A JACK- IN-THE-BOX GOD

The Open Door Retreat was drawing to a close. The two-hour weekly sessions, the commitment to 15 minutes of personal reflective prayer each day and the sharing of what we had experienced was a mind blowing experience. Over nine weeks I had interacted with my parish leadership and effectively been drawn into robust Anglican life. (A polite way of saying we didn’t agree politically, theologically, on what was right, what was wrong or the creative value of Freddy Mercury’s music.) 

The two leaders - my Spiritual Director and my rector – and we seven participants had bonded in a profound way.   It involved absolute trust and was pretty miraculous because we were such different personalities. I remember one woman saying she’d been told as a small child that Jesus was always sitting on her shoulder and she still sensed him there. One of the men shared how inadequate he’d felt most of his life. Yet another, believed he had the gift of healing the sick.

None of them seemed perturbed that I really didn’t care whether Mary was a Virgin or that I really hoped Jesus and Mary Magdalene had had a relationship. (I wanted him to be fully human)   

 

The ‘homework’ for the last week was to bring something that reflected what we’d gained from the retreat.  Now, with all the balls I was juggling at home, at work and at church, I’d invariably left my ‘show and tell’ homework to the last minute. I knew from previous weeks how creative the others would be. They would use flowers from their gardens, favourite paintings, music, a candle-lit tableaux and icons.  But I was in a different space. Sandton City had been my Cathedral for decades.  Besides, I was born to shop.

So I gave myself a day off from the agency and set of for South Africa’s most famous mall. There had to be something in that consumer paradise that would reflect what I had gained and how momentous it had been. 

By 4pm I’d literally shopped ‘til I dropped but I’d found nothing I could take to the rectory that evening. A coffee break brought true meaning to the term ‘arrow prayers’ – the kind of praying you do as you drive through a speed trap. I then calmed down to a panic and decided to treat the project as strategically as I would any corporate communication campaign.

What had been the prime objective in attending the retreat? To better understand God. Against that backdrop how would I brand the Creator? It came in a flash. My understanding of God, which already included the Holy Spirit and was slowly assimilating Jesus, was that God couldn’t be packaged. Mine was consistently proving to be a God of surprises, revealed in unexpected ways.  

That was it! I needed, one of those toy boxes that a figure popped out of – a Jack-in-the-box.  Not so easy.

At a toy shop the assistant explained that the line had been discontinued. When I explained what I was wanting to illustrate she suggested a pop out children’s book rigged with elastic bands from which images tumbled when you opened the covers.  I was convinced.

That evening my presentation seemed to go well. Far more importantly I had come to understand that what I loved best was how God had tumbled, helter skelter, into my life. 

Far from packaging my spirituality into an Anglican box that retreat had set me free.

Two huge God-incidences in the early part of my spiritual journey were to give me an irreverent Spiritual Director with a sense of humour and a rector who was a superb teacher. In fact I’m pretty sure that if he hadn’t ended up as a bishop he would eventually have headed up a theological college.

Bearing in mind that I had never read the bible, I signed on for two evening classes he used to give in the church hall. One on the Old Testament and the other on the New Testament. 

I was on yet another fascinating journey. One that involved a great deal of scriptural unpacking. 

NEVER CONFUSE CHURCH WITH GOD

So there I was, hurtling along my somewhat unusual spiritual journey. As I wrestled with concepts like unconditional grace and a Hollywood heaven (I’m still pondering that one) I was also learning not to romanticise the Church.

                                                     I'm still not certain what heaven is

Time was an issue. I was juggling a busy PR practice, participating in a nine-week Open Door Retreat, seeing my Spiritual Director, attending political meetings and keeping half an eye out for a decent man in my life. (It didn’t help that the sexiest guy in the choir was gay.)

Meanwhile, it was beginning to dawn on my caring friends that my ‘passing phase’ wasn’t as fleeting as they’d expected it to be. Their warnings not to give the church all my money were becoming more forceful. A reasonable concern since their only information about religion tended to be news items about TV evangelists with feet of clay. 

They were just being protective because my business was doing pretty well – 20 employees and clients that included the Lesotho Government. I was driving my fourth Merc and holidaying overseas every year. Those were what I now refer to as the ‘RODs’ (rich old days). 

Looking back, one of the biggest God-incidences was that retreat.

Probably because it was the first to be conducted at my parish the other six participants were all part of its leadership – lay ministers and council members.

A key element of any Open Door retreat is that each week you share your thoughts, angsts and experiences in absolute trust – a bit like a spiritual alcoholics anonymous. 

