A QUARTER COW AND MOTHER'S PEARLS

Ever shopped for a cow? I hadn't and didn't know where to start. But if I wanted to celebrate my ordination to the diaconate properly I needed a mountain of meat. 

In Soweto egg mayonnaise sandwiches were not going to crack it.

We had this amazing butcher shop a few doors away from the church where you could braai (barbecue) your meat at a fire in the yard. 

A typical buy and braai set up in Soweto

Because services in the township end when the Holy Spirit decides I would emerge ravenous after as long as three hours.  Across the road from St James was a small supply store where I'd pick up a couple of lovely fresh buns. Next door was a tavern that stocked my favourite red wine. They'd sell it to me by the glass which I'd carry with my buns to the butcher where I could buy fillet steak for a song.  

My mouth waters as I write this. Those lunches were to die for dolls! 

I learned later that all the surrounding shops knew when I had preached because the congregation would emerge at least half an hour earlier.

Who needs a mic?
Speaking of preaching, I am always amused when wealthier parishes panic if the sound system packs up. We had a huge congregation but no microphone. So the norm was to trot up and down the aisle as you preached at the top of your voice. 

If you don't have a mic you trot up and down the aisle to preach

It's a wonderful way of connecting. One thing I never had the courage to do was to start a chorus while I was expounding on the readings of the day. My rector, another who has since become a bishop, would do this with such aplomb. 

What I did learn to do was worship with my whole body. I didn't have a singing voice but oh the joy of dancing to those choruses! Many year later when I was serving a traditionally white parish I was touched when a parishioner shared  that she had prayed for me before the service - until she added, "that you will stand still during the hymns."

Numbers don't count But, back to my ordination and the after party.  I still couldn't pin my rector down on the number of people I needed to cater for. Silly me. The system is to do the best you can. If the food runs out that's life. 

There was no way I could afford a whole cow even though my favourite butcher gave me a good 'clergy' price. So we settled on a quarter cow and several boxes of whole chickens. The Mother's Union, who volunteered to do the cooking, also gave me a shopping list for side dishes like rice and three bean salad. 

Wonderful township food

The feast they produced was memorable. 

More importantly the township approach to catering taught me an invaluable lesson. So three extra people pitch for Christmas dinner. Bring in extra chairs from the garden and share. It's the company that counts. There were times during those years when  I felt as if I was witnessing the miracle of the feeding of the 5000. 

You can imagine how I cringed on one of our ordinands' training week-ends. Held at another Soweto parish, the deal was that we would all bring lunch and share. We whiteys duly arrived with our cooler boxes, serviettes and cutlery but there was huge resentment when the rector invited his Mothers Union to join us. Horrors they hadn't brought any food!! Several indignant ordinands shunned the hall and took their cooler boxes to a spot where they could eat without sharing.  

I was so ashamed but the miracle was that we all had ample lunch that day and the fellowship made the event special. 

In these circumstances it would have been easy to romanticise the whole Soweto thing but God had given me Archbishop Ndungane to work for. Among the gems of his sage advice was to insist on punctuality "there's no such thing as African time". Another was to always stay on the right side of the Mothers Union in the parish. Often a good translation for "It's not in our culture" was "I don't want to do that."

Spectacular on a small  budget
Another practical lesson was how even a relatively poor parish (60 percent unemployment) could stage a spectacular event. Typically, when the archbishop visited our parish for an AIDS service the huge parking lot was carpeted with our congregants' finest rugs. Everybody, including pensioner grannies caring for their orphaned grandchildren, contributed. It was a feast of note.

In that congregation there was no discussion about whether tithing should be calculated before or after tax and I often witnessed the power of the widow's mite. My years in that wonderful community underscored what the archbishop was telling the world as he campaigned for the cancellation of the debt owed by the by the most impoverished African countries to the World Bank.  

He also argued that South Africa’s foreign and domestic debt, since it was incurred under the apartheid regime, “should be declared odious and written off”. 

An interest treadmill

Although I had been a political journalist I was surprised to learn that Africa was on an interest treadmill. Original loans had been repaid several times over. In an era when international handouts to our continent were the norm, more money was streaming out to the developed world than was coming in.

At a grass roots level I was learning that people aren't poor because they are lazy and choose to be.

Ordination
My ordination date galloped closer, there were stoles and to be designed and clerical shirts to be tailored. Invitations to print and distribute (Okay, I'll admit I was still a bit of a kugel.) 

St Mary's Cathedral

Buses were hired to take my congregants to St Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg's city centre. Another was hired to transport my rather nervous white friends and family to the after party. They had to be convinced that they would emerge  from the township alive, their jewellery and handbags intact. (The effects of segregation were insidious and still are.)

Thank goodness those of us who were to be deaconed were placed in a conducted silent retreat at St Benedict's. I stepped off the merry-go-round into the oasis where I had first received my calling, where I was now a tertiary. It was a profound experience. 

I felt loved by God, loved by the nuns who I had grown close to, loved by my parish, my friends and my family. 

So often people who know I only really became a Christian at the age of 50 will comment on how I must have experienced happiness for the first time. Do they really think I was miserable until then? In fact I've been happy for most of my life. 

What I did experience at my ordination was unprecedented joy. Except for one small problem, I wore my mother's pearls for the service and, as we prostrated ourselves for the long litany, those damn beads really hurt - a touch of reality. 

Advice: Don't do this wearing a string of pearls!

