will the real slave owner please stand up

Yesterday was Heritage Day in South Africa.

a number of the museums were offering free entry and tbV [the beautiful Val] suggested that we go and visit ‘The Slave Lodge’ in town.

being the museum-loving guy that i am [not quite as much as the raiSIN-loving guy i am, but close] i built up some enthusiasm and Yes, Let’sed along with her, cos i knew it was something she wanted to do.

and, like with a long hike, or pretty much anything outdoorsy, by the time you actually get me there, i do tend to really enjoy it and so i am really glad that i went.

i think ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyable’ are not the right words to describe a visit to a place used as a symbol of incredible torture, racism and unjust incarceration, but i guess a sense of ‘i needed to see this and be reminded again’ if that could be encapsulated by a single adjective would be the word i would use.

HIGHLIGHT

the most powerful room for me was an exhibit focusing on women throughout the apartheid struggle, both black and white, who had played some key role in different ways. The exhibition is called ‘There’s something i must tell you’ and it is by Sue Williamson and if you are in Cape Town you should really try and make the time to see it.

From Albertina Sisulu to Helen Joseph to Mamphela Rampele and more there is a series of screen-printed protraits of women who were involved in different ways in the struggle against apartheid.  One that had a profound impact on me was a woman named Jeanette Curtis Schoon, who, with her six-year-old daughter Katryn, was killed by a letter bomb meant for her husband in June, 1984. Not because her story was any more profound than any of the others, but because there was a six year old caught up in it i guess. What an absolute mess our country has emerged from. No wonder there are still scars.

MOMENT OF TRUTH

We also watched a fifteen minute movie on the slave trade in the Western Cape and as we heard about the conditions on the ships used to bring slaves to South Africa [which i never knew – Dutch East India Company’s early missive to those in South Africa was don’t make slaves of the locals because you don’t want to cause trouble – we will ship you some of ours, which meant from India and China and other places] i found myself responding with a very strong, ‘HOW COULD THEY?’ which was followed up by quite an immediate, ‘HOW COULD WE NOT?’

Yes, what happened in this country was particularly horrific and unacceptable, but i’m not sure that we’re all that better. While ‘the people of the past’ propogated racism and slavery, we tend to sit back and allow [or maybe more purposefully ignore or pretend it’s not there] injustice and not even act as if it is a problem.

What sucks hugely for me in this matter is i don’t have the answers. i drive past ten thousand shacks every time i go to the airport and i don’t know how to ‘fix’ it or even ‘make it a little bit better’.

i drive past women in the street offering themselves for an evening, or is it an hour, of pleasure at their expense, and i know it is so completely wrong, as is the system of fear and power and ‘ownership’ that keeps them there, but am not sure of what to do in any way or form.

People at the traffic lights begging for money [how great i have gotten at looking busy or not making eye contact, or maybe just how easily i throw out a ‘No, sorry’ although i am trying to be better at making eye contact and smiling and initialising some kind of communication to at least be acknowledging their person’ness]

And on and on.

DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T

So we are in a place of wanting to make a difference. Somehow. To someone [or hopefully someones]. I feel like too many people around us are just happily and comfortably living their lives without even giving any of this stuff any thought. At the same time there are a whole lot of people giving this much more thought than i have and making much more of a difference.

But figuring it out can be difficult.

tbV and i are taking time to choose where we will live for the next part of our journey in South Africa and even taking time to be intentional in where we might live has been judged [in the commentary section].

Shenaz told us we were being too gangster:

It is getting boring hearing about you going to poor areas. Often these people are not as clever as you and out of a job. They are basically losers (don’t mean it in a bad way), who are hard to help. But always you are on a platform above them like a man feeding dogs at a kennel. It is the same, same, same – maybe you should consider going to a place where the people are more clever and successful, and try to change their minds instead? Preach outside Caprice on Camps Bay for example. These people are dropping R1000 an evening or more. I’ve heard of some at Shimmy Beach dropping R10K for a bill. This is SIN! Real SIN! Go there – go preach to these people. That my friend is a challenge for you and it could make a huge difference. Imagine convincing a queue of people to donate R100K to help the poor instead of using it for cocktails? Be a street preacher on Camps bay this summer and change things. Otherwise you’ll be on the streets of some area – helping another tik-kop or whoever and its circular – they go back to it usually. Go to Camps bay and get people of power and influence and money to help. I know you don’t want to hear it as you are in your comfort zone of helping the less clever, losers (as above) and you know how to handle that. TIME FOR A CHANGE.

