THE SWAN SONG OF A LEGEND

We might never know the sordid details surrounding the death of Whitney Houston, not even if there were sordid connotations. She has been described as ‘the pop queen with the perfect voice, the dazzling diva with regal beauty.’ But the Los Angeles Times last week added that she was ‘a troubled superstar suffering from addiction,’ and finally, ‘another victim of the dark side of fame.’

Towards the end of her short life cracks began to appear; her voice wasn’t what it used to be, she could look worn and haggard. Her chauffeur of twenty years said she was out of control, she would smoke crack in the back of his limo and once set it on fire with a butane blowlamp. But she is reported to have had some sort of premonition about her death. Some time after her last performance in Brazil, only two day before she died she told a friend, ‘I’m gonna go see Jesus… I want to see Jesus.’

I watched a recording of that show in which she sang that wonderful old hymn we all remember from our childhood; Jesus Loves Me This I Know, for the Bible tells me so. She told the adoring crowd how much she loved Jesus, that she was not ashamed to tell the world, and that they need to come to him, ‘...because one day we’re gonna have to come to him.’

There was something about that comment that reminded me of my childhood days in a little Mission Hall in North Belfast. There was fear behind the love, it was almost as if, ‘you’d better love him or you’re in trouble.’

But there is no fear in love, the Gentle Apostle John wrote, ‘perfect love casts out fear,’ and I wondered as I watched and listened to the swan song of a true legend, maybe you’ve missed something. Maybe you were told the same lie that I swallowed as a boy.

One of the greatest influences on my life was an American evangelist called Mike Williams. I met him and spent a week or so in his company in September 1995 and have been in regular contact with him ever since. He was touring Ireland and I managed to arrange for him to speak at the church of which I was part in those days. Those solid old Presbyterians looked on quizzically as Mike stood in the pulpit and sang that little hymn, then he sang his own version, ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for my own heart tells me so...’

Did Whitney Houston ‘know’ Jesus loved her because she read it in a book? If you and I ‘know’ that Jesus loves us because ‘the Bible tells us so,’ or because someone in authority says so, do we really know his love?

Can a marriage between a man and a woman be meaningful and lasting if they love each other on the sole basis of having read of that love somewhere?  No, to really know the love of a good woman will set a man’s heart on fire with passion. And to know and feel the love of a faithful partner gives us a solid foundation in life; we can face the worst that life throws at us when we know that we are loved and accepted at home.

Many of us are plagued by fears of the future and anxious because of something in our past. But we will only ever come to terms with life when we are secure in the Father’s love, not because we have read it in a book, but because we feel it and know it in the depths of our being.

The basis of our relationship with him is not that we have chosen him, for we are fickle. That’s why Jesus told his friends on the night before he died, ‘You have not chosen me, I have chosen you’ and then he went on to make this remarkable statement that has the potential to change our lives for good and forever, ‘My Father loves you dearly, and we will come and make our home with each of you.’ Yes! Jesus loves me!

When in the Presence of a King, Don’t Make Small Requests

The story is told of a famous golfer who played his sport to entertain the king of Saudi Arabia. When it was time to leave that country the king asked what gift he should give to the golfer as a
mark of his appreciation. The sportsman answered that the privilege of playing golf on the exquisite greens and broad fairways in his beautiful country was sufficient payment.

However, to refuse such an offer was, in the king’s culture, tantamount to an insult, so the golfer agreed that as a token, a golf club would be appropriate. But he forgot to specify what type of club; a wood or an iron, so when the time came for the award ceremony the king handed to the golfer the title deeds of one of the finest golf clubs in the land, complete with clubhouse and a lake.

The moral to the story is this; when in the presence of a king, don’t make small requests.

Pastor Titus

Pastor Titus was from Uganda, he was staying in the Gatwick Hilton on his way to the UK for a series of speaking engagements. ‘I was sitting on the toilet when I had my “Eureka”,’ he told
me.

‘The marble floors were spotless: not a germ in sight. There was soft quilted toilet paper hanging from a gold-plated bracket on the door. There was hot running water, soap dispensers and dry
towels; there was even piped music to entertain. ‘And it dawned on me,’ he said. ‘These people don’t need God. If they’re poor the Welfare State provides for them. If a tooth hurts there’s are dentists and an abundance of analgesics in the meantime. If they are sick they call the doctor, and if they are knocked over by a car, the Paramedics arrive in minutes.’

Pastor Titus was right, for while we do need God, when there is no alternative to prayer, the utter dependency on God drives you to your knees in a way that few of us in the developed world will ever know.

AND ABRAHAM RETURNED TO HIS TENT...

