Bournagain

It’s not that often that I get really frustrated, but this week dealing with the public service just about sent me into orbit. I needed to register a car – should have been a simple enough procedure. My expectations have been honed after 10 years of playing “the France game”. I know the rules, and not a few little techniques to help you get ahead a few squares. I know that there are a number of absolutes that cannot be avoided: such as the fact that the number of supporting documents your application is missing is inversely proportional to the amount of time you spend studying the list. There is ALWAYS at least one missing. The other absolute is that deciding when to turn up to hand in your application is rather like Russian roulette – you seem to have about one chance in five that the service will be closed without any forewarning on the day you take time off work, pay for a carpark (miles away) and show up. There is an even higher likelihood that the day before the mysterious closure it will be totally impossible to connect with a person on the telephone who is able to tell you the opening hours for the week when you sensibly phone ahead to make sure you don’t get caught out. I know how it works – and I know that there is absolutely no point getting frustrated, it’s just the way it is.

But my stoicism seemed to have left me when I most needed it this week. I had prepared everything carefully, went into town by car because I had another appointment afterward (always a bad idea), found an expensive carpark, and walked to the Prefecture. The usual building was still closed for renovations (which seem to have been going on so long I foolishly thought they must have finished by now…). So I retraced my steps and wandered around looking for the temporary shelter of our local outpost of the Republic. I went in, obediently took a ticket, looked up at the screen and discovered that my number was not the radar – not even on the far distant horizon. So I hunkered down thinking I would get a bit of work done on my smart phone. Smart phones are very useful insofar as their owners are smart enough to have charged them up before leaving home, which sadly was not the case that day.

So I sat, surveying the crowded room and the curious dance of people craning their necks, eyes fixed on the numbers flashing on the screen, until all of a sudden someone bolts up and hurries through a dark passageway into the unknown. Gradually the numbers began resembling my own, until my own bingo moment came a full one and a half hours later. I sat down at my booth, handed over my dossier which had been checked and rechecked for the required papers. Exactly 37 seconds later my little pile was handed back to me, incomplete. I had forgotten to enclose a photocopy of my wife’s ID card. My head nearly hit the desk … Il y a TOUJOURS quelque chose qui manque! Without the slightest sympathy I was informed that it was impossible for me to leave the application and just drop off the wretched photocopy later on. I would have to come back and go through the whole rigmarole again.

As I stomped back to my car my mind was full of the lamentations of the righteously indignant. I was internally shaking my fist at the universe – it just seemed so inhumane, that we are imprisoned in the web of a faceless, robotic, all-imposing administration and can’t get out. It was as if my whole life was being reduced to a pile of paper destined for the shredder. It was just so wrong, yada yada yada.

I was still steaming as I was driving through our neighbourhood later in the afternoon, when I saw a sight that put everything in perspective. As I turned the corner a woman raised her head and looked straight at me. As I drove past in my nice new car (the reason for the afore-mentioned visit to the Prefecture) I just had the time to notice that she was a Rom, with a huge blue plastic jerry-can at her feet, struggling to fill it at a fire hydrant. She would then have to lug her precious water several hundred metres back to the camp where she lives in a caravan, probably with 4 or 5 children, in the former carpark of an abandoned warehouse. This place is reputed as an eyesore, rubbish and graffitti everywhere – a piece of land that has been tied up in some legal dispute for at least 10 years, and left to go to ruin.

I know that living this way is part of their culture and identity, and that pity is an emotion that can be patronising. These people live off the grid, and it is sometimes tempting to think how nice it would be to avoid the endless paperwork required to live legally in this country.

But I couldn’t help comparing my life with the life of this woman, thinking of her daily existence (subsistence?) and I heard a still small voice speak to my heart: Have you any right to be angry?

Today was a great reminder of how much you miss when you don’t take the time to appreciate the beauty of your surroundings.

On the one hand, France has an absolutely fantastic road and rail network. The high speed trains get you to your destination quicker than flying if you count the time messing around in airports; the autoroute system covers the whole country and although the tolls are expensive the roads are fantastic – everything is designed for speed.

But I normally dread the boredom of the drive to and from Paris – 4 and a half hours of monotony, and in addition to the high cost of petrol you feel like you’re shelling out megabucks for the tolls.

