A Passion for Hospitality - I was naked

REV DR ALISON JACK:

Good morning. On this fourth Sunday in Lent we will be continuing our series focusing on “A Passion for Hospitality”. Today our theme is ‘I was naked and you clothed me’. On this Mothering Sunday, we reflect on that maternal urge to protect and nurture the vulnerable and the ways it might be expressed by anyone, whether a mother or not. And we’ll be holding in our prayers the deep pain of those around the world who are in need of such protection and nurturing.

MUSIC: O God, you are my God alone (Psalm 63) Tune: Resignation
Scottish Festival Singers conducted by Ian McCrorie.
From album A Taste of the Church Hymnary, Track 14, Produced by Church Hymnary Revision Committee.

ALISON:

Creator God, in whose image we were made, as we approach you in worship, may we know your parental care, the protection of the wings of a mothering bird over us all. From that place of assurance may we seek out the vulnerable and gather up the weak, that all may know the safety of your presence. Amen.

On the death of both of his parents, Seamus Heaney told an interviewer he had a feeling of being ‘unroofed’: he’d lost his sense of being homed and protected. When my parents died within weeks of each other three years ago, I knew a similar feeling of loss which made the world seem a bigger and more threatening place. Having to clear out the family home added to that sense of disruption and stripping away of something precious and protective.

MUSIC: Reflections; Composer: Ola Gjeilo
From album Ola Gjeilo, Decca Music Group

At their best, family relationships, the creation of home, is where growth and development happen in a place of safety and love. The Reverend Luke Bacon of St John’s Church in Chatham now tells us of his experience of finding and being a family, and the way it’s influenced his life:

LUKE BACON

I guess I’d describe myself as being adopted from birth. I was picked up by my adoptive parents when I was a week old, from the hospital that I was born in.
I’m mixed heritage, but my parents are both white and Welsh, so it was kind of pretty obvious that I wasn’t at least biologically both of theirs, and so always had this story of, they would tell, what felt like daily, you know my Dad would sit me down and talk to me about this adventure of driving down the M4 to come and collect me, and how their car broke down and how they got to the hospital just before the doors were locked, and this kind of became part of our family story. And so it was always a celebration that our family had been brought together by the gift of adoption. 
They’re not from Christian backgrounds but they had become Christians themselves, which is a story in itself, when they were teaching in Ghana. And so faith was part of our family story as well, so really grateful for being introduced to faith by their daily life, I guess.

It’s only over the last 3 or 4 years that I’ve been starting to think a little bit more about race, and particularly about mixed-heritage or mixed-race identity and Britain, and the very specific context that we have. But I’m very early on in thinking about that. But the one thing that I would say, particularly honouring my parents, is just how sensitive they always were in my upbringing and even now, to that complexity, and they’re really, really great at honouring – so biologically I’m half-Ghanaian. And I think they’re more excited by Ghana than I am, but just kind of honouring that culture and that part of the world.

I’m so positive about adoption, the opportunities and the loving family, and the introduction to faith that that has allowed me to have. So, kind of through a roundabout route actually, earlier than we expected in our married life, my wife and I started the journey of seeking to adopt a young girl that we knew. And our daughter is of mixed heritage, similar to me. So our now oldest daughter joined our family about 5 years ago when she was 7. And that’s just been so wonderful. So the challenge is how many generations in our family can we keep adoption going for! Because we love it and it’s just a beautiful way to extend family and to extend hospitality.

ALISON

Luke’s positive experience of receiving and offering love and protection is reflected a little in the Bible reading for today, although it’s a rather mysterious scene which doesn’t translate easily into modern understandings of mental and physical illness. Jesus encounters a man who is tormented, homeless, and rejected by those around him. Perhaps what’s most important about the story is that while others keep their distance, Jesus calmly asks him what is his name. It’s the beginning of a relationship which brings calm and order into the man’s life.

DAVID: Scripture:Luke 8: 26-39
From the Gospel of Luke:
26 Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. 27As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. 28When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’— 29for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) 30Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him. 31They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.