The level of honesty and self-appraisal was impressive. Surprise, surprise, those church heavies also had crises of faith. They were, by their own admission, imperfect at best. 

It was a wake-up call. Church wasn’t an exclusive club for saints, mostly just people trying their best.

At another level, Carl Jung’s theory of a human collective unconscious was working for me. It made belief in God a lot easier and helped me understand the importance of traditions and how symbols can trigger worship.

I was beginning to appreciate that seeking God is a never ending journey, that religion is not the destination. It’s a vehicle. And, just as some people are into Mercs and others give their Toyota’s names, so there are different religious strokes for different folks. 

Anglicanism was beginning to work for me. A nice mix of the high and hazy and less formal worship. Instead of being asked to shelve my brain I was encouraged to approach the bible with a healthy dose of suspicion.

Of course by then reality was kicking in. I was learning how people are hurt by the Church and how very human priests are. There was more. During the retreat coffee break I listened to in-house concerns about issues that ranged from rampant male chauvinism, particularly among priests, to whether tithing should come before or after tax. 

It was the beginnings of my understanding that one should never confuse the people-driven Church with God. 

WERE THEIR KIDS DEAD OR ALIVE?

I’m going to cheat and jump ahead to my first June 16 in Soweto – the anniversary of a march by thousands of school children to protest against the introduction of Afrikaans as a teaching medium. That fateful day in 1976 when Hector Pietersen was the first to be fatally wounded as police lobbed tear gas, set dogs on the children and then fired at them.

The Madiba jive
In 2001, I was training for priesthood at St James Diepkloof and having a ball. My ‘black’ parish had made me so incredibly welcome that I would often forget my ‘whiteness’. I was learning to sing choruses (very badly) and developing my own version of the Madiba jive.

I loved Sundays in the township. After the morning service I could cross the road, pick up a couple of buns, head for the nearby butchery to collect a piece of steak and cook it on the fire outside. The tavern next door had taken to keeping a good red wine for me. I was getting to know the community. I was making friends I still have today.

Because I was ‘entering the church’ I’d had to give up my ANC membership card and resign from my branch committee but I still felt I had decent political cred. What an idiot! It took a wonderful man, Lekgau Mathabathe, to gently teach me two important lessons.

A retired headmaster of the famous Morris Isaacson High School, Ntate Mathabathe was a hero. He’d unequivocally rejected government’s instruction to teach in Afrikaans. He had also played a crucial role in providing direction and support to students, parents and the community before during and after the protest.

He’d risked his life and been detained. He also knew a great deal about jazz.

As a former political journalist I had written much about what we called ‘the 76 riots’ – the outcomes, the implications. Now I was in a parish close to where major events had unfolded. Many of my parishioners had been involved. My political genes were in overdrive.

Lessons
The first life lesson came when I complained to Ntate Mathabathe that our youngsters seemed not to take our ‘Struggle’ holidays seriously enough. His gentle response was that perhaps it was what true liberation was all about – a life in which our children weren’t burdened by the oppression their parents had lived under.

My second lesson came as I sat with him and some of our parish grandmothers discussing the awful June 16 events. Looking back I’m not sure our little gathering near the tea urn in the church hall was as coincidental as it seemed at the time. The old man knew I needed educating.

Mothers' heartache
Several of the women had been domestic helpers back in 1976 and they shared their stories. It was stuff I’d known but hardly thought about in my cocoon of white middle class privilege.



In those days ‘the girl’, as even grandmothers were referred to, lived in. Her accommodation in the back yard would have been just big enough to hold a single bed, a chair, a cupboard and a side table. If she was lucky there was hot water in the small adjoining toilet/shower.

Invariably she was allowed no visitors in the evenings, especially not by the man in her life. She started at about 6.30am and finished when the supper dishes were washed.

Her day off was Thursday, usually after she’d finished making the beds and washing the breakfast dishes. If she worked in the leafy northern suburbs of Joburg it would take an hour or more to reach her own home in the location. So there wasn’t much time to attend to it and her family in what was left of the day.

There were no cell phones and few were allowed to use their employer’s landline. TV, introduced in January 1976, was in its fledgling stage. News, always heavily censored, tended to travel via radio and over backyard fences.

On Wednesday June 16, 1976, the first clashes between police and children happened at about 8am. An hour later 10 000 pupils had converged on Orlando West High School. Many years later witnesses would speak of the township being 'on fire'.

South African history had been irrevocably set on a new trajectory.