Today, however, was a completely different experience. I picked up some friends from the airport in Paris, and as we weren’t in a hurry, we decided to take the slower national roads instead of the autoroute. It added two hours to the trip, but it was so worth it. Ten years I have lived here but often miss the beauty of this country because I’m in too much of a hurry. For my friends it is their very first visit to France, and their exuberant appreciation of the sights was infectious. I so enjoyed drinking in the beauty of the rolling countryside, snow-dusted fields, long straight stretches of tree-lined roads, picturesque villages, massive country mansions in various stages of repair or disrepair, and the contrast in architecture as you pass from one region to another. Admittedly the gorgeous weather helped, but a rainy day would not have done much to spoil the effect.

Is it really worth saving two hours but missing the sights we saw today? – scenes that make you delight in the abundant variety of God’s creation on one hand, and that remind you of that conviction that there is hope for humanity after all.

Spent all day moving house today. Not my own place – we’re getting a house ready for some co-workers arriving to work with us in a few days. Finding the place was a bit stressful, but once we had it the big question was how to furnish it.

A young friend who doesn’t have a lot of work on at the moment offered to help us, and as we were driving around picking up bits and pieces he made a very wise observation. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be part of a community where whenever somebody needed to set up a new home, everybody rallied around to help; if people would pool their resources, pulling little-used items out of their cellars and garages, and bring them over to help furnish the new house. What if it became a real community effort – that way a house could be furnished very cheaply, the occupants would be all set up in a short time, and people could enjoy getting rid of unnecessary stuff.

Well, I don’t remember if he said all that exactly, but it reflects very well what we experienced today. We drove around picking up stuff from people’s garages, and a load of stuff from some friends moving countries, and apart from a couple of items, we managed to furnish the whole house for under 400€. Not to mention my friend who freely gave up his day to help us get it done. With this kind of giving and receiving – everybody gets blessed. That’s how the kingdom economy works.

Is it a significant event when in a country of 64 million people, 18,000 marchers descend on the capital to stand up for a cause they believe in? Or 25,000 marchers? Or 3,500? These are the three

estimations I have seen for a march that took place in Paris last weekend – the first two are according to the organisers, the 3rd according to the police. Why such a huge variation? Either the organisers have grossly exaggerated, or the police have some specific reason for underestimating. Such a discrepancy couldn’t just be a mistake.
The media certainly didn’t think it was significant. In any case, the two major newspapers that I peruse daily didn’t even mention it. If the march had been protesting over redundancies in the public sector, changes in retirement conditions, or the famous pouvoir d’achat (buying power), it would have been all over the news. Instead it was over what the marchers consider to be a human tragedy that surpasses the one that was to explode into the world’s media two days later – that of Haiti.

The march concerned what a friend of mine who blogged the event calls “the calamity of abortion”. Marchers came from all over France, accompanied by delegations from several other European countries, to participate in an event called En marche pour la vie (marching for life). The object was not only to honour the 7 million lives that have been snuffed out in France since 1975, but also the millions of women who have been physically, psychologically and spiritually damaged through the process, and the many marriages and relationships that have been dislocated as a result.

This was not the first such march but the sixth, and numbers have been steadily growing. This year there were interesting developments. Firstly there is a growing number of medical personnel demanding that a conscience clause be in included in the relevant legislation allowing doctors to refuse to perform abortions. And secondly was the presence of a number of marchers representing left-wing political organisations – revealing that opposition to the IVG (intérruption volontaire de grossesse – the very euphemistic technical term for abortion – “voluntary interruption of pregnancy”), is not simply the domain of the political right, nor is just it an obscure notion of the religious fringe.

If you read French you can head over to my friend’s article. Otherwise here’s a brief snippet from his conclusion:

There is no question of us remaining silent. The witness of women who have been through it prohibits us. The silent cries of embryos killed in their mothers’ wombs prohibits us. Our conscience reproaches us…We all know about it! Before becoming who we are, we also were embryos! Why should today’s embryos have less right to life than those of yesterday? Let us help women in distress! Let’s invest without counting the cost to support them! But let us refuse the diabolical short-term easy solution… which in the long-term creates nothing but difficulties.

Credit to Onlyphotos.org for the photo.

I have got so much out of reading other people’s blogs over the years (see my list of bloggy heroes in the sidebar), but my own has suffered from a bout of indentity crisis to the point where it went into hibernation.