32 Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. 33Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

MUSIC: Cronán na Máthar performed by Liam O’Flynn
From album The Poet and the Piper, Claddagh Records


ALISON

Seamus Heaney wrote a poem in memory of his mother, called ‘Clearances’. The most famous scene in the poem has Heaney as a boy peeling potatoes with his mother, while the others are at Mass. The scene that arrests me most, though, describes the two of them folding sheets together. The sheets have been outside to dry, and now they need folded before being ironed. It’s not a job easily done on your own, and we can imagine how often one or other of the Heaney children have been involved in the task. Here it’s Seamus who is performing that domestic and choreographed interaction with his mother. In his memory of the moment he senses something of her tireless physical and emotional commitment to him. Here’s a recording of the poem, read by Seamus Heaney himself.

RECORDING ‘Clearances 5’ From album The Poet and the Piper, Claddagh Records

SEAMUS HEANEY: The cool that came off sheets just off the line …
[Copyright material]

ALISON

It’s a profoundly domestic scene, one I can remember sharing with my own mother as she folded the sheets before ironing them, the laundry very much her domain. Holding the corners of the sheets widthways, folding them over twice, and then tugging them hard, one, two, three times, pulling against each other. I once asked her why we did this, and she had no answer other than that was what her own mother had done. What secretly pleased me, though, was that she would always ask my brother or me to do this with her, rather than my father, whom she had declared didn’t offer enough resistance in the key pulling task. This may have been strategic on his part- there were other things he was determinedly bad at- but we rather enjoyed taking part in the laundry dance. My own children have missed out on it, because I have to admit I don’t iron sheets or duvet covers. Once the bedding has been retrieved from the washing line, it gets bundled up rather than folded before being put away in the drawer.

But that moment of connection in Heaney’s poem, when the boy and his mother end up hand to hand as they step towards each other to unite one end of the folded sheet with the other, speaks to me of the reserved but real love in much of family life. The ‘touch and go’, the ‘coming close again by holding back’, both are part of the ongoing care of the parent for the child, expressed here in the instinct to provide clothes and bedding which are clean and dry and comfy, from the earliest days of a child’s life. For Heaney’s mother, for my mother too, actually speaking of that love might be alien and awkward, but moments of connection such as this are significant amidst the ongoing caring routine of daily life.

Things have surely changed in recent years in terms of how much we tell our family members we love them. I may not end every phone call to my children, now at university, with ‘I love you’, but I add a kiss at the end of my texts to them. Unlike my father, who used to close an email with ‘Regards, Dad’… What hasn’t changed I suspect, though, is the way a baby, particularly a sleeping baby, seems to draw the eye of its parents in loving adoration. Psychologists tells us that back to back on-line meetings are so very exhausting precisely because we are drawn to our own image on the screen, rather than engaging with the person we are in the meeting with, which leads to endless self-critique. By contrast, for a parent, gazing on their sleeping child feels particularly restorative and precious.

MUSIC: O Magnum Mysterium; Composer: Morten Lauridsen
Performed by Rundfunkchor Berlin directed by Nicolas Fink
From album Ottorino Respighi: Lauda per la Natività del Signore

The gaze of Mary on the broken body of her son Jesus as depicted in Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà is an extreme example of a very different moment of connection between mother and child. Mary’s gaze is downward, focused on his maimed body rather than his face. The gaze is filled with tenderness and pain. Its intense expression perhaps reflects the many occasions she had protected him by enfolding him with her love: from the swaddling bands before she placed him in the manger, to the clothes she will have made and laundered and mended for him through his life, and perhaps even to the seamless garment he was wearing that the soldiers gambled for beneath his cross. As she holds his body in her arms, Mary’s gaze is not one of worship but of maternal love for her near-naked son, and we can imagine the sorrow is intensified by the many shared moments of mundane and domestic closeness which Heaney’s poem describes.

The American academic Brené Brown speaks movingly of a lesson her own mother had taught her about not looking away from pain. Her mother told her that she should hold the gaze of those who are hurting – directly, eye to eye - rather than looking away. And that when she was in pain, she should seek out those who can do the same. For it’s when we are hurting that we most need to know there are others who will really ‘see’ us and what we are going through. For Brown, this has been a gift she has carried throughout her life.

In the reading from the Bible we heard earlier, Jesus holds the gaze of the naked man named Legion. He sees his need and calmly does what only he can do to meet it, strange as that story sounds to us now.

Much closer to home, I imagine we are all trying to face up to the refugee crisis created by the horrific war in Ukraine, and trying to resist the urge not to look as children stare out of train carriages and exhausted mothers drag suitcases behind them from one destination to another. How easy it is to switch channels, turn over the page, seek out that which delights the eye rather than confronts it with another’s pain.

Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at Glasgow University. She describes a moment when she met someone in need for the first time and with her husband decided she would not look away.

ALISON P

I first met Rema in 2009. My husband and had been volunteering with a charity that runs a ‘Rooms for Refugees’ scheme. And we’d been volunteering with them for several years and had 7 or 8 different people living with us, and, got a phone-call from them. I was actually working in the US at the time, saying oh we’ve got somebody, a young girl, she’s unaccompanied, we’d really love her to come to you, we think she’d be a safe place. And I said well, you know as soon as I’m back I’ll let you know, and 25 minutes after I’d landed at Glasgow airport, there was a young Eritrean girl on my doorstep coming to live with us for a while. 

ALISON J
Gosh, and what did you know about Rema – what was her background as far as you understood it?

ALISON P

So the only thing I knew about her was she was an unaccompanied minor, she was 16 years old and that she was from Eritrea. And she was destitute. That was all I knew. And honestly, Alison, I didn’t even know where Eritrea was on the map. I had to get an atlas out to look. 

ALISON J
And when did it become clear that she should become part of your family?

ALISON P

I mean within 48 hours we realised this was a really different emotional relationship that we had – the fact that this was a young girl was very different, even to some of the young pregnant women who had been destitute asylum seekers living with us before that, that our emotions were in play in a very different way, that we were needing to protect her, help her, show her the way – the way that you need to with someone who is much younger and hasn’t yet understood where the risks are in their lives, in the way that you might live in the world, you know, who’s asking questions which are at times quite naïve.

She was terrified she would be deported back to a situation that she’d fled from, that she might have to make that precarious journey again. She’d already been rescued from a boat that was sinking off Lampedusa.

But it was actually when she was taken into detention, and she was put into Dungavel Removal Centre for deportation as an unaccompanied minor, as a child, that then really a whole set of different emotions just coursed through both of us. And we realised almost in an instant – this child is now our daughter, she is given to us to care for. We are the ones who have to act now – this is ours to do. And I think it was there that we really started using the language of family, of fostering, this is our foster-daughter, she wants to stay with us. Doing a lot of this in really difficult circumstances, you know over the phone on a pay-phone from a detention centre.

MUSIC: Nyepi; Composer: Ólafur Arnalds
Performed by Voces8
From album re:member, Decca Music Group

And through lots of tears, but all of those feelings that people report to me of feeling for their own biological children when they’re in trouble - we were realising we were feeling for her.

My grand-daughter is now 3 and a half, I was present when she was born, which was the most amazing experience for me as someone who couldn’t have children of her own, biological children of her own, to be there when my foster-daughter gave birth.

And we know that over the years of – you know what Rema calls the years of ‘joiningment’ – that was the English word that she created herself for the experience we had of living together, and that we’ve used as well, those difficult years where out of the stress you make something new and creative, that we’ve made a family.

ALISON

Alison’s decision not to look away from Rema in her time of deep distress and need led to a transformation in both of their lives. We read about a similar transformation in the life of Legion, once Jesus has engaged with him at the point of his greatest need. Here’s the next part of their story from the Gospel of Luke:

DAVID: 34 When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. 35Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. 36Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. 37Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. 38The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

ALISON

Jesus has brought about the healing, but afterwards others step in to clothe the man and restore his dignity- perhaps his mother is still around to perform that role, as likely she had when he was born and needed the protection of being wrapped and swaddled. And then Jesus tells him to go home and share his story with those who had been alienated by his condition. In a sense the man is reborn, a new creation, through Jesus’ passion for restoring those who have had all their hope stripped away. Perhaps the man’s witness to the experience of being seen and healed and clothed transforms his community too. For Alison, a similar grace seems to have grown from the passionate experience of offering Rema hospitality:

ALISON P
All kinds of amazing, surprising things happened. I remember getting a phone-call from friends at the General Assembly that were just saying, Oh my goodness, somebody we don’t know, who’s not a part of any of our circles, has just stood up and said, what are you going to do about child refugees – like Rema. And suddenly this opened up all kinds of new avenues that eventually led to a question being asked in the European Parliament, and that led to protections being extended under the European Convention on Human Rights, for children to be able to live with the people that they considered to be their safe family.

