Nuclear Disaster

Our house in Gerardsville - gosh how things have changed!)

We used to live in a lovely spot, called Gerardsville. No-one in Gauteng has ever heard of it. It is near the slightly better known Hennopsriver. It was thornveld. Our house looked out onto a faraway hill called Kopjie Alleen (literally “hillock standing on its own”) and further West, into the distance, onto the hills of Lanseria and the Cradle of Humankind.

We lived in a thatch house with an upstairs bedroom. I looked out of it one evening, to see that in the untouched land beyond my stone wall, someone had pitched a tent! I was a bit puzzeled and went to enquire, fearful that squatters might suddenly take it into their heads to spoil my remote and unspoilt bliss. It turned out to be inhabited by two of the strangest and most unlikely characters. Two Eastern Orthodox Monks!

I greeted them breezily, as though it was entirely the usual to find two fully robed, bearded Eastern Orthodox Monks camping in a tent on the borders of one’s property, and enquired as to what they might be doing there. My heart sank. They belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church. They were “missionaries” and they had just purchased the property which bordered mine and were going to build a bloody great Monastery on it!

And they did just that. The chapel was odd looking, to the non-Eastern Orthodox eye. It had a great Christos Pantocrator image on the ceiling, with blazing eyes. (It was apparently painted by one of the nuns, who had to be given some kind of special dispensation to enter the Chapel and lie on her back for a couple of months on scaffolding while she painted Jesus.)

The Chapel had nowhere to sit and everything about the rest of the Monastery looked vaguely mid-Eastern European rural. Somewhere Borat or someone of similar ilk would be very much at home. They ploughed up the virgin soil and planted non-indigenous things in it. They rang bells at four o’clock in the bloody morning. The objected to my tenant, who lived at the other end of my property, (but closer to them) playing Madonna after they had gone into the Eastern version of the Greater Silence.

It was difficult. But it was when Leon noticed them burying dead brethren in the grounds of the monastery – in a completely dolomitic area – that he suggested we start looking for somewhere else to live. That was the one problem.

The other, I had noticed soon after moving into the area. It was signs which were put up on the few stop-signs that there were (in the absence of lamp-posts, about a meeting which was going to be held at the Tusker’s Arms, on a Saturday afternoon, to discuss how to stop the PBMR. Now for those of you who may not know, the PBMR stands for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor – and it was a grand scheme of the government which was intended to end South Africa’s impending energy woes.

I and a friend, who knows about such stuff, went to the meeting. It was one of those hot wintery afternoons on the Highveld. The Tusker's Arms had the overwhelming smell of stale ale. It seemed to infect everything. The wooden bar stools, the fake leather couches, the curtains, the floor the ceiling.

There a somewhat rag-tag bunch of anti-nuclear activists, and one or two locals, listening with increasing horror to the details of what it was all going to cost; what the impact would be; what the risks would be of trucks trundling along the R511, past one of the fastest growing townships in South Africa, carrying nuclear waste for disposal God knows where.

Then we heard from a smug, self-satisfied representative of Pelindaba, the plant where the PMBR would be housed. We heard how this was the safest option for energy in the whole wide world and how we didn’t have any other realistic options and how everything else would be, in the long run, less efficient and more expensive.

Between 2006 and 2010, the PMBR received a mere R7.2 billion from the state, according to the recent issue of the Mail and Guardian (19 -25 Feb 2010). PMBR was a public private partnership (PPP) between nuclear industry players and the government.

Last week, that was dropped to R11.4 million for the next three years (effectively about plus minus R3.5 million per annum). Approximately 600 or the 800 employees are about to be retrenched. Effectively, the PMBR is dead.

Apologies for the fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R7.2 billion are eagerly awaited by all of us, who sat that dreadful day, in the Tusker’s Arms, being fed a load of nuclear bullshit.

Jesus in tap shoes

“Infecting the City” is a novel programme of public Art, which Spier funds on a yearly basis for Cape Town. One of the items interested me especially, and luckily was outside the Michaelis Art Gallery on Greenmarket Square, which is about 10 steps away from where I work.

