Urban art in Stellenbosch

This is a bit of a random blog, simply celebrating the creative spirit in one of South Africa's loveliest and safest cities. The sculpture of a cheetah, outside an exclusive gallery, is exquisite, capturing the speed, lightness, energy and concentration of the chase. Ironically, though, we find it in a part of the country where the wildlife has almost been wiped out apart from in exclusive game parks frequented by foreigners with the purchasing power to install the art and see the animals. The rarer the animal, the more valuable the sculpture. When the cheetah is extinct in the wild, I wonder whether the art will die with it? I'm not knocking the artist, but musing on the relationship between art and nature, and our desire to capture the beauty.

 Like many people, I want to touch and feel sculpture, so this strange fellow felt closer to me than the remote, aloof and highly-priced animal. The sculptor, Jean Theron Louw, portrays the old man Oupa Carlos musing on the planet that we have scarred, and wondering - at 3.23 a.m. - whether his life was egocentric or soul-centric. It's a little 'new age' and 'mother earth' and all that, but raises some of the same issues that I did about the cheetah above. "Did you care for mother earth?"

"I don't know whether I cared enough" is the honest answer, but I know I tread lightly through the land, and hurt when I see how scarred it is. But it's romantic in an unhelpful way to care for mother earth without caring for her children, and so often issues of ecology and issues of justice seem to be poles apart. For me, the next 'you can't be serious' poster is the prophetic warning. Ageless is the dream, instant is the mode of delivery, and it is of course available if you have enough money to purchase it. Sadly, it usually seems to involve botox. Pumped full of chemicals, I can neither smile nor frown any more, but at least the wrinkles that show that I am alive have been smoothed out in a chemical death. Now you know why I prefer to photograph old people who have 'let themselves go'. Such a negative phrase, which needs to be given a positive spin. They've let themselves go, they've let themselves live, without fear, without pretence.

If you ever read this blog, it's probably because you can't sleep, and I confess that it is little more than meandering thoughts about an unconnected series of photographs. Maybe that's what art is given us for, to provoke us to think, to live, to change. Let me know what you think!

Chatfields' 2016 Christmas letter

December 2016

Dear all

 If we were Chinese, we might designate this year the year of the red-billed quelea, which we saw for the first time this month in South Africa. Month after month, for us and for the whole family, it’s been a year of new beginnings. Adrian retired from paid employment at Ridley Hall, we both moved to a new house (only the second we’ve ever owned), Michael and Helen moved from RAF Honington to RAF Odiham and new jobs, Dave started a new life as a self-employed electrician… Hannah spectacularly completed GCSEs and went into the Sixth Form (yikes!) and Charlotte completed her first year at secondary school. That leaves us with only one granddaughter in single digits.

Since we moved here to Ilkeston, we’ve kept work at bay, concentrating on getting to know a new though very familiar neck of the woods. Il’son is just over the Derbyshire border from Stapleford, where we used to live, but we remain within ¼ mile of the same river Erewash, albeit on the rive droite. We’re nearer to Derby than to Nottingham, but Nottingham will probably always feel like the home city. This whole valley is part of the old coalfield area, and both of us have mining in the blood. The starkest contrast lies in moving from the top 10% of wards in the country to the bottom 1%, and it shows.

Much of the past five months has been spent away from home. We had a week with very good friends in Calderdale in early September, and Adrian was able to run his third fell marathon in Brontë country. Then we holidayed with Jill’s sister Lynda and husband in the Cotswolds near Evesham, while Lynda recovered from a broken kneecap. The post-retirement bash was five weeks in South Africa camping, first in Kruger, then in Stellenbosch and finally in the wonderfully named Camdeboo (sounds like something from Puss in Boots), in temperatures between 24̊ and 42̊ C. Highlights included seeing all the Big Five on the same day and spotting 155 bird species.

We spend a lot of our time at the moment looking forward. 2017 was going to be the year in which we identified a church we could be associated with, but that’s now been postponed, as we shall be helping out in a city centre church where the vicar will shortly be off for surgery. That will take us up to Easter, and then we will have to think and pray again. Jill is in the process of exploring and training for voluntary hospital chaplaincy at Queen’s Medical Centre. When he is not walking with Jill, running or cycling, Adrian continues to give spiritual direction, supervise theses, and speak at occasional retreats.

It goes without saying that if you are ever in the area, and would like to stop over for coffee or tea, or even have a bed overnight, you’d be very welcome. Please get in touch!

Thank you to all of you who in different ways have sent us your news: we really appreciate keeping in touch, and value your friendship and care. Our prayer for you and all our friends is that in the midst of a dark and uncertain world, you find the peace of Christ, hope for the future and the strength to face all that life brings.