MUSIC: Robin’s Cello, performed by Phoria
From album Caught a Black Rabbit, Akira Records

And all those people who were part of this and who joined us, it really did feel like we were held by a host of witnesses, and it was an extraordinary thing, and I think for my future life really showed me many things about how to try and keep that poise that Rema had taught me, a grace and a stillness, but also a defiance that says I am here and I am alive and I will live. And I think all of that just really taught us something about what it means to be part of communities of faith. Because of course there are many faith communities. And people of no faith at all who just joined with us in those actions.

ALISON J

For many people, Alison, life is tough and, it’s hard to look beyond your own family, where you perhaps don’t have any extra, there’s no extra to give for those who come from far away. What would you say to that sort of argument?

ALISON P

I’m really glad you asked me that question, Alison, because I think it’s real, and I think it’s also true, and I think there are, and always have been, limits on what it is possible for people to do. Now, what I was able to do, what we were able to do in our family came from our circumstances and our decisions. But they aren’t for everybody, and people ask those questions of themselves in very different ways. Just as I’ve given the examples of people popping multi-ride tickets through our door or just sending vouchers – I see that right across the country, that people are giving these acts of kindness, that are often called small acts of kindness, but often are huge acts of kindness. And we see those and they’re just beautiful, but I think it’s really important that we know that this is a shared, common task. That this is something that we need to have structured in as a response. That it needs to be fair, and that when it doesn’t have, and I know this professionally from my work with UNESCO, that when it’s disproportionate, then we have trouble. Particularly when we have required people to live together in communities with new people arriving, where we haven’t done the work of saying – When we do this, we will also make sure that we address, in very real ways, the needs of your community, the destitution that’s present in your whole community, that we address the housing needs, or the needs of the community centre or the needs of all the young people in your community. Because we know that if we don’t do this fairly and proportionately, we will stoke up anger. But also seeing this as something that we cannot do in our own strength alone. This has to be something that we do together.

MUSIC: Lord of life, we come to you; Tune: Eriskay Love Lilt
Performed by Glasgow University Chapel Choir directed by Katy Lavinia Cooper
From BBC archives

ALISON

Alison’s experience, arising from her decision to hold the gaze of the young girl who came into her life with almost nothing, has led her to appreciate her interconnectedness with her community, and her dependence on the promises of God too. She’s found strength when she’s looked beyond herself and her own resources. Prayer is one way for us all to connect with God and with one another: to hold the gaze of the hurting within the protective presence of the divine.

So let’s pray together now.

MUSIC: Robin’s Cello, performed by Phoria
From album Caught a Black Rabbit, Akira Records

Living God, creator of all, in Jesus there is no flinching or turning away from the pain of others. In your presence now we name the needs of the world, and know that you will not ignore our sense of helplessness, or the cries of those in peril. For all whose lives have been shattered by bombs and bullets in the cities and towns of Ukraine, we pray. For those in exile in strange lands, far from home, hearing foreign tongues, we pray. And we remember those whose loved ones have died in the fighting or been injured, all who fear and know things will never be the same again. Bring peace, dear Lord, and healing, an end to war and justice for those most affected by its ravages.

Where we feel most vulnerable, most naked, Lord, we ask for your protection. On this Mothering Sunday we pray for those who find the challenges of motherhood difficult, whether the child is a toddler or an adult. We pray for those who struggle to become mothers; and for those who find they have to justify their decision not to have children. We remember those whose relationship with their mother is fractured and painful. And We pray for mothers who have suffered the loss of their children, and for those of us who have lost our mothers and who miss them still. Help us to honour and forge new family relationships of all kinds, with the openness to others that you showed in the life and ministry of your Son. Amen.

MUSIC: Think of how God loves you; Composer: Sir James MacMillan
Performed by Cappella Nova directed by Alan Tavener
From album Who are these angels? Linn Records

ALISON

In the words Jesus taught his friends, we say…

The Lord’s Prayer

A rune, and a blessing from Carmina Gadelica:

I saw a stranger yestreen;
I put food in the eating place;
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place;
And, in the sacred name of the Triune,
He blessed myself and my house,
My cattle and my dear ones,
And the lark said in her song,
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger's guise.

The eye of the great God be upon you,

The eye of the Son of Mary Virgin be on you,

The eye of the Spirit mild be on you,

To aid you and to shepherd you ;

Oh the kindly eye of the Three be on you,

To aid you and to shepherd you. Amen.

MUSIC: O God, you search me and you know me (Psalm 139)
Composer: Bernadette Farrell
From album Christ be our light, OCP Publications