It was partly due to the challenge of living as a person of faith in a culture where everybody assumes that faith is to be completely restricted to the private sphere of life. This creates somewhat of a dilemma if your life’s goal is to follow Jesus who said not to hide your light under a bowl, but to put it on a stand so everyone in the house can see it – how can you reconcile keeping faith private with letting the world know what makes you tick?

For my work I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and it has become increasingly obvious to me that the only way to completely protect your privacy on the Internet is not to use it at all. Anything you put up there is available for the whole world to see. This was brought home to me when I was kicked out of a local community centre where I was running an activity. The director had been alerted to the fact that a dangerous cult leader had infiltrated their centre and was trying to brainwash their members. Some well-intentioned officer of the French religious police (the anti-sect brigade) had followed a rabbit trail from a press article about me, to my blog (via Google), to the mission organisation I am part of, and discovered that I was a threat to the well-being of all the patrons of the community centre. The humour of the fact that it was the yoga instructor that showed me the door was definitely not lost on me. Yoga, sophrology, tarot reading, doing spooky things with magnets were all kosher, but faith in Jesus of Nazareth was definitely not – not that I had even mentioned anything about my faith by that point.

This experience was partly what lead to my bloggy identity crisis – I wasn’t sure how much I should be putting out there for general consumption, and it was easier just to give up writing altogether. The kind of behaviour I witnessed at this community centre might seem extreme – and I hasten to add that many of my non-believing friends also found it very peculiar. However, it is a completely logical application of the assumption that faith should be private – which incidentally was never the intention of the separation of church and state. La laïcité – that untranslatable concept which is a foundational value of the French Republic – should be about protecting French citizens who adhere to a minority faith from being disadvantaged, protecting us from having religious beliefs imposed upon us, and allowing free exchange and debate on the subject of religion. Instead it has become an innoculation against any faith other than the majority faith of the culture, which is difficult to name, but can be expressed in a series of -isms (individualism, materialism, existentialism, evolutionism, republicanism à la française, laïcisme etc.)

But why should that stop me from blogging about things that are important to me? If somebody reads something on my blog that s/he finds offensive, the little red circle (for Mac users) or the little red ‘x’ (for the unconverted) is only one click away. I now see blogging as one way of being a whole person – not talking psycho-babble here – I mean that there is a huge temptation to modify your words and actions to suit the circles you are moving in. I have a tendency to be much more open about my experiences in God with those who share the same faith as me, than with those who don’t. This is normal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its good. I use religious jargon when speaking with other Christians, which I would not use when talking with work colleagues, for example. This is part of “hiding my light under a bowl” because the language we use can exclude people. Being whole is about being the same person whoever you are with, which is why blogging is such a good discipline, because it makes you think about how you communicate. Everything I put up here I have to be willing for people from all the different spheres of my life to read (well, theoretically at least – the odds of people finding my blog amongst the 36 squillion blogs out there are almost as great as the odds that the universe evolved from nothing).

All that to say to anyone who stumbles onto my blog that I’m back (Hi Mum), with a spruced-up blog theme, and occasional postings where I will think out loud about living in France, faith, family and mission, not necessarily in that order, with lots of unfinished thoughts, digressions, and useful links to people I admire.

Had a fascinating session with one of my students yesterday – a doctor. We were discussing a podcast on advances in medical research, and he was explaining how some of the most important discoveries in medicine have been accidental. He is sceptical about the idea that to that advances in medical research are held up by lack of funding, transdisciplinary studies, or simply the lack of a culture of research in the surgical area (the main arguments of the podcast). He also feels that medical breakthroughs are not discovered at conferences, colloquiums, or formal meetings to discuss research – gatherings which, in his experience, frequently degenerate into arguments between two parties, neither of which has the answers.

Apparently it is far from uncommon for major medical breakthroughs to be the result of failed experiments – “failed” in the sense that they contradicted the hypothesis that led to the experiment. Sometimes these “failures” can unlock secrets in areas completely unrelated to the object of the research. My client gave the example of how an experiment to change the colour of petunia plants led to a breakthrough in the treatement of cancer. He maintains that the secret of being a good scientist is to not throw out the results of “failed” experiments, but to study the failures in an attempt to understand why the experiment produced such results.

