A short post today, but momentous (I think), namely to say that we have the gift of another grandchild, a darling baby girl born yesterday. Our fifth grandchild but the first for this particular family (our second son and daughter-in-law). First or fifth, each birth feels amazing, even miraculous. This Inuit birth song expresses it best:
She was unloaded and delivered to us, glory be!
Unloaded from her mother, the little one, delivered,
And we all say Glory Be!
This week I attended an informal discussion meeting in which my friend Doug Koop, editor of ChristianWeek, talked about his experience of Cape Town 2010, the third congress of the Lausanne movement (the first being 1974, in Lausanne). We discussed The Cape Town Commitment, a document authored for the congress by Chris Wright, but mostly we enjoyed hearing about the event, especially to get those perspectives one doesn’t necessarily get in official press releases. I confess that I hadn’t really informed myself about this event earlier, as I’m mostly out of the loop on matters Evangelical, but I did read some of Doug’s reports on Facebook.
He gave us a quick history primer: the Lausanne event in 1974, key organizers being the Billy Graham group and John Stott, with an internal debate sparked by then-young upstarts Samuel Escobar and Rene Padilla, arguing for a holistic gospel; then to the congress in Manila in 1989 whose primary result was partnerships and an emphasis on the language of “unreached people groups.” And now, a third congress in Cape Town, 2010. The Cape Town Commitment uses the language of love as a way of framing commitment (We love because God first loved us, we love the living God… etc., 10 points in all), which struck us as both compelling and significant, though one person in our discussion group commented (to the nods of others) that while it uses love language it seems to have a belief agenda.
Doug shared Cape Town 2010 highlights: the words of Libby Little, recently widowed when Dan Little was killed in Afghanistan, and of Sung Kyung, a young woman from North Korea. Other matters of note included controversy around John Piper going “off script” in his exposition of Ephesians 3, and the critique of “managerial missiology” or preoccupation with numbers.
Rather than trying to convey things third-hand, I commend Doug’s writing on the event at ChristianWeek blogs. There’s also an interesting piece there by Wendy Gritter of New Direction on her conversation about homosexuality with Anglican Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda.
Sometimes it seems that the large clusters of the Christian church — Evangelicals, World Council of Churches, Anabaptists — circle only in their own orbits, which partially explains the personal out-of-the-loop note above, but I notice that the Mennonite World Conference had some 30 representatives at Cape Town, according to this report by Byron Rempel Burkholder.
The following arrived as a response to the previous post in which I mused about adding more words to the “tsunami” of words already out there. It came from my friend and fellow writer Leona Dueck Penner, whose rich life has included working with Mennonite Central Committee in Africa, being a correspondent for Canadian Mennonite, and engaging in ongoing writing of various kinds including poems (one example here) and short stories. Those of you who follow comments here will know that when she responds to something she adds wonderful reflections of her own. This time I asked if she’d let me carry them as a guest post. I’m pleased that she agreed, and here they are, under a title from the quote on Rilke below.
“This quality of beholding” (Leona Dueck Penner)
Thanks so much Dora, for sharing your learnings through your blog, especially that quote by Nadine Gordimer and the link to the interview which I really enjoyed and was challenged by. I put her Telling Time book of essays on hold at the library right away!
Gordimer is a favourite writer whose books taught me so much about what it meant to be human in South Africa during the years that we worked/lived in the region prior to and just as apartheid ended in that beloved country. And her interview taught me some more about what it means to live there now. For example, I like her suggestion, nay demand, that the rest of the world cut SA a bit slack. After all, it’s only 16 years ago since their first democratic elections, while North America and Britain have had “hundreds of years of working towards democracy and are still not perfect; you’ve still got poor people; you’ve still got xenophobia.”
But back to your post. I also appreciate the quote by Gordimer re discovering our humanity through the process of writing, and how this can send a writer “falling, falling through the surface” of his/her own social context. That reminded me of the forward to a book (discovered at McNally’s of course!) which P. and I are reading together in the mornings just now: A Year with Rilke: Daily readings from the best of Rainer Maria Rilke (translated & edited by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows) which states that:
… perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Rilke’s poetry resides in his fearless confrontation with the fact of suffering. His capacity to embrace the dark and to acknowledge loss brings comfort to the reader because nothing of life is left out. There is nothing that cannot be redeemed. No degree of hopelessness, such as that of prisoners, beggars, abandoned animals, or inmates in asylums, is outside the scope of the poet’s respectful attention. He allows us to see that the bestowal of such pure attention is in itself a triumph of the spirit.
This quality of beholding–taking into oneself what one beholds –is to Rilke the central task of our being. From the outset, our engagement with the world around us is presented as reciprocal: ‘All becoming has needed me. /My looking ripens things /and they come toward me, to meet and be met.’
So … if a writer remains true to this high calling to the best of her/his ability, perhaps it’s no wonder that they are often feared, ridiculed and silenced by the structures that govern society, whether in apartheid South Africa, or in right or left-wing “dictatorships,” where power and/or money may be put at risk if writers advocate for the poor (including our environment) too strongly.
Borrowing Bones 