So, I stood in the sun, with a small crowd of mostly young, “alternative” sorts of people. We were looking at the entrance of the Gallery, which has some nice steps, a covered area and columns on either site. Between the columns had been mounted Beezy Bailey’s two life sized bronze pieces which are part of the performance. Like most of his work, they are quirky and strange. A man with long hair and a beard, in a loincloth, with stick-thin legs, arms outstretched, in high heels, and obviously doing some kind of dance.

The performance started, and out of the double doors of the gallery appeared a man with false beard, long hair and wearing a loincloth and in tap shoes. It was unmistakeably meant to be Jesus. Whereas the bronzes were white, this Jesus was black, young, slightly rounded of figure and camp as a row of pink tents.

He danced to a suped-up version (sometimes breaking into rap!) of “Lord of the Dance”, with words written by Sydney Carter. It was a short piece, lasting no more than 5 minutes. I was extremely interested to watch the crowd. They clapped enthusiastically at the end and some of them jigged along with the beat in a supportive, sort of approving way, during the performance.

Before the performance, I had asked one of the organisers where “Infecting the City” got their funding from. “Spier, and only Spier”, was his response. I asked him what the reaction to the piece had been. He said that they had received a whole lot of hate mail from “Christians”.

Of course it was predictable that they should get hate mail from “Christians”, but it got me thinking about a whole lot of things. When Sydney Carter wrote “Lord of the Dance” in 1963, it was partly inspired by Jesus and partly by a statue of Shiva as Nataraja . It was an adaptation of Joseph Brackett's "Simple Gifts", and he intended it as a tribute to Shaker music.

"I did not think the churches would like it at all”, he said later. “I thought many people would find it pretty far flown, probably heretical and anyway dubiously Christian. But in fact people did sing it and, unknown to me, it touched a chord ... Anyway, it's the sort of Christianity I believe in."

"I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus. Whether Jesus ever leaped in Galilee to the rhythm of a pipe or drum I do not know. We are told that David danced (and as an act of worship too), so it is not impossible.”

Now, I know that “Lord of the Dance" is an extremely popular song in both the mainstream churches and in the Evangelical tradition. I can only imagine that some of the hate-mail which the organisers of the Exhibition received, was from people who themselves, at some point of their lives have sung “Lord of the Dance”. I can only wonder at what they were thinking when they were singing the song!

I can remember very clearly, when I was growing up in a tending-towards-Evangelical Anglican Church in Johannesburg, singing another of Sydney Carter’s hymns “Standing in the rain” (1965). It had a very catchy tune and we used to sing it often. However, verse 4 read as follows:

Christ the Lord has gone to heaven
One day he'll be coming back, sir
In this house he will be welcome
But we hope he won't be black, sir.

This verse was routinely omitted in my church. Because many of the congregation indeed fervently hoped he wouldn’t be black. Indeed, the mere possibility of him being black was deemed offensive in the extreme!

Recently I found some amazing pictures on a blog I follow called – Jesus in love blog. Both pictures are by photographer Bill Burch. The one is Transvestite Jesus. The other is even more strange, I think, which, if I understand it correctly, is cocking a snoot in the direction of some feminists, as well as the more general swathe of patriarchists. It is called Fur Coat Jesus. And there is Jesus, as a woman, standing in a fur coat on the cross.

One of the readers of the blog describes them as “disturbing”. I suppose many, if not most religious people would find them “disturbing”. They are certainly not the norm!

But the point all of them are making, this and the Beezy Bailey exhibition – one amongst many points - is a relatively simple one. Any and all pictures of Jesus are necessarily interpretive. What mainstream “orthodox”, or even so-called “Bible believing” Christians may see as the “right” kind of picture of Jesus, others could find offensive, disturbing, or blasphemous. Either that or is Jesus so fully and so comprehensively defined in patriarchal, hetero-normative terms, that nothing else is even remotely or conceptually (or even artistically) possible? I fear that might be nearer the
real truth.