PS: See my guest blog on TheologyMix 
http://theologymix.com/biblical-interpretation/its-time-for-christian-women-to-lean-in/

IT WAS THE TAX MAN NOT GOD

So there I was, in a process to discern whether God had called me into priesthood.  I was also putting loads of extra effort into my PR clients, driven by the conviction that Jesus had signalled that I would make a stack more money and be able to go into full time ministry. 

I would be 'Reverend Bountiful', fisher of men and women.

Oh, boy was I in for a shock.

I wasn't doing badly when I received my calling - nice house, a Merc, overseas holidays - but not enough to retire. Even if I could have lived on a stipend it didn't make actuarial sense for Church to employ people in their 50's  and then be responsible for them in their old age. Besides, I had a disabled son to support.

So why did I think I was called to full time ministry? You may remember that I'd felt called while meditating on the gospel story in which Jesus stands on the beach and sends the disciples to fish again after an unsuccessful night. They return with nets so full  that they can't even load the fish into the boats. Jesus then tells them that he will make them fishers of men.  

While I have no doubt that my priestly calling was in that meditation. I am just as certain of the dangers of taking the Bible too literally. 

There is real risk in reading the Scriptures as you would your  horoscope  in the daily newspaper. Somehow I'd heard Jesus promising me unprecedented financial success if I worked my butt off. 

But let's get back to the thread. 

Being an ordinand is no cake walk. One tends to shift from being a much pampered member of the congregation to the very bottom of the church hierarchical pile. It's like graduation from junior school to High School where you start at the bottom rung of the new ladder.

You have a living to earn and you have a new boss who expects you to work on week-ends. Your annual family holiday feels like a cardinal sin. Forget Lent. Forget Easter. Forget Christmas. That's like taking leave when there's annual stocktaking at work. 

You are desperate to be put forward for the discernment conference. This means trying to impress your parish clergy, the parish council, your bishop, your archdeacon the folk who run the discernment programme and God. (Probably in that order.)

In short, burn out looms. 

Women ordinands weep, much to the disgust of their rectors. 

Male ordinands see their doctors about stress symptoms.

Families make supportive noises but often feel neglected.

It's a war zone and I knew I had to work smarter at making my fortune so I pitched for a major government tender. Part of the process was to get a tax clearance certificate. 

'Ah!' said the grim man at the Receiver's office, 'We've been looking for you. You haven't paid VAT or tax for years.' 

My accountant, who handled all those matters, had paid himself instead of the Receiver. He'd dust-binned all warning correspondence so I didn't have a clue. He eventually went to jail but the backlog, the penalties and interest were humungous. 

 Like so many middle class South Africans our lifestyle had been financed by easily obtained credit. I was more than broke. I was insolvent.

That wasn't Jesus I'd heard from a beach. It was the tax man calling from his miserable cubicle.

This begged the question. What if my calling to priesthood had also been wishful thinking? If not, would the Church still have me? 

There was a meeting with the bishop and my former rector who was the bishop elect. They decided that I should stay in the ordinand's programme. 

Meanwhile I was still in my working class parish in a suburb that had seen better days. My rector had calmed down and I am still grateful for the training I got from him. Not that there was a great deal of love, it was more of an uneasy truce. 

As the bank reclaimed my home in Sandton there was another one of those God incidences I'm always so grateful for. Not far from my parish was a house that had been vandalised - no floors, not fittings, no windows, no doors. The bank that owned it was in despair. No one would buy it. 

Except me. 

I got it for a song which happened to be all I had. We boarded up the holes and, may God forgive me, for the first month we hijacked electricity from a street pole because we couldn't pay an electrician  or pay utility deposits. A neighbour put a long hose pipe over the fence. We boiled water in a kettle and bathed in our dogs' zinc bath. 

Sounds awful doesn't it?  In a strange way it was fun.  I've always loved to build and I shop in hardware stores the way other women shop for clothes. Every little bit of effort, every light switch, every floor tile had a disproportionate impact on our new home. It was a blank canvas. I found labourers who were used to being dropped off each day by their builder bosses and getting on with the job. 

I couldn't pay much but put them in charge of themselves. Between us we cooked basic food every day. Often the workers would sleep on the floor in an unfinished room. 

I'd picked up an old bath and basin and a hob at a pawn shop. Life was getting better by the day. Looking back I realise that there was one big bonus. My life had been stripped to the bare bones of reality and I've never felt as close to God.

Of course there were times when I missed my false nails. Hair tints and highlights were a distant memory. As were quite a few friends who did not want to venture into my low class suburb.

The house took shape, I had faithful clients.With no funds to socialise I was whipping through a theology diploma. There was food on the table, the house was becoming more than comfortable. 

And I was still an ordinand.

It was on one of our training  week ends in Soweto that I realised that I didn't know enough about the majority of Anglicans in our diocese. I asked the bishop to transfer me to a black parish.

I must explain that even today, 21 years after our first democratic elections, few white South Africans have set foot in a township. You cant blame them. Apartheid wasn't just about racism is was also about spatial segregation. 

The only township pictures we ever saw prior to 1994 were of violence and unrest. Most whites still genuinely believe that to go into a black area is to risk your life or , at the very least to be hi-jacked. 

But Soweto, home to a third of Johannesburg's population, is a mix of suburbs good and bad. 

The diocese gave me a letter giving me permission to work at St James in Diepkloof Ext 3. There were caveats. It would be for six months only and on condition the rector would have me.

The job interview is a whole other story. Watch this space.

  
Listen to Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak about prayer from his hospital bed (the family is hoping he will be discharged soon)  The link is ow.ly/RMCnd

SEE COMMENT BUTTON BELOW

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.