where town and country meet, the scrublands, populated by semi-industrial works or forgotten agricultural sheds, unexpected beauty often emerges. In his 1973 book The Unofficial Countryside, soon to be republished, Richard Mabey 'explains how 13,000 tons of canary grass seed, fodder for caged birds, comes into Britain every year, and is recycled into landfill sites, to leach into the water table, to drift down embankments and sewage-outfall tracks; bringing life and colour to the uniform greys of spurned and disregarded places.'

I am quoting Iain Sinclair, reviewing Mabey's masterpiece in The Guardian last week. Sinclair has written the foreword for the new edition and wonders – like me – how he ever 'miss[ed], first time around, [a] book that linked, at a single stroke, burgeoning bureaucracy and the threatened pastoral of whatever lay beyond the city's horizon? Richard Mabey identified so neatly the transitional quality of unwritten places where slightly bemused survivors of the 60s, pocketing their battered copies of Food for Free, found themselves labouring at the dawn of a harsher era.' Sinclair observes that

The Unofficial Countryside is a proper reckoning, the Doomsday Book of a topography too fascinating to be left alone. Gravel beds, abandoned by film studios, were blissfully repossessed by passerine birds and opportunist plants. Mabey logs the tough fecundity of the margin, where wild nature spurns the advertised reservation and obliterates the laminated notice-boards of sanctioned history. Human tragedies of our paranoid cultures, raids and terrorist outrages, as Mabey points out, are nature's opportunity. "The first summer after the blitz there were rosebays flowering on over three-quarters of the bombed sites in London, defiant sparks of life amongst the desolation."

I'm honoured by a mention in Sinclair's article: 'A Liverpool clergyman, John Davies, took a sabbatical to hike down the acoustic footprints of the M62, from Hull to Crosby beach.' Honoured by this association with John Clare, WG Sebald, Ronald Blythe, Roger Deakin, Will Self, Nick Papadimitriou. Each connected by a 'trajectory, soul-sickness, walking in nature, swimming, planting, observing …  Sickness was not always the launching point, unless it was the sickness in nature, in our broken treaty with living things.'

The procession of death meets the procession of life - my sermon on my 48th birthday….

In his will Jim invited me to raid his large and excellent collection. So I've been reading some great books recently, thanks to my late friend. And as always, I'm making connections between them. In Real England Paul Kingsnorth describes as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'class war' the sorts of ways which the forces of capital are destroying so much of our physical and cultural heritage – from the PubCos monopolistic grab of the pub trade, choking the life out of it, through the gentrifying developers' eradication of the 'indigenous' boat people from the canal system, to the supermarkets' fruit policies which – in a land which has thousands of different homogenous apple varieties – reduce choice to just two or three, max. 

'Ethnic cleansing' and 'class war' are strong descriptors, but when you get into the detail of what's happening you realise that Kingsnorth is justified in using them. His answer – a rallying cry for us to 'Know our Place', cherish the genius loci, and be prepared to fight for it. He quotes Patrick Kavanagh's The Parish and the Universe, 1952:

All great civilisations are based on parochialism… Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience… A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.'

Then Gillian Darley's Villages of Vision, a celebrated 'Study of Strange Utopias', the planned settlements and villages of Britain from the creations of philanthropic industrialists (Bournville, Port Sunlight) to the work of vain aristocrats, wealthy eccentrics or monied visionaries. The opening chapter introduced to me a word which brought me up short and caused me to revisit my 2005 essay, The Making of the Croxteth Landscape. Darley's word is 'emparking' – ie, the creation of parks and country estates which often happened – and this is what I hadn't grasped before – through a process of 'the removal of entire communities and, therefore, their rehousing elsewhere or in a planned settlement nearby'. 

Those planned settlements, designed by expensively-appointed architects were intened to show off the sophistication of the wealthy estate-owners who commissioned them. Some were, indeed, very good. Others were worse than the houses which the displaced local poor had been forced to leave. 'Ethnic cleansing', 'class war', anyone? It made me wonder what happened here, back in 1575 perhaps, when the first Croxteth Hall was built for the Molyneux family, or at other points in this estate's long history. Maybe it wasn't just in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the poor of West Derby were 'cleared' to make room for showy, expensive redevelopment…?

Columba's Tears is the name given to the green and white marble stones of Iona. Tourists and pilgrims fill their pockets with them and take them home. It's a wonder that there's any left on that small island. But a lot of things about Iona are wonderful. Searching through some old papers at the weekend I came across this poem, which I penned during a work week on Iona in 2002. I reproduce it here aware that there's a Greenbelt party on Iona at the end of May. I won't be with them this year: hope they have a good time.

