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Several things stand out for me from the New York Public Library’s outstanding exhibition, “Celebrating 100 Years,” which collects notable historical objects – mostly books, maps and manuscripts, but also other items from the library’s own collection – on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the library’s historic and monumental Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan – yes, the building with the stone lions out front.

First, the exhibition is arranged thematically, not chronologically, the themes being: Observation, Contemplation, Creativity, and Society.  This was a creative decision that focuses attention on fundamental human activities rather than on time periods or academic fields.

Second, the explanation of “Contemplation,” obviously the sector of interest to religious folk, is nicely put in a way that has missiological significance:

Whether focused on a deity, a spiritual force, or the individual soul, the search for something beyond the material realities of daily life has always been one of the hallmarks of humanity.  From the Bhagavata Purana, celebrating stories of Krishna, to T. S. Eliot’s classic modernist poem The Waste Land, the items displayed here reflect the ceaseless desire for meaning.  In their own quests, individuals as varied as Dante Alighieri, Rabindranath Tagore, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm X have used travel – the journey, the pilgrimage, the search – as a metaphor or organizing principle.

Travel is intrinsic to mission, of course, for mission involves moving beyond one’s own community to encounter other communities.  The travel may be literal geographical travel to a distant geography, or it may be metaphorical travel to the very different social group on the next block.  For the authentic missioner, travel of whatever kind becomes a pilgrimage, that, is, a journey in which the traveler discovers something more about God.

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“And Mary gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).

A  few days before Christmas I was scurrying around an art supply store for a Christmas project.  I stopped in mid-stride.  There at the end of an aisle a woman was sitting on a crate.  Around her were cardboard boxes and picture frames left by the frenzy of shoppers, but she was at peace and totally preoccupied, because she had in her lap a baby.

She might have been from Africa, but she could have been born and brought up anywhere.  I couldn’t see the baby for all the little blankets, but I knew a baby was there.  The mother was stroking her baby’s face, letting her child know that mother was there, that the child was loved and cared for. 

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“Christmas is not a time or season but a state of mind,” said the student master of ceremonies at today’s Christmas dinner for hostel residents at Edwardes College in Peshawar.  “Christmas calls for love in action,” he said, continuing, “Every time we give for the sake of others we are celebrating Christmas.  He who does not have Christmas in his heart will not find Christmas in a tree.”

Moving for me in these remarks was the understanding and appreciation that the student expressed for how Christians have come to understand the festival that signals the start of what we regard as the central act in God’s redemption of the cosmos, the Christ event.  Celebration, not dialogue was the purpose of the dinner, and here was a member of another religion, the majority religion in that setting, interpreting the ethical implications of Christmas in a way that most Christians would fine quite congenial. 

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The latest pastoral letter from Bishop Julius Makoni of Manicaland, the eastern Zimbabwean diocese of the Church of the Province of Central Africa makes it clear that discord with the renegade bishop who has refused to relinquish diocesan property continues even as the diocese makes progress in building community and preparing future leaders.  As with Harare, the other Anglican diocese under siege, it is lamentable that a renegade bishop receives support from the Mugabe regime in hanging onto illegitimate power.

It is good to hear how heartening the visit by the Archbishop of Canterbury was in October.  Bp. Makoni confirms news accounts at the time that Rowan Williams was firm and clear with President Mugabe about the oppression that Anglicans have been experiencing from the renegade groups and law enforcement agencies.  It has always been clear that Mugabe’s professions of ignorance about what has been going on were sheer prevarication, and the archbishop’s visit was effective in removing the excuse that Anglicans’ suffering was previously unknown news.

Bp. Makoni’s letter follows:

ANGLICAN DIOCESE OF MANICALAND CPCA

Pastoral Letter                                       November 2011

To our Brothers and Sisters in the Anglican Diocese of Manicaland and to our friends further afield.

I write to you with great concern over the prevailing challenges and suffering the church is still going through in our diocese. I also write with great joy and hope when I consider the success stories in the diocese despite the challenges we continue to face daily.

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Amid all the Christian and Muslim reverence for Mary at the Annunciation, here’s an important question:  Was Mary chosen because she was great?  Or was Mary great because she was chosen – and for how she responded to being chosen?