Despite all the hoo-ha, the fact is that the simple act of
praying at the beginning of a Council meeting has not suddenly become illegal,
specifically in Bideford. This was never an attack on religious liberty, quite
the opposite, for as the atheist Councillor Clive Bone who raised the issue said,
‘Religious freedom is an absolute right... so is freedom from religion.’
What Mr Justice Ouseley ruled was that opening a Council
meeting by prayer when Councillors have got to be there, is illegal. In other
words, if as a town Councillor your attendance at a meeting is mandatory, and if
prayer is on the agenda, then that is discrimination.
I have been to many Council meetings that opened in prayer:
‘You
have called us to be the servants of your servants, our brothers and sisters in
the parish. We meet here as their representatives, and so we ask for the grace
of your guidance. Help us to truly represent them and not simply ourselves. May
the true needs of our parish...’
Now I know the man who says the prayer. I know
most of the Councillors too, and they are good people, but to see the act of
opening in prayer as anything other than a harmless ritual is at best fanciful,
at worst delusionary.
At the heart of the
debate is a misunderstanding of what prayer is. Prayer can be an attempt to get
God on my side, to outflank the opposition, to monopolise the high moral
ground. It can be as devoid of meaning as morning Assembly in the local school:
rather than a sincere endeavour to raise the community to an awareness of true
communion with God, it can be an attempt to involve the Almighty in our shabby
little political enterprises.
One of the most
revealing examples of prayer is found in a highly emotionally charged conversation
between God and Abraham – and isn’t it odd that Abraham is seen as ‘the friend
of God’ by all three of the great religions of the world; Christianity, Islam
and Judaism?
God had decided to
destroy the town of Sodom because of the great wickedness in that place, and
Abraham wasn’t too pleased, perhaps he had a vested interest. And so he began
to negotiate; ‘Will you sweep away both the righteous and the wicked?
Suppose there are fifty righteous people living there – will you still sweep it
away and not spare it for their sakes?’
And God said, ‘OK, if I find fifty righteous people in
Sodom, I will spare the city for their sakes.’ Abraham spoke again, ‘How about forty-five
rather than fifty?’
And God said, ‘OK, I won’t destroy it if I find forty-five
righteous people there.’
Now I get the impression that perhaps for the first time
Abraham began to think about the people he knew there, and he ventured, ‘Suppose
there are only forty?’ and God said, ‘OK.’
‘Thirty?’
‘OK.’
‘Twenty?’
‘OK’ – and so it went until Abraham said, ‘Ten?’ and again
God said, ‘OK.’
And then there’s this wonderful line, ‘When God had finished
his conversation with Abraham, he went on his way, and Abraham returned to his
tent.’
There’s more than a touch of inevitability there don’t you
think, but the question is this; Abraham set out to persuade God to see things
his way, but as a result of the conversation – and it was a conversation,
that’s the key – did Abraham come see things from God’s perspective?
For me the great tragedy is that prayer has been reduced to
a shopping list said in a particular place at a specific time. You ‘say your
prayers’ but when you’re ‘saying’ you’re not listening. On the contrary, prayer
is a way of life, a posture, it’s leaning deep into the Father’s bosom, in his
presence, feeling his breath on your face, hearing his heartbeat. It’s being
free from the need to do, released to simply be.
There is no law that can stop that, and there never will be.
Adam Harbinson

NOTHING CAN I DO TO MAKE GOD LOVE ME LESS

Someone once said, ‘Show me a fifty year old man who
believes exactly what he believed when he was twenty and I’ll show you a man
who has just wasted thirty years of his life.’ That’s a nugget of truth with
which few would disagree, and yet so many of us interpret changing your mind as
a sign of weakness.
Richard Rohr,
founder and Director of Center for Action and Contemplation makes the
following observation: ‘The Christian life is a matter of becoming all that God
wants us to be.’ And he adds, ‘But the path is more about unlearning than
learning.’
What Rohr appears to be saying is that life is a series of
opportunities to question something we have always assumed was written in stone,
and if it does not stand up to rigorous examination we should have the courage
to reject it. The implication appears to be that we have been mis-taught by our
society’s values, our parents, our education system or our religious leaders,
and our progress along the road of becoming what God wants us to be, is a measured
by our willingness to reject firmly held beliefs. But we don’t like change, we
tend to believe what we believe because we have always believed it. And that is
not good.
Allow me to suggest that we all make a New Year’s Resolution
right now. Unlike the others that involve stopping this or cutting down on
that, this one requires us only to believe and act on something that deep down
we know is true.
For example, let me take you back to the creation story. In
Genesis we are told, ‘God created human
beings in his own image... male
and female he created them.’
Now move forward only two chapters to where the woman is beginning
to doubt what God had done. The tempter said, ‘You will not die (if you eat the forbidden fruit), for God knows that
when you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.’
Most of us miss the point here because our vision is clouded
by arguments about how long God took to create all that was created and how he
did it and the Big Bang Theory and all that angry Richard Dawkins’ nonsense.
The remarkable is buried under the ordinary, for the woman and the man were
already created in God’s image! They were already like him regardless of
whether they ate the forbidden fruit or not! But they both failed to embrace
what was glaringly obvious.
Many of us trudge our weary way through life crushed by a
great weight of guilt because we have been misled by our religious leaders and
the meritocratic world system we inhabit. Regardless of the rhetoric we hear
from many a pious pulpit the truth is that there is little room in religion for
grace: getting what we do not deserve, or mercy: not getting what we do
deserve.
Preachers tend to give with one hand and take back with the
other, but the liberating truth, which when believed will change lives for good
and forever, gives and does not take back. Here it is: ‘He was pierced for our rebellion,
crushed for our sins, beaten so we could be whole and whipped so we could be
healed.’
Let’s take this truth with us into a new year and
we will find new life: if God punished Jesus for my rebellion and sins, will he
punish me as well? I don’t think so, but does that not suggest that I have
already been forgiven? And if already forgiven am I not throwing his forgiveness
back in his face by refusing to forgive myself?
We all woke up this morning with a completely clean
sheet. Write these immortal words on it: There
is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and there is nothing I can do to
make him love me less.