While Sean didn’t think we were being gangster enough:

 Woodstock and Salt River is very trendy. Where do you guys get the cash to live there? If you really want to be “intentional” then why don’t you go live in Langa? The answer is because you don’t and that is understandable because of the crime. Kayamandi is like a walk in the park compared to places like Langa or even Lavendar Hill.

I suspect the answer might be, to some extent at least, found in making changes that are both huge and small.

Starting to recycle [we did this a lot in Americaland and it is something we would love to see happening on a more effective scale here] and encourage our friends to do the same. Buying fair trade and Free Range where possible and at least being intentional in terms of our consumption in a variety of ways. Figuring out how we do generosity and how we encourage those around us to do the same [Actually since coming home we are beyond well aware how incredible may of the people in our lives are at doing generosity – so making sure we follow suit i guess]. It might be paying attention to and sharing conversations on equal rights for women [like Emma Watson did so succinctly in her speech to the UN over here] or the environment [like Leonardo DiCaprio did in his ‘I pretend for a living, you don’t’ speech to the UN over here].  Starting to plant our own food and perhaps be part of a local space where others are encouraged to plant theirs.

It might be having conversations on race, particularly issues like racism and reconciliation [or following those already happening like over here] or human trafficking [like getting involved with Jamie the Very Worst Missionary and her team over here] and more.

It might be allowing bigger decisions be affected by the choices you make to make a difference. Like where and how you choose to work [Maybe there are some industries we should not be prepared to work for/with?]. Or where and how you choose to live. What you do with your resources – which includes time, money and skills or education.

Overall i guess it is summed up as living with purpose. Which is a message for everyone. But as a Christ follower, it feels like a particularly apt message for me. After all, close to 2000 verses in the bible call for me to get involved with the poor and needy and those who are considered by society as ‘the least of these’. How do i do this in the best of ways? I’m not sure yet, but help me to figure it out.

i read this quote online today and it feels true, at least in the collective sense. in the individual and family sense i still need to think about it some more.

‘When a poor person dies of hunger,it has not happened because GOD did not take care of him or her.It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.’ [Mother Teresa]

i dunno. this conversation has a ways to go. but we can’t do nothing. and throwing stones at me while i try do something doesn’t feel like it helps an awful lot, either. so meet me around the coffee table or have us over for dinner. or come to one of ours that we hope to throw soon. but let’s be working on this together, because i feel like together is where the solution to this lies.

 

How great [pretty drum great!]

Wow. This is my favourite hymn ever and just heard this rendition that just gets drummier and drummier as it goes on [if that’s a thing] – i imagine that even if you don’t like christian music or hymns that you may still be able to appreciate the amazingness of this piece – Enjoy! The percussion group is called Stikyard. Boom, here it is:

Now sings my soul…

If that’s not your thing, or even if it is, this is the latest worship song that has captured my attention just in terms of the energy and vibe the band, Rend Collective, has in delivering it so if you have not seen ‘Build Your Kingdom Here’, give this a watch as well:

 [And if lyrics are more your thing, check out these powerful words by Tim Hughes, in a song that acknowledges life can be hard]

Let me help you avoid those Word Crimes [with a little help from Al!]

i am a big fan of Weird Al Yankovic and if you don’t recognise that name then WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Move out from under that rock you’re under and hang out with Uncle Google and get educated…

From probably his best music video for ‘Fat’ [the parody of Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’] to classics such as Amish Paradise, Smells like Nirvana and The Star Wars take ‘The Saga Begins’

More recently there were two exceptional pieces which saw him take on “Ridin” by Chamillionaire and re-inventing it as the Geekfested ‘White and Nerdy’ and the little bit more quite appropriately  ‘out there’ version of Lady if-anyone-was-asking-to-be-parodied-by-Weird-Al-it-was-me Gaga transforming her weird ‘Born this way’ into the possibly weirder ‘Perform this Way’

All this to say, this week he came out with a new song turning the chart-topping uplifting clap-filled ‘Happy’ by Pharrell into ‘Tacky’ posing questions about “wearing stripes with plaid” and “instagramming every meal I ever had” which was good and fun and silly and contained traces of Jack Black, Eric Stonestreet [Modern Family] and the stalkery lady from ‘Flight of the Conchords’…

But then, THIS HAPPENED!