Dancing Jesus - Performance Art - Greenmarket Square, Cape Town

As part of the "Infecting the City" public arts festival, I saw today Beezy Bailey's short piece "Dancing Jesus" which involves two life-sized bronze sculptures and a tap dancing, high heel wearing Messiah, doing his thing to a very contemporary (almost rap) version of "Lord of the Dance".

I spoke to one of the organisers, who said that they had received a lot of hate mail from "Christians". Isn't that ironic? I wonder if those same "Christians" sing "Lord of the dance"? And if they do, I wonder what they think it might mean!

Lord of the Dance by Sydney Carter

I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth;
At Bethlehem I had my birth.

Refrain:
Dance, then, wherever you may be;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

I danced for the scribe and the pharisee,
But they would not dance and they would not follow me.
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John
They came with me and the dance went on.

Refrain

I danced on the Sabbeth and I cured the lame;
The holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me on high;
They left me there on a cross to die.

Refrain

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I'd gone;
But I'm the dance and I still go on.

Refrain

They cut me down and I leapt up high;
I am the life that will never, never die;
I'll live in you if you'll live in me
I am the Lord of the Dance said he.

Refrain

Breakfast with Nelson Mandela

Me and the late Harry Gwala, in front of Nelson Mandela, back in the early 1990s in Pietermaritzburg

A few months after Nelson Mandela’s release, he came on a visit to the Kwazulu-Natal region, to assess for himself what was going on in relation to the terrible violence which was wracking the province. I was, at the time, working quite closely with Harry Gwala, who was also a Robben Island prisoner and, by virtue of that, the de facto leader of the ANC in the area.

Gwala was an amazing, albeit flawed man. He suffered from a terrible degenerative disease, which meant that he had no use of both his arms. You would think this would be something of a limitation, but it wasn’t. He was an orator like none I have ever heard. He could get a crowd raging, or weeping, or quiet and obedient, within a few sentences.

He was an unashamedly unreformed Stalinist. (In fact, I would sometimes sit turning pages of this or that work by Stalin, which he would be reading at the time). He held Stalin and Shakespeare on probably the same level – both with deep reverence and he would quote both, from memory and with the same amount of passion.

He was also a warlord, I’m afraid. He had an outright hatred of Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement – which was a breakaway Zulu-based movement in Kwazulu-Natal, which was friendly with (and many would say supported by) the apartheid state. He did not believe that talking to them would do any good and he believed that we, in the ANC, should fight fire with fire. His warlike stance was, undoubtedly, a contributing force in the escalating violence of the time.

But he called Mandela to come and visit the province. And he came. He stayed at Harry Gwala’s tiny house. It was all supposed to be fairly low key. He wanted to meet people and get to know what was happening. What we did not expect was the kind of support the man had. “Mike”, Harry Gwala said to me, “we have a secret weapon here”.

So, we drove Nelson Mandela all over Pietermaritzburg. Up hill and down dale. We drove him into every township, and wherever we went, he was greeted with crowds of people. Sometimes, it was almost impossible to actually drive the cars. People were singing, chanting, shouting, waving. People were crowding around the vehicle. People were crying. People were laughing. It was indescribable.

Early one morning, during the visit, it may have been 6 o’clock, I got a telephone call from Harry Gwala. “Mike”, he said, “I want you to come here now”. Being the naturally obedient type, I jumped into my clothes and ran to organise another priest to say Mass at the seminary, where I was teaching. I jumped into the car and rushed to Gwala’s house, which was not too far away.

I was met at the gate by Gwala. “I have to go somewhere urgently”, he said. “Please keep Madiba (Mandela’s clan name) company for breakfast”. Needless to say, I was a bit taken aback.

As I entered the lounge of Gwala’s house, I could see Mandela sitting, with his back to the window, dressed in a lounge suit. Gwala escorted me in and introduced me to Mandela. He did not rise to meet me, but shook hands very warmly, as though I was an old friend, and asked me to sit with him. (There was no dining-room in the house. Breakfast was going to be served on our laps and in the lounge). There I was, sitting, alone, with the mythical Nelson Mandela. Here was the man who had been in prison for 27 years; who had made that immortal speech from the dock about being prepared to die in the fight against white domination and against black domination; the man who picture none of us were allowed to see until very recently; the man on whom the hopes of millions of people in the country depended. There I was, about to have breakfast with him.

