Local scenes and global perspectives 2

I must say I was having something of an argy-bargy with God over the weekend. It doesn't happen often, but last week's events got under my skin. That documentary about Kibera in Kenya, as you'll have gathered, moved me a lot. A million people crammed into one and a half square miles of mud huts with corrugated tin roofs, with communal toilets (up to 1000 sharing) with open sewers running down the centre of the alleys, awful child mortality. As Angela Rippon commented, "Here 'hand-to-mouth' literally means hand to mouth." Lennie Henry was lodged with five orphans, living in squalor, and couldn't take it. He was so upset that he broke the 'rules' of the film and asked to buy them a house with his credit card. It was an expensive house (£800) for Kibera, but hardly a palace. Samantha Womack was put with a young mum who worked as a prostitute to support her children and extended family up-country. Contrary to my expectations I understood why she did so, and how Jesus loved and forgave 'sinners'.

"Why, God, don't you get out your celestial credit card and rehouse the whole lot of them?" Actually, I know there is something much larger, more systemic, than bad housing conditions behind places like Kibera. My friend, Katie, recently wrote from holiday in Cape Town, that she "has been blown away by the poverty in the local township here... 40.000+ people crowded into a small space....." And, of course,  I know that God doesn't use American Express and doesn't bale out every result of human or satanic folly. That's something to do with free will, isn't it? I guess one of his questions is "Why don't you feed, or house, this multitude?"

Tsunami debris (Photo: Reuters/Kyodo)

And then came the earthquake happened off northern Japan, and its devastating consequences started to dawn us like the tsunami it caused, so that now Japan holds its breath lest a plutonium reactor melts down and explodes. Already the radiation levels have increased 100 miles away. Tens of thousands of people are dead or missing as the tsunami swept all in its irresistible path. And, what's more, the Tokyo stock market has plunged. I've heard it all described as "an act of God", an instance of the awesome power of nature, an example of the limits of the most sophisticated human technology, and the result of Adam and Eve's fall from innocence.... I find it very hard to understand as either the first or the last of those. I don't think we can thank God for the good things about it, such as the tsunami not causing damage in other Pacific Rim countries, if we rule him out of the bad parts. And while I'm happy to believe that "the whole creation has been groaning with the pains of childbirth until now", as Paul of Tarsus put it, it feels too simplistic a correlation to make to primal sin.

Rescue in Japan with body-bags (Photo ABC Australia)

I guess it's just part of inhabiting a planet formed as ours was. And a consequence of rising populations and increasing urbanisation, so that although the incidence of earthquakes hasn't noticeably increased, their human effects have become more catastrophic. We have an odd instinct to blame when disasters occur, blame someone or something for things going wrong. Blame whoever built nuclear power station on seismic fault lines, blame whoever built cities on them (though I gather that humans have chosen to live in such places from the beginning), blame authorities who allowed it all, and in due course blame someone for failures in rescue operations and in the reconstruction effort.

Photo © Ian Salisbury

And then today I've heard that another of my lovely young friends has cancer. Give us a break. Maybe it's copping out, but I'm cornered into concluding, as I was about my illness, that God is love (for which I have good evidence), but that love is far more incomprehensible than I'd imagined - so that somehow personal and international catastrophes both fall within that love, as does rescue from them. So I move backwards from Psalm 135.6, "Whatever the Lord pleases, he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps", to Psalm 131.1, "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up... I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvellous for me."

We certainly live in a mysterious and beautiful universe. This is a picture I was sent last week of the moon over the North Pole, with the sun just above the horizon. I understand the moon has recently been nearer than usual.

(Unknown source)

Some things to celebrate

On Friday afternoon, we went to the local MNDA branch meeting in the Holiday Inn on the Oxford ringroad. It was good to meet up with other people in the same boat. I was delighted to meet Peter Durkin who keeps a number of us smiling with his seemingly endless stream of jokes. Before MND hit him he used to teach geography. The main item was a talk by Rose Prince who writes about food for the Telegraph and judges the BBC's Food and Farming awards. She was refreshingly down to earth. She didn't have much time for all the latest food fads. 'Super foods' are bunkum! And I was pleased that she debunked the myth about butter being so bad for you. Did you know that in Dijon they have one of the lowest incidences of cardio-vascular disease in Europe - and one of the highest consumptions of butter? Not because of their red wine consumption, which is high, but because of the variety in their diet. I celebrated with a scone, cream and strawberry jam at the end. And I'm back on butter for breakfast. Yippee!

And, hallelujah! 'Songs of Praise' was back to its former best last night. After I posted about it on Facebook, Jules commented, 'I don't usually watch, but felt I should tune in last night, and I am glad I did! Wow! Wish all churches were as amazing at proclaiming the good news about Jesus as that one seems to be.Real life, real people, real testimonies, the reality of Jesus in their lives was great to see!' Couldn't have put it better myself. It came from Peterborough. Full of people enjoying worship 'vertically' as Noel Richards put it, but also 'horizontally' i.e. getting involved in making a difference in their community + a touching account of God transforming someone's self image. I've put the iPlayer link up. Give yourself a tonic and watch it. More, please, auntie Beeb.

I don't know if you caught the item this morning about Rachel Pooley in the Samoan tsunami. A real good news story. If you look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n1rb2#synopsis , and then the Breakfast Show chapter 3 you can listen to it. Rachel tells the story of how she and her boy-friend, Tolu Taranaki, got caught in their pick-up as the tidal wave swept over the island. Their car was hit by the water. Tolu smashed the window and caught hold of her hand; he got sucked out but she was left in the car as it filled with pitch black water. "I was trying to breath in the water," she said, mimicking a deep inhale of air, "so I was gulping down water.... Blinded by the wave and inhaling the salty sea, Pooley struggled inside the car to find a way out: "I don't even know how long it was, probably a few minutes, but it just seemed forever."
With no sight and no clear exit she lost hope and resigned herself to the inevitable. "I said to myself, Rachel, if this is it, this is it," she said. "If this is you're time to die, that's it."
Her body relaxed in the spinning car, she said a little prayer for herself and her boyfriend who had been pulled into the wave.
"Please let us get out of this," she said. "Don't let us die like this, we just can't.... Then the next thing I saw was daylight and I was able to get out." Commented Shelagh Fogarty, "Sounds like her prayer was answered!" Too true. I notice the BBC website headlines the story, 'Tsunami survivor recalls lucky escape' - listen to the lady, guys.