I stumbled upon a new song of this coming album which takes the below-the-belt-but-way-too-catchy Robin Thicke ‘Blurred Lines’ and weaves it into an acceptable and commendable and brilliant piece of insane wordplay and i seriously am thinking that Word Crimes might be my new favourite Weird Al – it is SO SO good…

Check it out and then forward this to all your teacher and grammar police friends…

i hope you enjoy this as much as i did – definitely deserves multiple viewings – it is fantastic, and no i was not being sarcastic…

Standing with the least likely to succeed

If i was sharing every chapter and excerpt i enjoyed from  ‘Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion’ by Father Gregory Boyle, which i have been reading and really being deeply moved by, then the whole book would pretty much be in here. But i am wanting you to get hold of the book and so am only sharing a story or a passage from every couple of chapters in the book. There is some great challenge and inspiration but also moments of great sadness and emotion as Father Boyle has buried hundreds of the gangsters and ex gangsters that worked with him over the years and so a story of hope might a paragraph later be followed by a senseless death. I am hoping that these extracts will keep you motivated and inspired while you wait for your ordered copy of the book to arrive. In this chapter, Father Boyle responds to the question people often ask in terms of ‘How successful is your ministry?’:

‘Sr Elaine Roulette, the founder of My Mother’s House in New York, was asked, “How do you work with the poor?” She answered, “You don’t. You share your life with the poor.” It’s as basic as crying together. It is about “casting your lot” before it ever becomes about “changing their lot.”

Success and failure, ultimately have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until He was crucified – whichever came first.

The American poet Jack Gilbert writes, “The pregnant heart is driven to hopes that are the wrong size for this world.” The strategy and stance of Jesus was consistent in that it was always out of step with the world. Jesus defied all the categories upon which the world insisted: good-evil, success-failure, pure-impure. Surely He was an equal opportunity pisser-offer in this regard. 

The Right wing would stare at Him and question where He chose to stand. They hated that He aligned Himself with the unclean, those outside – those folks you ought neither to touch nor be near. He hobnobbed with the leper, shared table fellowship with the sinner, and rendered Himself ritually impure in the process. They found it offensive that, to boot, Jesus had no regard for their wedge issues, their controversial amendments or their culture wars.

The Left was equally annoyed. They wanted to see the ten point plan, the revolution in high gear, the toppling of sinful social structures. They were impatient with His brand of solidarity. They wanted to see Him taking the right stand on issues, not just standing in the right place.

But Jesus just stood with the outcast. The Left screamed: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” And the Right maintained: “Don’t stand with those folks at all.” Both sides, seeing Jesus the wrong size for this world, came to their own reasons for wanting Him dead. Both sides were equally impressed as He unrolled the scroll and spoke of “good news to the poor”… “sight to the blind”… “liberty to the captives”. Yet only a handful of verses later, they want to throw Jesus over a cliff. 

How do we get the world to change anyway? Dorothy Day asked critically: “Where were the saints to try and change the social order? Not just minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?” Dorothy Day is a hero of mine, but I disagree with her here. You actually abolish slavery by accompanying the slave. We don’t strategise our way out of slavery, we solidarise, if you will, our way toward its demise. We stand in solidarity with the slave, and by so doing, we diminish slavery’s ability to stand. By casting our lot with the gang member, we hasten the demise of demonising. All Jesus asks is, “Where are you standing?” And after chilling defeat and soul-numbing failure, He asks again, “Are you still standing there?”

Can we stay faithful and persistent in our fidelity even when things seem not to succeed? I suppose Jesus could have chosen a strategy that worked better (evidence-based outcomes) – that didn’t end in the Cross – but He could’t find a strategy more soaked with fidelity than the one He embraced. 

[from the chapter titled ‘Success’]

and a little further on:

Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I’m not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us the good ones. 