We spoke for quite some time. It was mostly on the situation in Kwazulu-Natal. And I could tell, even then, that his view of the world was one very different indeed from Harry Gwala. But there was one incident, during that breakfast, which remains indelibly etched in my memory.

At one point, one of the women who had been cooking breakfast in the kitchen came in and whispered in my ear, that there was someone who desperately wanted to see Mr Mandela. She addressed the request to me, out of a kind of reverence for Mandela himself – almost as though the use of a proxy was necessary in the face of such eminence.

I asked Mr Mandela, if he would mind meeting a young member of the ANC youth. He had no hesitation. “Of course!”, he said, “Of course!”. The message was relayed. Then, shuffling into the room, on his knees, with his eyes averted, came a boy, who could not have been more than 17 years old. He was on his knees, out of respect. He averted his eyes, because to look at the man would be too much of a disrespect for his person.

Mandela was holding a teacup full of tea. When he saw the youth come in, he passed the cup to me and, saying nothing, struggled to his feet, with a fair amount of difficulty. The youth was now terrified and started shaking. “I always stand in the presence of a young lion”, said Mandela. “Thank you for coming to see me”.

When I see the politicians of today, puffed up with too much food; expensive whiskey; and too much reverence being shown to them for their less than admirable persons, I remember this incident. I think I can say, without any doubt, that it changed me forever. I am pretty sure it had the same effect on that young boy.

Another great leader, (one whom I had the privilege of serving under as a priest), made the same point, in different words. Desmond Tutu said that we need to genuflect to our neighbours. Ah yes, these were really great leaders. How much they stand out and how sad the contrast with what we have today.

The violence of culture

The other day, I glanced, casually over at the naked man, who was standing next to me’s gym bag – the way one does - (you know how we boys have to compare everything). And to my horror, I saw, lying amongst the aftershave, sweaty Jockeys and hairbrushes, a gun! It was a large looking gun in a leather holster, and it was lying at the bottom of his gym bag!

I shook my head in disbelief. I looked up at the naked man and then back at the gun. He glanced disinterestedly in my direction and went on dressing. I said “Is that a gun in your gym bag?”. He looked into the bag with some surprise, as though I was asking if it were, perhaps, a tortoise.

“Yes!” he said, followed by a silent “Duh! Of course it is a gun, you idiot! What did you think it was – a tortoise?”
“In the gym!?” I said, my voice rising the way it does when I am about to have a heart attack.
“In my gym BAG!” he responded aggressively, as though that solved everything.

I left the matter. I said nothing. I stared horrified at the bag and its extraordinary contents again and then I just carried on getting dressed. On my way out, I asked for one of those silly little cards to write down a complaint, (which never gets attended to, or answered in my long experience at Virgin Active). I asked whether Virgin Active had any policy about bringing guns onto the property. The unhelpful man at the desk didn’t know if there was any policy. When I asked him whether Virgin Active had any safe to lock the gun away, or any system to keep it safe. Or any sign anywhere prohibiting bringing guns into the gym. He said no, it didn’t.

I once made a suggestion, on another one of those placatory little suggestion cards which the gym provides to make you think something is going to be done about your issue , that Virgin Active provide condom dispensers in the change-rooms. After all, a healthy lifestyle is what a gym is all about, surely this would be a little thing to do, which could go a long way in making free condoms available in a closed and non-threatening environment. The smiling man who continuously asks me how I am, but doesn’t give a fig, stopped smiling briefly when he read my suggestion. He said he didn’t think “they” would allow it, because the gym was a family gym. So, condoms are not allowed, but guns are. It is a strange world we live in!

