Some thoughts on Anglican Franciscanism - part five - Cathy Ross's input on Lament
I am continuing my reflection on the input last year at the IPTOC-JFOC gathering at High Leigh in England.
The second slot of input was shared between Cathy Ross from CMS in UK and Jeff Golliher TSSF from USA. Together they helped us focus on "Listening to the Cry of the World."I want to focus on Cathy's input here. You can find the video of her sessions and the PowerPoint here.
Who is she? Dr Cathy Ross is a is a New Zealand-born academic and scholar of missiology. She has worked for NZCMS in Rwanda, Congo and Uganda. She is currently leads Pioneer Mission Leadership Training Oxford and is a lecturer in mission at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. I first met her at a conference 25 years ago where she presented a paper based on her doctoral work on the importance of missionary wives in Aotearoa. That was published as "Women with a Mission, Rediscovering Missionary Wives in Early New Zealand", (Auckland: Penguin, 2006). You can read more about her here.
She went on to explore these using Maggy Barankitse’s sad and difficult story from Burundi - Love made me an Inventor. Love led her to be an inventor, creating new community based on different paradigms. There are things that only eyes that have cried can see. This is a story with no happy ending. Like so much that is happening in our world. Sometimes it is hard to know how to engage and respond.
Which brings us to Lament. "To reach that fierce hope I need to lament – to allow that ancient practice to find expression and turn the debilitating fear and anxiety outwards into action." Frances Ward. Lament becomes the starting point and opens the way to hope. Not guilt. Not hopelessness. Not despair. They all hold us immobile. What we need to reclaim in the ancient and biblical practice of lament.
Lament frees us to feel the sense of loss at what is happening around us, with climate change, the politics of white supremacy in this country, the stupidity and lack of humanity in what is happening in the USA as I write this. (those last comments are all me, for the record). We are invited to join Liz Hoare who lamented, "I am crying as I write this because I am sad, so very sad, at the loss of beauty and variety in this world." And then we might look to act in hope.
Into all this Cathy introduced Kate Raworth and Doughnut Economics as an alternative to the growth model of economics. Her book in on my list of books to listen to.
And from that she used Frances Ward and others to show us who to move into hope, and through hope resistance and justice.
In her book "Like There's No Tomorrow - Climate Crisis, Eco-Anxiety and God" Frances Ward says "Hope is a condition here and now; not a foretelling of what lies ahead, and certainly not an inoculation against loss, but the affirmation that God is bound to the finite reality that God loves, and it is God’s business to honour that binding. Meanwhile, we keep ourselves open to the God who acts and speaks in the present, and we labour at whatever we can do to prevent catastrophe, even if we are fearful that all our effort is too late." (p.11)
AS I write this our government has introduced legislation that seeks to rewrite our founding document, and to rewrite history. It is legislation written out of a white supremacist agenda. It is constitutionally dangerous, and it is deeply offensive to many. Too many will support it because they are not sure how to address the sometimes horrific consequences of colonization. They feel stuck in guilt for something what was not their doing. And so they want to ignore it and pretend it never happened. Lament offers another way. We can lament the past. We can acknowledge they ongoing consequences for Nga Iwi o Aotearoa. And we are invited to join them and others to create a society that undoes those injustices and builds a future for all in this land. I wonder then what is the particular Franciscan approach we bring to that? How might we offer places of lament during this time, so that we can find hope, and live God's resistance and justice?
Cathy offered us this quote from Hannah Malcolm - ‘To lament, we must name the damage, express grief, act out restitution, and so access restoring forgiveness. Hope, like lament, becomes a way of being in the world.’ In this way Lament is newness and hope.
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