The second image was a wall that had been knocked about a bit, the plaster was crumbling, it had been patched, but may not stand for too long. My words for this slide were: In StreetSpace We call the walls to dust, beyond the old notions of centre and edge, there is no longer in and out, us and them, christian and non christian, kingdom and church, sacred and secular, we journey together and We call the walls to dust.
I could go on naming the walls, and many us would have different walls we need to call to dust. After doing my talk, one of the organisers tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to leave the room with her. Immediately my own insecurities from being called to the headmasters office (and on more than one occasion being beaten as a result) as a child flooded back. Here I was a 44 year old man, following the radical Christ, going on demos, and generally getting up the nose of the institution, still panicked, by a tap on the shoulder, and thoughts I had done something wrong. This was not the organisers intention, indeed I was simply being asked to run an additional workshop, but something triggered this strange response and it is going to take me a long time to call that particular wall to dust.
To often we patch walls up, rather than rebuild from the ground up, with different materials, it is too easy to take what is already there than go to new place, source new materials, experiment with new forms of building, and judge others trying to do so.
Bart Campolo has recently been in the “christian” news questioning his faith, the role of his father and liberal theology, now Bart is a humanist chaplain. I love Martin Saunders response here to an earlier article here. I wonder if we need to move beyond this, and if both articles in some way are a response to the walls we create in our minds, between doxy and praxis, right and wrong, in and out,etc What does it matter how Bart is tagged and who is to say he has departed from Christianity, labels are for jars not people. I call those walls to dust.
Great post Richard. Thanks for your honesty and for expressing the common experience that many of us share. Our memories, childhood experiences and traumas still haunt us, drive us and in some way shape us. I was particularly struck by your ‘tap on the shoulder’ experience. In body therapeutic work it is understood that the body holds emotions, memories, traumas, ‘The body remembers’ . Revisiting that ‘tap’ and the emotional trauma it holds is one way of turning that wall to dust.
Dear Richard, while i must confess to only having read this second part of the post due to time constraints. I want to shout loudly and empatically that i could not agree with you more. The sorts of thoughts you express in so far as i have understood them – especially in relation to walls that are inept, inapt, unhelpful and the like, having been going through my mind for a while now. In short, much as I would very much like to natter about this further (maybe face to face and soon? Im in the West Country now – Cirencester) for me, its like this – that Spirit (Holy) is not bound by Words or even by The Word. So neither by our words or by God’s. Beer? cuppa? something similar face to face dans la West Country?