Indeed it is a strange world. It is a strange world where it is fine for dad to leave the house in the morning, on his way to the gym, with a gun strapped to his chest. It is a strange world where his partner sees that as normal. And, in an environment such as that, it is even stranger that a business seemingly dedicated to health, wellness and all those other good things, can simply ignore the fact that in the flimsiest of lockers, with the tiniest of locks, a gun can be left lying in a gym bag, unattended!

But that is now our culture. And the more we accept it, the more we remain silent in the face of it, the more it gains power and credence and the more it becomes normative. That is the tyranny of culture. Because “that is what we do”, it is allowed to go unchallenged. So, we can publicly torture bulls to the point of death, before we stab them in Spain, or we can tear them apart with our bear hands in Kwazulu-Natal – because “that is what we do”.

We allow the thing to gain a power of its own, because we are too feeble to call it what it is – ghastly and unacceptable, whether or not, it has the veneer of “culture” hiding its ugliness. The man in the gym, with his gun lying in his gym bag undoubtedly felt it was his “right” to carry a gun. One could say, I suppose, that carrying a gun is now part of his “culture”. He would undoubtedly argue that there is a prevailing “culture of violence” in our society and that he is simply trying to protect himself. But the violence of his “culture” - of gun-owning and gun-carrying and gun-leaving-lying-in gym-bags - simply adds to it, and allows it to normalize and continue.

Mary and sacrifice

My child Joshua, full of wonder at today's Candlemass

Today, the church celebrates the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It's an odd business, really, involving a celebration of Jewish purification rituals which take place after childbirth, otherwise called "Candlemass" in the Catholic tradition. So, because Joseph and Mary were poor, they could not afford the required lamb for sacrifice, and offered, as the Law required, two doves, instead. Mary would have handed over the doves to the priests in the Temple, and would have then had the blood of the sacrifice sprinkled over her, to make her clean. It's fairly strange to those of us who don't slaughter things anymore and certainly sounds fairly distasteful.

Blood obtained through sacrifice. Armies are inspired by it. I see virtually every day on Sky News, soldiers in Iraq dying and the newsreader dropping his or her voice appropriately at the announcement of the news of yet more deaths there. In our own country, there are many people, some of them practising Christians, who will also sacrifice for big events, such as births, deaths etc because that is what tradition requires. (I am very glad indeed, that my tradition doesn't require anything of the sort from me!)

And the Christian tradition itself, a theological breath away from Judaism, is one which is also full of blood, as it relates to sacrifice. The crucifixes in our churches, the pictures and celebrations of Saints and Martyrs often depict in very graphic detail, the suffering and sacrifice of forbears in the faith. And the honour we give to them, and the veneration we show, is very often in direct relation to the amount of blood spilt. That is not the way it is put. It is put in the language of suffering, sometimes vicarious, and sometimes direct. And most of the time it is fairly raw and meaningless, as well.

So, today we remember a mother who fulfills the fairly bloodthirsty requirements of a Law book, to purify herself - presumably in the eyes of God - but particularly in the eyes of the patriarchy, after childbirth.

And that got me remembering the encounter we had with Social Welfare, when we were finding a child to adopt, 9 or 10 years ago now. We were told to go to the Adoption home, because there was a child there which they thought was suitable. He was a lovely little boy, and, of course, Leon (my partner) fell instantaneously in love with him. His name was, let's say, "Grant". We played with "Grant", picked him up, and hugged him. He gooed back at us. And after half an hour or so, we went back home, thinking we had met our son.

On the way back, we got a phonecall from the social worker. "Sorry!", she said, she had just had another look at the file and the birth mother had said that the child could not be adopted by gay or lesbian couples. So, that was the end of that!

Some time later, when we were still up in the air, waiting for a child, the social worker was discussing what had gone wrong with "Grant", before. Basically, she hadn't bothered to read the file before sending us to meet "Grant". Then she said something else, apropos nothing at all: "Oh yes,", she said, " If I remember correctly, Grant was the product of rape".

My mind went into a whirl. I tried to imagine how one would talk to that child, who could have been my child, about that fact. And sure as nuts, if one didn't talk to him about it, he would eventually find out about it - and which would be worse?

