Surprised by the man on the borrowed donkey: Ordinary Blessings. Denise Ackermann
come to Taizé each year to live in community, worship together and commit themselves to prayer, Bible study and communal work. Ubi caritas is taken from the antiphon sung during the foot-washing ceremony on Maundy Thursday. Early manuscripts contain a slightly different version: Ubi caritas est vera … (Where charity is true), which has now been incorporated into a recent Roman missal.
Agape is the New Testament Greek word for God’s unending love for all human beings, as well as for our love for one another.
The quotation of Bernard Lonergan is taken from William Johnston, Being in Love: The Practice of Christian Prayer (London: HarperCollins, 1989), 12.
The phrase “love your neighbour as yourself” occurs in Matthew 19:19, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27; Romans 12:10; Galatians 5:14 and James 2:8.
Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915. His father was from New Zealand and his mother, an American, died when he was six years old. After schooling in France and in England, he attended Columbia University, New York, where he graduated with an M.A. degree in literature. After converting to Catholicism, he entered Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky in 1941. His spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (London: Burns and Oates, 2002) in which he chronicles his early years and the impulses that led him to join the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (known as Trappists) where he spent the next twenty-seven years until his untimely death in 1968, became a bestseller. His prodigious corpus of work includes books (some seventy), letters, poems, monographs and journal articles that range from the popular to the scholarly. Today he is considered one of the most important twentieth century Catholic writers on spirituality.
The Christian Institute of Southern Africa was founded in 1963, prompted by the disastrous conclusion of the Cottesloe Consultation in 1960. Delegates from the World Council of Churches (WCC) met with some eighty members of South African churches at Cottesloe and resolved to reject race as a basis for excluding some people from membership of certain churches. It also approved the right of people to own land and to have a say in how they are governed. In other words, it rejected apartheid. The Dutch Reformed Church could not agree to these resolutions and left the WCC in 1961. A deep rift remained between the Afrikaans and English-speaking churches in South Africa for the next thirty years. The Christian Institute aimed to promote dialogue and to critique apartheid. Beyers Naudé was its first national director and the Pro Veritate newsletter was its mouthpiece. This newsletter was banned in 1977. See John W. de Gruchy with Steve de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa, 25th Anniversary ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), for a comprehensive account of recent church history in South Africa. (Also see note on Beyers Naudé in chapter 3 about Holiness, page 109.)
The Black Sash was founded in 1955 when six women met one morning in May at a suburban home in Johannesburg. They shared a sense of outrage at the planned removal of the coloured (the recognised name for people of mixed racial origins in South Africa) people from the voters’ role in the Cape Province of South Africa. This resulted in an organised protest march, and a petition signed by nearly a hundred thousand people – but to no avail. After losing this battle, this band of white women decided to continue as a voluntary human rights organisation in resistance to apartheid. Their name came from the black sashes that were worn as a sign of mourning at injustice whenever they appeared in public protests. Until 1994, they campaigned against the pass laws, monitored court proceedings, set up advice offices to help black people deal with the pass laws, and conducted silent standing protests whenever further excesses were perpetrated by the apartheid rulers. When Nelson Mandela made his first speech as a free man, he called the Black Sash (together with the National Union of South African Students) “the conscience of the white nation”. The Black Sash was reconstituted in 1995 as non-racial humanitarian organisation and continues to act on behalf of the needy in our society.
Alles sal regkom is a commonly used Afrikaans saying for “everything will be fine”.
The prophet Jeremiah (12:1) raises the famous question that echoes down the ages: “Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” I struggled with the theodicy question in a previous book, After the Locusts: Letter from a Landscape of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), in chapter 4 on the need to lament. We are challenged to hope in situations that give rise to despair. The language of lament is a way of dealing with Jeremiah’s cry – we lament our situation to God in language that is direct, truthful and unafraid. The ancient Hebrews held onto prophetic hope, hope that enabled the prophet Micah (4:3) to say: “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
The quote from Teilhard de Chardin is taken from Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 13.
Augustine (born c.354–died c.430), philosopher, theologian and Bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa (present-day Algeria), was the most influential thinker in early Western Christianity. His contemporary, Jerome, described Augustine as the person who “established anew the ancient faith”. After reading an account of the life of Anthony of the Desert, Augustine gave up teaching rhetoric in Milan and devoted his life to ministry in the church. He was a prolific writer and his works comprise tomes on Christian doctrine (e.g. On Christian Doctrine, On the Trinity, and The City of God), commentaries on the psalms, Genesis and Romans, letters and sermons. His Confessions give a personal account of his early life and his conversion to Christianity. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).
For the last section entitled Blessings, refer also to Denise Ackermann, “Christian ideals laid bare by two beatitudes”, in Faith in Action, ed. Sarah Rowland Jones.157-176 (Wellington: Lux Verbi, 2008).
Works consulted
A Book of Hope. Cape Town: David Philip, 1992.
Ackermann, Denise M., “Christian Ideals Laid Bare by Two Beatitudes.” In Faith in Action, edited by S.R. Jones, 157-176. Wellington: Lux Verbi, 2008.
Ackermann, Denise M., “The Alchemy of Hope.” In A Book of Hope, 28-30. Cape Town: David Phillip, 1992.
Alves, Ruben. Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity and the Rebirth of Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Armstrong, Karen. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. London: The Bodley Head, 2011.
Barth, Karl. God Here and Now. Translated by P. M. van Buren. London: Routledge, 2009.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. London: SCM Press, 1959.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Edited by E. Bethge. Translated by N. H. Smith. London: SCM Press, 1971.
Braaten, Carl E. The Future of God: The Revolutionary Dynamics of Hope. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.
Brueggemann, Walter. Hope within History. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987.
Gaybba, Brian. “Love as the Lamp of Theology.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, no. 65 (1988), 27-37.
De Gruchy, John W., ed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Cambridge Companions to Religion Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
De Gruchy, John W., & Steve de Gruchy. The Church Struggle in South Africa. 25th Anniversary ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by T. H. Johnson. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1960.
Dillard, Anne. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Eagleton, Terry. The Meaning of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Galilea, Sergio. Spirituality of Hope. Translated by T. Cambias. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.
Jackson, Timothy P. Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Johnston,