Columba's island called me
So I dutifully came
By plane and bus and ferry boat
Through wind and driving rain.
I've been drying out my trousers
But they just got wet again.
I'm feeling very windswept and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

They've put me on a chore team
To make me feel at home
I thought, 'This is a holiday'
But didn't like to moan.
Those mealtime conversations meant that
I've never been alone.
I'm feeling very tired and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

They've processed me round the island
And sent me out to sea
Thev've sat me down with videos of
Macleod's Community.
They've caused me to drink gallons of
Odd-flavoured herbal tea.
I'm feeling decaffinated and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

I thought I was retreating
But they've brought me face to face
With life in all its rawness
In this light-filled edgy place.
I'll leave here with a song to sing
About amazing grace.
I'm feeling almost holy and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

This green rock begs a question:
What makes Columba cry?
And what can keep the tears away from
That missionary's eye.
The answer's in my lifestyle
Beneath God's lively sky.
I'm feeling liberated and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

Preparing a workshop on Celtic Spirituality it strikes me again, the inventedness of it all. We have a generous record of the 'ancient' hymns and prayers of the ordinary Scots because the civil servant and amateur folklorist Alexander Carmichael toured Gaelic-speaking Scotland between 1855 and 1910, collecting them. But it's generally recognised that Carmichael heavily edited his Carmina Gadelica, tidied it up for Victorian consumption. So what I, in my workshops, present as the spiritual outpourings of everyday folk, rooted in peaty land and rugged history, is as invented as, let's say, the druidry at any chosen Eisteddfodd (for which we must thank Edward Williams, aka Iolo Morganwg).

You can go one of two ways with this observation – moan about the artifice, suggesting that there's no real value in Carmichael's work because his radical alterations are so far removed from the original words of the Hebrideans he visited on his tours; that Iolo Morganwg's rituals are a contrived charade. Or you can hold your hands up and say, it's probably impossible to get to the raw source of anything in history, so we  should be grateful to the Carmichaels and Morganwgs for bringing us something glorious to play with, however invented it may be. Folk expressions change all the time: so celebrate!

This strikes me as a theme in Cole's book, which recognises that of all the nations in the British isles, England is the least reluctant to celebrate itself, but then goes on to note the emergence of a new kind of Morris Dancing (The Morris side Hunter's Moon 'smash huge sticks together instead of waving wimpish hankies'; Cole's website references Goth Morris sides Wolf's Head and Vixen) and the increase of all sorts of 'traditional' festive events (Lammas etc, which could be called a return to the pagan, but in a good way – valuing the earth and celebrating the seasons). Which is all invented – but wonderful. That it is also an English spirituality rather than something borrowed from the Scots, is even more encouraging still.

My other website www.johndavies.org is still up and running, though its front page will remain pretty static due to all my blogs being posted here instead from now on. Nice to get an email off Gareth today, saying he finds my online sermons 'inspirational and “normal”. Heaven in ordinary kind of stuff'. Comments like that… keep me going.

During a key scene in Philip Pulman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, the son of Mary, Christ, opens up to a prostitute  about the differences between him and his twin brother Jesus:

'More than anything, he does things out of passion, and I do them out of calculation. I can see further than he can; I can see the consequences of things he doesn't think twice about. But he acts with the whole of himself at every moment, and I'm always holding something back out of caution, or prudence, or because I want to watch and record rather than participate.'

 I read this immediately after finishing Cole Moreton's Is God Still an Englishman? and it struck me that Cole's writing displays something like the dual personality which Pulman's fascinating little novel explores. The Englishman book follows Cole's previous work, My Father was a Hero, in being a stimulating mix of the confessional and the investigative. Both passionate and prudent, Moreton the journalist who wears his heart on his sleeve. Moreton the investigator who cannot help keep returning to the one subject which most fascinates and illuminates him: himself, his own life, as a lens through which to see the rest of the world.

And this works well. Is God Still an Englishman? weaves together The Jesus Story with the Cole Story with the story of the English Church (the Anglican one, mostly) in a most engaging way. Well, I found it engaging because as I read Cole's Story I am reminded of my own story too. Cole and I have made similar journeys – towards and then away from charismatic evangelical Anglicanism – always stopping off each August Bank Holiday at Greenbelt along the way. 

So Cole's opening and closing chapters tell a story which I am familiar with. A very moving story of a young woman, very active and much loved in Greenbelt circles, who sadly died of cancer a few years back. The loss felt by her many friends and the story of her loving husband's journey into a new beginning. Ali's strong faith in her eternal future contrasting Cole's pained unbelief. And me, recalling an odd but wondrous evening whilst on my M62 walk when I joined my hosts Andy and Michelle in a pub outside Hull where they were reunited with a group of close friends from church/Greenbelt who had come together for an act of memorial to that same woman Ali, who I recalled vaguely from my Greenbelt involvement but learned so much about as they praised and celebrated her life that night.

Events like losing someone so good, so young, concentrate the mind. So Cole had my attention as he took me with him through, well, our story. I laughed with Cole (master of cheeky prose), I was touched by his self-appraisals and challenged by his apparisals of a dying parish system. But most of all I found myself agreeing with the hope to be found in the new sort of spirit found in our response to Hillsborough, in the funeral services of Diana and Jade Goody, in the new paganism celebrating the English countryside in joyous ritual and in the joys of multicultural exploration.