I thought about that story today, during the reading of the Gospel. Jesus was the product of some really quite fishy circumstances. Yes, I know that the Church holds that the conception was not caused by Joseph, but rather by the Holy Spirit, but it clearly was something which was (and remained) fishy, throughout his life. John's Gospel (8:37 - 47)has a wonderful discussion recorded in it between Jesus and the Pharisees, basically on who is a true Jew. The discussion revolves around paternity and being "children of Abraham". Jesus casts some aspersions on the character of their Jewishness by saying that "You claim to be descendents of Abraham, yet you are trying to eliminate me". They answer basically in this way : "We, at least, know who our father is! We are not born of fornication!" - with the tacit - "Like you were" implied. Jesus gets extremely angry at this and tells them that their father is really the devil.

In a context where our President, Jacob Zuma has fathered 20 children (at least!), some born inside and a good deal born outside of marriage, the kind of argument between Jesus and the Pharisees seems a little archaic, to say the least. But the essential patriarchy of the narrative, and the assumptions of patriarchy, remains deeply embedded in it.(As it does, incidently, in the national debate which is taking place at the moment about Zuma!)

Mary sees her son go out on his mad mission. She watches him gather the crowds and dazzle them. She watches his serious political mistakes and clear misjudgements, his betrayal and his death. She watches as he is soon put to death and she is utterly powerless to stop it.

That is why Christians in the Catholic tradition venerate her, because she is much more than what she appears to be at face value. She represents the whole spectrum of motherhood, from the violated to those gracefully accepting the patriarchal plan. She represents mothers who are powerless to stop their children destroy themselves, before their eyes, and against their best advice. She represents them all. She represents the legitimate and the illigitimate. She represents the victims of rape and those mothers who simply cannot cope anymore and are forced to give their children up.She represents the mothers who sacrifice throughout their lives for the wellbeing of their children.

Our son Joshua's birth-mother was HIV+ when she gave up her third child for this adoption. She simply could not support any more children. Chances are, she might be dead now.

Gabriel's bother was a vegetable seller in Johannesburg. His father had done nothing to support her and was not likely to support her now that she was pregnant. She decided that her alternatives were either, to keep the child herself, (which would mean that she would have to bring him up on the steet and which she felt would be unsustainable), or to give up her job, which she could not do, if her family was to survive. The other alternative was to give him up for adoption.

Her choice was to sacrifice her child in an act, I suppose, not unlike Mary, with Jesus. She also gave up her child to his religious extremism, which ended up with him dead.

I think I understand the essence of the sacrificial, which is something Christianity thrusts upon us, as a thing we should all strive for. Sacrifice is good, we are told. Sacrifice makes things better, somehow. The question we need to ask, though, is, whether or not that is actually true? A Hindu friend of mine once rounded on me saying that the perspective of sacrifice for others was just plain madness. The only person you could sacrifice for was yourself, she said.

Sacrifice is a concept which is deeply embedded at the heart of Western Christianity. However, you don't see much evidence of it in the way the religion itself is practised. You don't see it in the well-preserved buildings; you don't see it in the lives of the priests, to any real extent; in the processions; in the meticulous ritual; in the daily praxis. Suffering is acknowledged, but it is very seldom actually experienced. And when it is experienced, it is often simple abuse, more than anything else

It seems to me, though, that it is women who experience it in our society, far more than men. They spend a great deal of time surviving the patriarchy and playing by rules they have not themselves created. I do not want to speak for them, but that is something I cannot fail to observe. How else, for instance, can one understand 20 births being caused by the same man, in an age of HIV and Aids?

That is the kind of thing, it seems to me, to which Mary points. That is her present-day sacrifice.

Quality!

The car guard told me that this was a 1901 Mercedes, that I found parked quite casually, outside our local pub. I have no idea if he was right. I looked on the web, and the Mercs from that era seemed to be of a completely different style. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

But it really doesn't matter. It is a wonder to behold, one way or t'other. And when you look at it, you can't but imagine the clothes to go with it and the kinds of rides it went on.

Lovely to have it visiting our hood.