I loved the idea that major breakthroughs can be discovered by accident, unplanned and unexpected. “It’s not about concentrating the means of power and money, but about just letting the guy get on with the research he wants to do”, said my client. I understood that it’s about setting capable people free to follow their hunches and instincts, and waiting to see what might come up. This goes along with another concept I have come across lately – they idea that we are moving from an information age into an inspiration age. The basic idea as I have understood it is that the vast amounts of information we are currently swimming in will expand beyond our capacity to sort through, and knowledge of information will no longer be a realistic basis for intelligence. The real “geniuses” of the future will not be those who have vast knowledge, but rather those who have learnt to tap into an intelligence that is higher than their own, into inspiration. Jesus understood this when he explained “he did nothing on his own, but only that which he saw his Father doing”.

My student (seems odd to be calling a medical expert “my student”) also spoke about his fondness for the application of chaos theory to a variety of fields, not just the medical (a theory originally pioneered by the French). I’m not very familiar with this theory, other than the fact it sounds like something that would help my wife understand the state of my desk (or under the bed, for that matter). It sounds like fun, though – chaos is all around us, and like the untidy reverse side of a tapestry, conceals beauty and order which would astound us if we could just apprehend it.

I put “house church” in inverted commas as we are still not sure what to officially call this gathering we have weekly – not having a name doesn’ t seem to have been detrimental up till now so we’re going with the flow.

Tonight was a meeting just as I like them. We all arrived a bit late, and everything was a bit disorganised. We discovered nobody had eaten but the soup we had made for dinner just stretched as each person turned up and joined us at the table – not that this had been planned. Had a great time just sharing news around a bowl of soup – catching up on some issues people in the group are facing related to their homes, their jobs etc. – things that we had already been praying about.

We then moved to the comfortable seats and opened the Scriptures where we had left off last time (we’re in Revelation at the moment), and although nobody had had the time to prepare a “study” as such, we drew out all kinds of insights which led into some very worthwhile learning. I think we could have all gone on much longer, but we try to respect the one and a half hours we agreed on – seeing that we meet weekly, and some have to get up early to work.

One great story we heard tonight was about an original way of starting a church. The parents of one of our house-groupies started a house church, and the way the group really took off was when they decided to have baptisms in their garden and invite all the neighbours. Many of the onlookers were that surprised to meet Christians so ingenious as to have a baptism in their garden that they asked all kinds of questions, and this process morphed into an Alpha Course which now has many of them making definite steps toward faith. This is FRANCE, folks – not India, Guatemala, or some other place where you just need to put a church sign up and they get a crowd. Who says that people aren’t interested in the gospel in “post-Christian” Europe?

Complete change of subject: this poor blog suffered from such neglect for such a long time – I hadn’t updated Wordpress for ages, and when I finally did I lost all the bells and whistles in the sidebars. So we’re going for a kind of pared down, minimalist look until I get a moment to fix it.

Since news the calamity in Port au Prince began filtering in nearly a week ago I have had times where it has been difficult to keep focused on things demanding my attention. It’s not the first time an earthquake has wrought destruction in a part of the world already woefully ill-equipped to deal with catastrophes. It probably won’t be the quake that produced the most fatalities in my lifetime either. However, this one is affecting me more than most.

For one thing I think it is the first time I have been aware of my children really understanding the extent of the disaster. Previous catastrophes haven’t affected them the way this one has – our 8-year old frequently talks about Haiti; without being prompted prayers for the Haitian people are offered up at mealtimes. It helps that Haiti already had a place in their consciousness. We have a Haitian friend in our church, and had (coincidentally?) begun supporting a work amongst Haitian orphans living in the Dominican Republic not long ago. It’s not that we had any particular concern for the Haitian people more than any other, but simply a belief in our Haitian friend who has taken up this cause, and wanting to support him. We agreed as a family that we would eat just rice for dinner on Mondays (when we remember), and give the money we save for this project.

So when the earthquake hit the children already had that connection. Not having TV they have been spared from a lot of the images – not that I am against children being exposed to the suffering of their fellow human beings per se. But images of suffering are so ubiquitous that it is easy to become blasé about them, and I haven’t noticed our children needing the reinforcement of pictures to understand the seriousness of what has happened. I can’t get over the extent of the damage though. It is so difficult to envisage an entire city leveled, and I keep imagining what it would be like to live there, and the overwhelming sense of not having any idea where to even begin putting life back together again.