Myriad are the examples at Homeboy Industries of homies colouring way outside the lines and being given their ninety-eighth chance. Maybe it’s because we are often forced to start where others have stopped. Some of my senior staff wanted to change our motto, printed on our T-shirts, from “Nothing stops a bullet like a job” to “You just can’t disappoint us enough.” Others would mention that there seems to be no consequences for some actions, and, of course, in the real world, there are consequences. Someone told me once, “I mean, what’s it take to get fired at Homeboy – release nerve gas?” When it seems the best thing for a person, I have, often enough, fired someone. I call the person in and say, “The day won’t ever come when I will withdraw love and support from you. I am simply in your corner until the wheels fall off. Oh, by the way, I have to let you go.” They always agree with me. Nearly always.

There is no question that everybody working at Homeboy would have been fired anywhere else [including me, I suppose – just ask my board]. But as Mark Torres, S.J., beloved spiritual guide at Homeboy Industries, says, “We see in the homies what they don’t see in themselves, until they do.”

There was a homegirl, straight out of prison, with award-winning and alarming tattoos all over her face. She began work at the silkscreen. First day, a fight. Second day, she came in utterly illuminated on “chronic” [marijuana]. Third day, she arrived at work, in a car filled with her homies [this is against our rules]. Oh, and the car was stolen [this is against, well, everybody’s rules]. I suppose we could have fired her. And yet we decided, with all the “no matter whatness” we could muster, that she would give up on us long before we would ever give up on her. And give up she did. She just stopped showing up. We’ll be ready for her when she comes back. You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behaviour is recognised for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

Jesus jostled irreparably the purity code of the shot callers of His day. He recognised that it was precisely this code that kept folks from kinship. Maybe success has become the new purity code. And Jesus shows us that the desire for purity [nine times out of ten] is, in fact, the enemy of the gospel.

Funders sometimes say, “We don’t fund efforts; we fund outcomes.” We all hear this and think how sensible, practical, realistic, hard-nosed, and clear-eyed it is. But maybe Jesus doesn’t know why we’re nodding so vigorously. Without wanting to, we sometimes allow our preference for the poor to morph into a preference for the well-behaved and the most likely to succeed, even if you get better outcomes when you work with those folks. 

If success is our engine, we sidestep the difficult and belligerent and eventually abandon “the slow work of God”.

Failure and death become insurmountable.

[To read the next passage, with laughter and tears, titled ‘The Power of Water’, click here]

Taboo Topics: Race – Don’t be colour blind, be colour brave!

i just watched this TED talk by a woman called Mellody Hobson on the introduction of a topic she called ‘Colour Braveness’

While the focus of the clip is very much from a ‘The American Dream’ point of view, and so doesn’t necessarily have the end point i would focus on [become a CEO of a company!] there are some interesting and helpful points she raises and so it is well worth a viewing…

Some lines that stood out for me were the following:

“Surround yourself with people don’t look look like you, who don’t think like you, who don’t act like you and who don’t come from where you come from” – this is such a powerful idea and i have been inspired over the last year in particular to seek out writers and speakers who are quite different from me [race, culture, background] so as to hear a different voice from the majority of voices i might have heard growing up [typically white male] not because there is anything wrong with white male voices, but definitely because there is a richness that comes from being informed by a variety of sources and influences. “They will challenge your assumptions and help you grow as a person.”

Mellody finished off by challenging the audience to be brave, colour brave, “so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible.”

 

 

[For a growing list of exciting topics and stories relating to different aspects of Race, click here]

They ARE someone’s family.

Would you notice if they were yours?

Wow, heart tug video of the weekend…

 

 

Would i have done any better? is the question of the moment…

Do i look?

Do i engage?

Do i take the time to hear and share a story, or even a meal?

Not every time necessarily… but some time.

And at the very least do i at least acknowledge the person’ness of the person?

Wo!

 

Change of pants optional… [Extremely close moments of almost]

Wow, just caught this clip [or one like it] on the You of Tubes and it was such a difficult one to watch because again and again there are Too Close for Comfort moments being beamed out at you [my earphones are playing up at the moment so you may want to watch this with the sound down if in a public or work type space for obvious reasons]

If you think you are brave enough to make it through the whole thing, good luck

 

That was close!

What was the closest call you ever had?