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Dancing on a Toilet Seat

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to a friend, 1850).
As far as I'm concerned, these 170 year-old words could have been written yesterday. And no doubt I could find even earlier quotes to similar effect (though the analogy would be hard to beat). I can't decide if the timelessness of impending cataclysm is more reassuring than it is horrifying, or vice-versa. (Matthew 24:6 springs to mind).

Is it too much of a cliché to say this isn't how things were meant to be? Is it too naive to suggest it's not how they have to stay?

In The Very Good Gospel, Lisa Sharon Harper writes compellingly about the vision of creation's perfect 'goodness' as glimpsed in Genesis 1. "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." (Gen 1:31a). The Hebrew word tov (the 'good' of 'very good'), she emphasises, is inherently relational, applying not just to objects or people but to the ties and connections between them (p31). Meanwhile, me'od (the 'very' part) means forceful or vehement.
It [creation] is tov me'od because all the relationships between things overflow with goodness! [...] God's mighty web of interconnected relationships was forcefully good, vehemently good, abundantly good! The relationship between humanity and God was forcefully good. Humanity's relationship with self was forcefully good. The relationship between humanity and the rest of creation [...] between men and women [...] within the first community [...] between humanity and life itself [...] was forcefully good. (Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel, pp31-32).
Throughout the rest of the book, which I vehemently recommend, for what it's worth, Harper explores the ways that we can experience and participate in the 'very good' of God's Kingdom in the here and now of our fragmented world. Against a backdrop of resurgent Christian powermongering (see especially US politics) and all the attendant associations between Christian 'interests' and oppressive worldly agendas, her message of wholeness and dignity for all in the name of Jesus has proved a huge and life-giving source of relief to me in recent weeks.

The fragmentation persists though, as does Christianity's part in perpetuating it, so that in the midst of my very real hope there remains grief, confusion, and the ongoing challenge of disentangling Kingdom from Christendom...


SAID AND DONE
...and behold, it was very good.           

The beginning was sound, and the end was a cry,
And in between we made a lot of noise. 

And the cry was ours, and the noise was sound
And in the end we made mincemeat of each other. 

Or we were the end, and the noise was barely beginning,
And won’t somebody please think of the children? 

It was the beginning of the end, and we were sound,
And our children made everyone cry. 

It was noise from the beginning, the children cry,
And we had made something of nothing. 

We didn’t know what we were doing, between us,
But between us we made a lot of children. 

And the cry was sound, and the end was a beginning,
And in the noise we made of it what we would. 

Carolyn Whitnall, 2018.

 

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