And then you start thinking, why Haiti? I don’t mean in the sense “how could God let this happen”, because this is a question that doesn’t usually occur to me. I don’t blame God for natural disasters. I ask the question in the sense, why Haiti instead of, say, France? Are we more deserving than Haitians, that we live in such relative comfort, in secure homes, with reliable incomes? How do we get off scot free? And what if disaster did strike? Would we know what to do? Not just in terms of having enough tins of food stashed away to ride out a disaster, but would we have the emotional and psychological framework in place to be able to not only to get ourselves through it, but to be a beacon hope to those around us in the midst of it. If my house fell down, would I blame God? Would I shake my fist at him? Would I dissolve into a puddle of anxiety and hopelessness? Or would I have the necessary insight to realise that it’s only a house, and that life is more than the sum of my possessions, and get on with the job of helping my neighbour dig out his relatives?

If nothing else, the images of Port au Prince put many of my petty concerns in perspective, and is a great reminder of how ephemeral are our days.

You’d think that after 9 years of working in the domain, I would have a better grasp on the question “what is mission”? But if the Christian life is about transformation and pilgrimage, it stands to reason that lifelong learning is part of the deal, so I suppose it’s no surprise that our views change as our understanding grows. I have been increasingly uneasy with a vision that places the simple “conversion of souls” at the centre of the enterprise. Before the stones start flying let me say that I’m not suggesting that this is unimportant, but rather that it is not the centre. This is where I have found Newbigin’s writings so very helpful:

It is impossible to stress too strongly that the beginning of mission is not an action of ours, but the presence of a new reality, the presence of the Spirit of God in power [...] The great missionary proclamations in Acts are not given on the unilateral initiative of the apostles but in response to questions asked by others, questions prompted by the presence of something which calls for explanation [...] Where the Church is faithful to its Lord, there the powers of the kingdom are present and people begin to ask the question to which the gospel is the answer. And that, I suppose, is why the letters of St. Paul contain so many exhortations to faithfulness but no exhortations to be active in mission. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

This is from a man who spent most of his career as a missionary in India. It almost sounds heretical. He also makes the point that the end of the enterprise is not the successful conclusion of our projects, but the coming of Christ to reign. Jesus’ statement, “Where I am, there shall my servant be” is central here. Where is Jesus? At the frontier of light and darkness, where the acted out good news of the kingdom is pushing back the powers of evil, whatever form they may take. If we want to be with Jesus, that’s where we need to be.

All around me I see projects. When our projects succeed, we feel good. When they fail, we sink into existential crisis. Our whole reason for being seems to be predicated on our projects. This is because we see the Church as the source and agent of God’s coming kingdom, which is not so very far from the imperialism of medieval Christendom. The Church is not the source, but the sign and witness. It is here that the reality of the kingdom begins to break through in a visible way.

Mission is an acted out doxology. That is its deepest secret. Its purpose is that God may be glorified.

So why aren’t more people in our culture looking a the Church and asking questions?

Okay, so I know I’ve been silent for months. This blog has been suffering from a terrible lack of attention. But I just had to share this with you, from one of my favourite authors at the moment.

Faith enables us to be at the same time realistic and hopeful. We can be realistic, knowing that no human project can eliminate the powers of darkness as they operate in human life. This realism delivers us from the utopian fanaticisms which have condemned millions of people to misery and death in the cause of an imagined future. But at the same time we can be hopeful, acting hopefully in apparently hopeless situations, not dreaming of an absolute perfection on this side of death, but doing resolutely that relative good which is possible now, doing it as an offering to the Lord who is able to take it and keep it for the perfect kingdom which is promised. In this sense [...] our actions in the public life of the world are acted prayers for the kingdom. They do not themselves lead directly to the kingdom. They are acted prayers for its coming and as such they act as signs of its reality and so enable others to act in hope.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

It’s such a shame this guy isn’t better known. What I love here is the refusal to escape into a pessimism which sees the world “going to hell in a handcart”, which leads some to retreat into a kind of “lifeboat” Christianity which refuses to engage with the world other than trying to pull a few drowning people into the boat. But at the same time there is no room for living in denial, as if heaven was already here. Yes the world is profoundly sick, and yes at this point in time we can’t actually bring ultimate positive change through our actions. But, we can rest assured that our actions are not wasted. Change is coming! It is not our actions that will bring it about, but our acts do have an important prophetic role in pointing people toward the glorious reality that is coming. I also really like the idea of viewing our actions as a form of prayer. No room for passivity here.