The Renaissance paintings of Mary reading the Bible or interrupted at prayer – they’re based on the notion that Mary was someone super-special to begin with, extra-virtuous, extra-pious, as though God searched all of creation, or at least all Israel, and found the purest and most virtuous young woman.

We project all that onto Mary because our own drive for merit imagines that everything, including our relationship with God, is based on merit that we can generate, earn, record and stack up to ensure that we end up where we want to be, whether that’s at the head of the class, the head of the faculty, the top of the corporate ladder, or the top of Jacob’s ladder in heaven.

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Like Joseph the son of Jacob, Joseph the husband of Mary took signs seriously and had intriguing dreams.  His story touches us in the struggle we all have about signs (Matthew 1:18-25).  How do we know a sign to be a sign?  How do we know what it means?  How do we know whether to trust it?

Mary certainly trusted her sign, but at first Joseph saw it differently: it meant the marriage should be cancelled.  Then came the dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”  Was this an avoidance of hard reality?  Or grandiosity?  A convenient fantasy?  Or the truth?

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The last Kenya Communiqué from Gerry and Nan Hardison as they retire from ten years of seminary and hospital ministry in Masena in western Kenya exemplifies fine reflection by missionaries as they leave their work, reflection that is instructive for all of us.

To review, the Hardisons, already retired from long and successful careers in education and medicine, went in 2001 to Maseno, where Nan guided St. Philip’s Theological College and Gerry guided Maseno Hospital.  In blog posts over the last couple of days I’ve reproduced their last communiqué and shared my own acquaintance with them.

Here are some missiological reflections:

Realism, not Romanticism:

“We have met lots of people, some good and some bad; a few happy, but more sad,” they write, continuing: “We’ve seen life and death and too much of the latter. We have seen high spirits in the face of poverty and adversity but despair and hopelessness as well.”  It’s not that all Kenyans are wonderful people – or more wonderful than people in the West – or that all those who suffer are amazingly hopeful despite their suffering – characterizations too common among returned missioners, especially those who have gone for short visits.

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The closer we get to Christmas the more we think about family.  Christmas highlights family in the saga of Mary and Joseph, the birth of their first child, and the later stories about the three of them.  In old Cairo today one can go down into the Crypt of the Holy Family and see, as a yellow sign on the street announces, “where the Holy Family lived for some time.”

Mirroring the story’s family dimension, our own families are gathering for the festival: the familes that created and formed us, the families we have created and formed.  Family forms the baseline of our spirituality.  Our background growing up shapes decisions we make about churches, whether we continue in the same vein or choose a different direction.  More deeply, our families of origin affect our images of God, our confidence in God’s love for us, our style of connecting with others in community.

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The Christ Child comes into a world where people have been yearning for God from vastly diverse backgrounds and perspectives.  Jesus was born in a time of many religions new and old.  Those Wise Men from the East: What view of God did they have?  How did the trip to Bethlehem confirm or change their faith?

As in the first century, globalized communication, economics and culture in our time have brought encounter, jostling and now conflict between religions.  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many American churches reached out to mosques in their neighborhoods to reaffirm relationship.  The church-mosque-city procession organized in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, was a counter-sign to violence that marked my consciousness, even as conflicts with religious overtones have multiplied in the world since then.

One flashpoint has been northern Nigeria, where people have died as Christians and Muslims fought about shariah law, economic power, and religious insults.  In Kaduna, rival groups led by Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pentecostal Pastor James Wuye were embroiled enough for Pastor Wuye to lose an arm in one skirmish.

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Receiving this week the last “Kenya Communiqué” from Nan and Gerry Hardison as they retire from their mission work at Maseno in western Kenya puts me in mind of the first time I met them.  At the ecumenical Mission Personnel Orientation in Santa Fe in January 2002, where I had been asked to assist, two of the 20 outgoing Episcopal missionaries were Nan and Gerry from San Diego.

They were in their 70s, having retired from successful educational and medical careers in the USA.  They could have stayed in San Diego to enjoy retirement close to their grandchildren.  But no, they heard God calling them into mission.  Nan is a theological educator, and Gerry is a physician.  By the time of the orientation, they’d already been working for several months in Diocese of Maseno North.