Adrian and Jill

A reflection on the crisis in Syria for Ridley Hall

Nadim Nassar of the Awareness Foundation spoke to us at Federation Worship on Tuesday 23rd February on the plight of Christians in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. He drew attention to the scales which often blind our eyes to the reality of what is going on. None of us left unmoved; many were deeply shocked and shaken. It’s always difficult to be faced with hard truths from the pulpit, and one of us said that “for me the talk felt less like a sermon, more like a psalm of lament. I think we should be humble enough to accept its bleakness as a very understandable response to the context he comes from.”

I’m really grateful for those who had time to respond to my email, and what follows is a collation of those comments (in inverted commas) and my own reflections. I take full responsibility for it all, of course, and am simply trying to work out what it all means for me as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

The first thing, of course, is that we need to speak out the hard truths, especially as the pressures of our innate desire to be ‘nice’ or kind collude with certain forms of political correctness and cultural politeness. “I agree that we ought not to feel helpless or be driven by guilt, and I really do think that we should be preaching the good news. However, I also think that sometimes it is of value to be left feeling 'hanging', uncomfortable and challenged, without a tidy conclusion. I wonder if too often we seek to sanitize what we hear from the pulpit…” Another said that it’s ‘good to feel uncomfortable’.

Secondly, the call in the service and sermon to pray is exactly right. Prayer is not what we are called to do when all else fails, but the starting point for everything else. To use a journeying metaphor, it gives the only true compass bearing. I know that some weeks ago, God gave me a clear sense of responsibility to pray for Syria until peace comes, and I’ve been neglectful of that. So part of my prayer has to be an act of sorrow for my blindness, without wallowing in unhelpful guilt. We spent long enough in South Africa to know how much difference, in sometimes miraculous ways, the prayers of millions made to the desperately tense first elections in 1994.

Many of you spoke about this call to prayer: “It is easy for us to say that we are not blind and that we are doing things in certain places, but I think we are blind to the power that our prayers have in regards to the heavenly realms, when we pray, when we intercede for a place, a nation, a people, we are crying out for God's mercy and we are advancing the troops in the heavenly places. I am preaching to myself here. Prayer is powerful. I think we have lost touch with its power and necessity and we should be praying more and thinking about how we can be practical at the same time. Praying “Lord have mercy” seems to be the best words to utter sometimes in the darkest of times and for the places where pain and suffering is in abundance.” I found myself running the Cambridge Half Marathon and praying the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord, Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on Syria.’

Thirdly, there were those of you who pointed out that “‘you should never pray a prayer that you are unwilling to be the answer to.’…The thing that I need to remember is that there is a big difference between being willing to be the answer to a prayer and being able to be the answer to a prayer.” There were lots of practical suggestions, ranging from getting involved in organizations like Open Doors or Nadim’s own Awareness Foundation all the way through to various kinds of political action. Ridley Runners’ own small involvement with refugees – many of them Syrian - through the half-marathon is a little example of the way in which many small acts of engagement ultimately add up to something more significant.

It would be easy to romanticize our little attempts not to play helpless, and I don’t want to do that. For me, the opportunity to run was both a 2 hour space to pray for Syria and an uncomfortable reminder that all this is not going to go away any time soon. Small engagement leads to personal connection, and when ‘victims of war’ become flesh and blood people with names and lives like us, the scales begin to fall away.

Part of the process is certainly helping our Christian communities and congregations to understand and engage better. Some reminded me that many churches are very active in a whole range of ways, for which we ought to give thanks. Little churches can have little engagements just as individual Christians can, and Christian leaders have a responsibility to call us to shared action in the public square. We might even dare to call it political action.

Finally, we might be able to apply what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1 about the paradox of tribulation and consolation to our experience of this crisis. The heart of the matter is that here as in so many places, we see Christ crucified, and we are called to accompany him wherever he calls. Our tribulation somehow becomes consolation to others. Don’t get me wrong. I can’t ever say that the Syrian tribulation can be read in this way. I can only speak thus of my own tribulations. So in Colossians 1.24, Paul speaks of “rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” I find it difficult to get my head around this, but feel instinctively that it is really important for me.

Maybe it's better put in these last words from another of you: “On reflecting this morning on my feelings last night I started to see something: the good news perhaps, is that in the darkest of places; in the bloody pain and torment; the torture and systematic killing of Christians - we have hope. In that dark, bleak, painting there was light. This man standing in front of the people holding his arms outstretched was trusting in God in a way that I have never. His passion for God shone through. The passion of his people for God and their reliance on Him was a beacon of hope. We can do something — we can trust in God to help us to speak out about the situation, to call for justice for our brothers and sisters in Christ, to cry out as His Body as it is beaten and kicked by those who would stifle our God. The very fact that Christianity is such a threat to those people should give us cause to rejoice, and to reach out to our brothers and sisters who suffer and let them know that whilst we have never known their torment — that we stand with them.”