Back in 2007 I took a group of twenty to Central Zimbabwe for two weeks. The day after we arrived we walked to a farm and saw with our own eyes the desert that had once been a thriving and fertile farm. It has to be remembered that this was a time when the Zimbabwean economy was in free-fall and inflation at a mere 10,000%. We experienced constant power cuts, water stoppages and harassment from Zanu PF’s dodgy police.
While walking around the arid farm, and wondering how on earth a future might be shaped out of this disaster – the breadbasket of Africa become the basket case of Africa – my misery was interrupted by something easily missed and apparently trivial. It was a single rose, about twelve inches high, planted and watered in a small hole in the dry soil. It looked feeble and misplaced – almost futile. But, as everything else seemed to be closing down and smelling of death, here was a prophetic symbol of hope. It seemed to be saying that the is a future – that there is more to reality than what appears as the immediate evidence of your eyes. It was placing a question mark over the dominant gloom, whispering a new melody over the grinding music of doom.
In my presidential address to the Bradford Diocesan Synod this morning I called for our diocese to be ambitious and prophetic and I said it like this:
We should be ambitious. We should be confident about our vocation and the God who gives us it.
In all these matters we are being invited to be prophetic. I know the word is over-used. (I remember the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that when people ask him to be prophetic, what they really mean is: ‘Say loudly what I want to hear you say!’) But, to be prophetic in the biblical tradition is to catch a glimpse behind the curtain of our time and place – a glimpse of the glory of the God who, in the face of our pessimism and gloom, always whispers words such as ‘resurrection’, ‘renewal, or (in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase) ‘newness after loss’. Being prophetic is to plant a seed when everyone else tells us the ground is dried up. It is to build a house when everybody else is demolishing and leaving. It is to sing a song when everybody else has gone silent. It is to build a boat when there isn’t any water… yet.
It is to be a sign of hope – assuming a future. As Rowan Williams says of Dostoyevsky, there is never a final word in the conversation; there is always more to be said. Just as there is nothing new under the sun, there is never an ‘end’ in the economy of a God for whom even death doesn’t finish everything off.
The Occupy movement does not have a monopoly on prophetic action. Every action, word or symbol that defies ‘endings’ by holding out even a tiny promise of a new beginning – a future beyond the loss – is prophetic. And hopeful.
November 5, 2011 at 4:53 pm
🙂
November 5, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Zimbabwe will not excite political interest in the west because:
a. it doesn’t have oil
b. it doesn’t have nuclear weapons
c. its white professional class has now largely disappeared to Australia or England
d. Mugabe was the hero of the amnesiac Left in 1980
e. it can’t be bullied over aid like Malawi
f. the ANC don’t care.
November 5, 2011 at 7:20 pm
You rose illustration reminds me of a radio programme I heard some years back when one of the liberators of a concentration camp spoke of his initial anger when, amongst the first consignment of supplies which he received was a large quantity of lipstick.
He was initially angry at the frivolity, yet quickly came to see that it was a perverse gift of genius. Even when he witnessed the disturbing images of starved corpses in the
Mortuary, he realised that the women had appropriated their individual humanity by using this ” luxury”.
Somehow it is important to do even the serious stuff with an eye to the distance.
November 6, 2011 at 9:11 pm
I remember the trip really well in 07 and many fond memories of all the people we met while in Central Zimbabwe.
Thank you to all those who opened up my eyes to a beauiful country but more so to the beautiful people whose lives were a real struggle, They said “we are dead but still walking”. I was delighted to be able to return again this year with the bishop of Kingston and explore Matabeleland, which covers Victoria Falls,(I still have the picture of our trip to Victoria Falls) Today the people are now walking and struggling but there is a hope for the future.
Many memories, and prayers for our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe have been said.