I asked the missionaries to introduce themselves and share their understanding of Christian mission around the circle.  When Gerry’s turn came he launched into an extended and animated description of the problems in Maseno: how the church hospital had declined to a skeleton operation through mismanagement and lack of personnel, how everything they tried to do was afflicted by corruption in the church and in local government, how discouraged but persevering the staff was, how every step forward was followed by two steps backward – the list of obstacles was evidently endless.

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“It is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it.”  So said William Temple, English bishop and theologian in the first half of the 20th century.  Labor relations and social justice, mission and ecumenism were all commitments that Temple engaged in the public eye of church and state.  Yet for this major activist, praying was the central act.

What does that mean?  It is only in prayer that we can track along with what God may be up to with us and in the world.  And what does that mean?  Commitments and initiatives are life-absorbing instead of life-giving when they become our fixation.  Regardless how compelling the cause, we need regularly to let it go and simply be.  In that relinquished state, we are again available to God.  We encounter God afresh.  We encounter ourselves afresh.  We become able to access again the true depth and breadth of life.  We become accessible to God’s mid-course corrections.  This state of attentive rest with God is what the Christian tradition knows as contemplation.  It renews our very being.

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Nan and Gerry Hardison at our home in April 2009

Below is the last Kenya Communiqué from Dr. Nan and Dr. Gerry Hardison as they retire from ten years of faithful, indeed outstanding, mission work in Kenya.  I have a lot of commentary to share at this transition in their lives, but it’s already too long to append, so for now I simply reproduce their letter here and commend it to your reading and reflection:

Down through the years there have been hundreds of good-bye songs, both popular and classic. As we draft this, the last of our Communiqués from Kenya, the song that best expresses our emotions is the one adapted from one of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads by Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the late 40s or early 50s. It goes like this:

   I’ve sung this song and I’ll sing it again

            Of the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been

            ‘Bout some of the troubles that bothered my mind

            And lots of good people that I left behind

                                       So long, it’s been good to know you  (x3)

It’s a long time since I’ve been home

                                      And I’ve got to be movin’ along.

And so it is with us. We have met lots of people, some good and some bad; a few happy, but more sad. We’ve seen life and death and too much of the latter. We have seen high spirits in the face of poverty and adversity but despair and hopelessness as well. Our 10 years in Kenya have planted lots of troubles that bother our minds, troubles which will continue to bother our minds until our dying day. We are changed persons.

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One of the great transformations of recent world history was South Africa’s change from a political system based on racial separation and White domination to a democratic state in which the Black majority could shape a national future.

Equally compelling was the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which became a sign that God’s vision for reconciliation can be realized in a public, national and secular political process.  That work could not and did not achieve full justice and reconciliation.  Instead, it was a sign, a sign that pointed to a vision that many others strive to fulfill.

Among them are James and Lorine Williams, Episcopal missionaries from Buffalo, New York, who serve St. Peter’s Church in Klerksdorp in the Diocese of Msalato, with James as the rector.  St. Peter’s used to be a White congregation that did not welcome Christians of other races.

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A couple of stray missiological thoughts about today’s Daily Lectionary reading from the Revelation to John, which is the messenger’s word to the church in Laodicea (Rev. 3.14-22):

• Wealth and poverty as metaphors of people’s experience of spiritual states: Many times you’ve probably heard enthused returnees from a short-term mission trip say something like, “Those people we were with are so poor they have hardly anything, but spiritually they’re so rich.  We realize that we with all our possessions are spiritually poor and have so much to learn from them!”

Such statements by people from Ohio or Alabama or Connecticut or Texas or California about the people they’ve visited in Honduras or Haiti or South Africa or India are so common that they’ve become a cliché.  And the Short-Term Mission Movement, as it morphs toward what I hope will be the Mission Pilgrimage Movement, is rightly beginning to scrutinize and interrogate the short-termers’ accounts:

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Valeska Daley’s rounds included boarding a rickety cable car and cranking herself over a river fifty feet below her in Honduras.  “It’s pretty scary,” she laughed, “but it’s the only way to get where I need to go.”

Where she needed to go was yet another village where people were poor – poor in money, poor in farm equipment, poor in education, poor in prospects for flourishing.  Valeska, a Young Adult Service Corps missionary from the Diocese of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church, didn’t go with food or money.  Instead, vision and skills were what she shared.  Vision for the difference people can make by working together.  Skills in micro-enterprise development, community organizing, and project management that she learned through her study and experience in business.