ALONE WITH THE GREAT ALONE

I once knew a young lady who suffered from heart palpitations. It was frightening, at best the fluttering feeling in her chest was annoying, at worst there were times when she thought she would die. The most frustrating aspect of the condition for her was that all the many tests she underwent indicated that there was nothing physically wrong with her heart, at times she wished the medics could find some defect, for then she could see a possibility of getting it fixed, for if there’s nothing wrong there’s nothing to fix, and she suffered on.
Now I’m no medic but it seems to me that the difficulty could have been related to her chosen lifestyle; the frenetic busy-ness, always going somewhere, or coming back, indeed it would be little surprise if she were to meet herself on the way. The incessant music plugged into her ears, the jumble of parties and part-time jobs and studies were indicative of an inner malaise: she was afraid of her own thoughts.
What I mean is this, a couple of years earlier, when I thought I began to see trouble ahead for her, I pleaded with her to slow down the pace of her life, to take time to think, to reflect, to observe the beauty of the world in which she lived. How wonderful, how invigorating and therapeutic it is to watch the waves crash onto rocks, or listen to the quiet gurgle of a stream on its way to the sea, or to stand on a mountain top and simply absorb the majesty of creation. But no, she told me she could not bear to be alone with her thoughts for ten minutes. And therein perhaps lay the problem.
Os Guinness in his book The Grave Digger File, quotes Bertrand Russell; ‘Most Christians would rather die than think – in fact they do!’ and that is my conclusion too. For example I wrote in this column a few years ago, scathingly I think, of a well known American evangelist who said, ‘Follow the man who is following Jesus.’ The sad thing is that because of the perceived stature of the man, you and I both know that thousands of his devotees will mindlessly trot out that saying as a cool mantra. If they were to pause for a couple of minutes, exercise some original, critical thought they would quickly see the utter stupidity of the idea, quite apart from its dubious theological basis.
We live in a world of increasing madness and I’m convinced that the only way to avoid contamination is to cultivate a habit of quietness, allowing for solitary moments in our daily lives. Richard Rohr talks about learning to be alone with the Great Alone.
There are many references in the Bible to the benefits of stillness, indeed on a trip to the Holy Land a few years ago I spent some time alone in the Judean Desert, the place where Jesus would have gone: ‘...at daybreak... to a solitary place.’ And I think I gained some insight into the uniqueness of that time and place in communicating with what writer Paul Hawker came to know as the Source of all life.
For me however the great lesson is in the experience of the old prophet Elijah. He was afraid, depressed and lonely, hiding from those who would have had him dead. He needed to hear from his God and as he stood on the mountain top a mighty windstorm hit the mountain, but God was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake either. And after the earthquake there was a fire, but it was only after the fire that the tired old man heard the voice of God in a gentle whisper.
We don’t need to go on Retreats, nor are we expected to become hermits, but we can, with a little self discipline learn to hear the voice of comfort and guidance, in the stillness of our own hearts.

Sit Loosely in the Saddle of Life

I’d love to know exactly what Robert Louis Stevenson had in mind when he exhorted his listeners and readers to ‘sit loosely in the saddle of life.’ But the wonderful expression conjures in my mind a picture of a man whose life is not dominated by rules. He is at peace with himself and with the world; he does not take himself too seriously, he holds lightly onto his possessions and his position. He’s a man who does not make demands on himself or on others, who enjoys the journey as much as, or maybe more than the destination. And he’s not constantly looking over his shoulder to his past glories, nor constantly straining to see beyond the horizon in the hope of a better future. No, he has learned to live in the beauty and in the pain of the now.

The Westminster Coalition Attacks the Vulnerable

The decision to re-package Disability Living Allowance (DLA) in order to cut the cost of this benefit by 20% is to be deplored. There are a number of factors that explain the relatively high up-take of DLA in Northern Ireland and there have been despicable attempte to use these statistics as a stick by which to beat Northern Ireland. However, the telling statistic is that on average some 30% of applicants are disallowed, while something in the order of 50% of appeals against the decision to disallow, succeed at Appeal Tribunals.

Bearing in mind that it is government officials who disallow claimants, and it is independent tribunals who overturn half of their decisions, it is clear that there is an expectation on the part of officialdom to reduce the welfare budget by denying the neediest in society the safety net that any civilised society should afford them.

The Tories in this coalition government, these children of Thatcher are faithfully following in the footsteps of their forebears whose default position has always been to target the vulnerable; the poor, the weak and the voiceless.