As news of the march slowly filtered through to the leafy suburbs. Frantic mothers didn’t know if their kids were dead or alive. But there were houses to clean, meals to be cooked, washing to be done, dogs to be fed.

Geographically, socially and politically, life in their employer’s homes was a world apart from the townships. Even the slightest indication of interest in struggle politics meant, at best the loss of much needed employment. Moreover, whites were often as fearful of the regime as blacks were so a domestic helper with a child in the march could be reported to the security police. The few who were given compassionate time off couldn’t get into Soweto.

It was awful even for mothers who were in the townships. The unrest spread. When Mrs Masenya of Alexandra Township, east of Sandton, went to look for her children she was shot in the back by the police whilst crossing an empty stand.

As the St James women told me of the agony they’d gone through - the desperate furtive phone calls, the fearful speculation over fences not being allowed to rush home – they wept, so did I. It was as much for myself as for them.

Despite coming from a family that discussed politics and railed against apartheid at the breakfast table, I had never considered the diabolic effect that June 16 had had on domestic helpers caught up in my world. It was the beginnings of my understanding of why my black friends used ‘white liberal’ as a derogatory term.

A true benchmark
That day next to the tea urn I finally understood that the measure of oppression and political violence must not just be about bullets, body counts and political analytics. A mother’s heartache is among the truer benchmarks.

The women also told of how, despite the township being a cauldron of unrest and the powerful government response, Ntate Mathabathe had risked his life by going to the hospital and the morgue to identify dead and injured kids. It was he who gave them the news all South Africans were being deprived of by an inhumane system.

I will always be grateful for the sharing that day.

Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox, June 16, now called Youth Day, always affects me and I pray that I will never stop learning.  

SORRY HELL’S ANGELS BUT….

 Okay, so Alpha ended with me barely noticing. I was hurtling towards a destination I wasn’t sure I wanted to arrive at. After all, I was happy, successful and single. Why rock the boat?

But curiosity killed the cat. It can also change your life.

By the time Alpha ended I’d recovered from the shock of turning 50. The crematorium was fading into the distance. The urgency for taking out a heavenly insurance policy was fading.

At least at this stage I knew what I didn’t want. Topping the list was a chocolate-box Jesus looking like an Englishman in a nativity play. The model for soap powder ads. The ultra-white version who still holds sway in many township churches. (Tell some folk the historic Jesus had an olive skin as well as a prominent nose and they cringeJ.)

Fortunately my avid reading revealed a Jesus I was warming to.  I liked the man who knew the difference between quality and lousy wine. (Remember I was in PR, that first miracle was invaluable branding.) I was impressed by a guy who spoke truth to power, got seriously irritated, wept and attended dinner parties. I loved that he ignored class and cultural differences. 

Mind you, I wasn’t ready to go the ‘Jesus on a Harley’ route – it was only when I became chaplain to a bike club many years later that that image could work.

With Alpha behind me I finally hit the main road to Damascus.

At that time my spiritual director and her husband launched the first Open Door Retreat at the parish and invited me to participate. I’d got used to giving up one evening a week for Alpha so I reasoned ‘what the hell’ and signed on. 

Introduced to South Africa by Father Andrew, a CR monk, the retreats were designed for people too busy to actually take time out at a retreat house or with a religious community. They are based  on the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius  and  the format is very much about finding God in the hurly burly and realities of your own life. Praying as one can, not as one can’t.

For me it turned out to be much praying in the bath and not worrying about what Jesus could see.

Open Door groups range between 12 and seven and the retreat runs for nine consecutive weeks. You are given 15 minute daily spiritual exercise. For example, in the first week we were asked to take special notice of God’s loving creation. While the others took walks, gardened and made trips out of town, I invested in a pair of binoculars and checked out the large tree at the bottom of my garden – wine glass on hand. 

It worked for me. As did experiencing religion/spirituality within a real life context. It says something that of our group of seven 3 became  priests (including me!)

This brings me to something I come across quite a lot. The perception that God needs to be approached like an eastern potentate - crawling on our knees, beating our breasts. An extrovert bishop once shared with me how he felt far holier at a school assembly of 1000 boys than in solitude. I can identify. Felt it at a U2 concert in Cape Town.

Of course it’s imperative to make space and time for prayer and self-audits. As Dag Hammerskjold, former UN Secretary-General, pointed out, ‘an un-reflected life is a wasted life.’  But time is a precious commodity which makes the gym, the loo and your local coffee shop all okay. Whatever rocks your boat.

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