Challenging Violence II

These weekly bulletin inserts are offered as a resource to individuals and parishes during the five weeks in Lent and on Palm Sunday and Easter Day 2013. These were created in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December in an effort to help all of us challenge violence in our world, our society, our Church, our homes, and ourselves. The weekly questions in each bulletin insert are posted for online conversation here at www.ctmissionconnect.org

Readings II

Thoughts II:


(1) “I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.” ― Albert Einstein “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

(2) From Sabbaths (2005) By Wendell Berry

I.
I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.

I have no love
except it come from Thee.

Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.

II.
They gather like an ancestry
in the centuries behind us:
the killed by violence, the dead
in war, the “acceptable losses” —
killed by custom in self-defense,
by way of correction, as revenge,
for love of God, for the glory
of the world, for peace; killed
for pride, lust, envy, anger,
covetousness, gluttony, sloth,
and fun. The strewn carcasses
cease to feed even the flies,
the stench passes from them,
the earth folds in the bones
like salt in a batter.

And we have learned
nothing. “Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you” —
it goes on regardless, reasonably:
the always uncompleted
symmetry of just reprisal,
the angry word, the boast
of superior righteousness,
hate in Christ’s name,
scorn for the dead, lies
for the honor of the nation,
centuries bloodied and dismembered
for ideas, for ideals,
for the love of God!

(3) (there have been 2,318 gun deaths since Sandy Hook)

In a situation where human life seems dirt cheap, with people being killed as easily as one swats a fly, we must proclaim that people matter and matter enormously. – Desmond Tutu

School teacher, child psychologist, and psychotherapist Haim Ginott: 

Dear Teacher: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

Generous Acts II (www.40acts.org.uk):


Read the local news
‘Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.’ Colossians 4:2
Not much comes for free these days. But every week a teenager wheels his bike up my front path and pushes a free newspaper through my letterbox. Most weeks I pick it up off the doormat and take it straight to the recycling bin in the kitchen. But once in a while I stop to read it.

The range of stories is amazing. Here’s a picture of a man looking distraught because his family business had been destroyed by fire. And here’s a story about a church that is starting a new club for children. Here are tragic tales of dying children and inspiring stories of people overcoming the odds. And there are ‘parish notices’ – a road closing for repairs; auditions for an amateur musical production.

The reason I don’t usually read the local paper is because it’s all about people that I don’t know. But maybe that’s exactly why I should read it. These people are my neighbours. They all live within a few miles of me. And as a car-driving, daily-commuting, out-of-town-shopping, seldom-at-home neighbour, this is the best insight I get into their lives.

So once in a while, I’ve decided to use my local paper as a guide to my prayers.

It can evoke thanks or praise or petition. It works with a national paper too of course. It helps me to be more watchful about the life of my community. It allows me to get past my own reactions to stories and to lift up to God the people whose streets and shops and businesses I share. And since the paper comes as a free gift to me… it’s a simple way of giving back.

Grab a cuppa
‘Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.’ Hebrews 13:2
As a former local newspaper hack, I'm used to talking to strangers and encouraging them to share their lives with me in sound-bites, for me to re-tell in newsprint.

I've done many a vox pop in my time, scouring the streets armed with a notepad and pen and asking inane questions of the few passers-by who believed me when I assured them I wasn't a chugger.

What I'm not used to is opening my home to strangers, or as Hebrews says ‘entertaining’ them. Is anyone? The word strangers implies something foreign, something alien, something unknown. But the word neighbours has an altogether friendlier and more familiar feel. Everybody needs good ones.

So when I got my first home of my own in Greenwich in March 2012, I was certain I'd be one of those people who operates an open house policy. I wanted to be the bastion of the community. I'd become a school governor, run a book club, do the local pub quiz and regularly have the neighbours round. I wanted to build community with those living around me.

But life has an annoying habit of getting in the way.

The days and weeks fill up with work, deadlines, more work, more deadlines, church, and the much-needed social gathering with those friends you already have. So the getting-to-know-your-neighbours thing slipped my mind. I'd find myself avoiding eye contact on the rare occasion I saw someone in the corridor in our block of flats, or avoiding getting in the lift with people for fear of being forced to make awkward conversation.

I'd started with the best of intentions, but it had all gone to pot. I'd also assumed that my neighbours didn't really want to get to know me anyway.

Community is kind of a 'Christian thing', surely? So when I was asked to take up the 40acts challenge to host a tea party for my neighbours, I was excited yet quietly dreading it.

I had no reason to be.

Because all I needed to do was open my doors, send an invitation and they came. I've discovered there are some great people living all round me – people with interesting lives, jobs, families – and people who love community, and who love a good cuppa.