On prayer

I continue my reflections on my past campus work with a third post that follows on from this one (1) and this one (2). The connections here to travel, apart from the obvious mentions, are the culture of individualism that has given rise both to travel and perhaps to some of the drive for activism. Keep an eye out and let me know what you think!

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“Travel is wonderful. A near-perfect state of surprise, wonder, and excitement. A chance to challenge your assumptions, defeat your prejudices, and write a new story for yourself. As a traveller. An exile. An adventurer. An explorer. As someone with great stories of struggle, survival, curiosity, courage and reinvention. But the pursuit of those narratives can be harmful, too.

Everything in life is about dosage. I’d gotten the dosage wrong. I felt ready to reprioritise, to commit to [a place], to [a partner], to my job…, to staying when things got hard, instead of running away to some romanticised, mirage, wanderlust new.”

Taken from chapter 13 of ‘Don’t Go There’ (Adam Fletcher)

There are great dangers of parachurch ministry amongst students. Firstly that the ‘parachurch’ bit can often come unstuck from the local church (we’ll come to this at some other point). But also that it is amongst students.

Students are deemed the next generation of world leaders, culture changers, thought shapers and activists. Increasingly much of society is encouraged to think about going to college – what perhaps once before was something just for a certain section of society. The student world is a fast-paced, fast-changing world, full of possibility, challenge and adventure, where the average student is impressionable and has plenty of free time (even if they don’t think so).

And so the role of the CU Staffworker is both a joy and a challenge. A joy, because very few other roles in ministry see so much change so quickly, so much fruit and such quick forgiveness (or memory) for mistakes made. And a challenge, for the same reason as the travel writer above articulated. Just as there are problems when the traveller lives for the romanticised travel-blog life, shaped by wanderlust and living every day as an their own adventure. So the staffworker when not grounded in the ancient gospel narrative, surrounded by the global church and embedded and submitted to a local gospel-preaching church, can quickly get the dosage wrong and forget the calling to which they are living. Let me explain how that looked in my life at times over these years.

“…the staffworker when not grounded in the ancient gospel narrative, surrounded by the global church and embedded and submitted to a local gospel-preaching church, can quickly get the dosage wrong and forget the calling to which they are living.”

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The danger of activism

One of David Bebbington’s four key characteristics of evangelicalism is activism. Evangelicals are activists. We love living out the gospel and letting it shape everything in life. This, unsurprisingly, is a very popular thing these days. Here are 3 examples in the Irish church at large:

1. Within the Church we are having vast swathes of people move from saying “God is building His Kingdom” to talk about how “we bring in the Kingdom of God”. We emphasize our action.
   
2. Within a very young and fragile Irish evangelical Church, students are often infuriated by the lack of zeal and purity and so break off into activist groups who seek to live a ‘more authentic’ life (often seen in groups like The Last Reformation, some Torah-emphasizing ‘Christian’ groups, the lure of subtle cult groupings currently having sway in Ireland, and sometimes just in lone-wolf evangelists, burdened for the lost).
   
3. And in a progressive theological scene which seeks to constantly find new things we missed in the Bible (like every PhD is designed to do), the New Perspective on Paul speaks into the vacuum that occurred when western individualism injected toxins into much of evangelicalism, and seeks to claim that free grace found in being united with Jesus and justified by faith alone is not good enough a motivator to propel us into bearing fruit. (Mr Vanhoozer gives a far better summary.)

So what about when we get the dosage wrong?

Well in each of these three things we’ve seen the disasters that have happened in the wider Church.

In the first, we often had many quick converts – the promise of God’s Kingdom here on earth as it is in Heaven is a juicy one. Glimpses can be seen. But soon people get fed up of how hard life is, how slow spiritual change is in our hearts and others, and many grow disillusioned with all they were promised and wander from the faith. There are better activist groups out there, they think. I have seen this in the many churches who do such wonderful work in communities, and use language like the aforementioned.

In the second, the newly formed ‘authentic’ groups often die off quickly. Partly because they have no identity other than being the “radicals”. And that identity is a fragile one. Either they find flaws within the group and need to split again. Or they start drawing different lines and emphasis to what the scriptures emphasize, and so forsake the gospel. Sadly they often do so having already ruined young believers – giving them a deep disillusionment about faithful gospel churches, or even worse in the case of some cults operating in Ireland currently, also giving them a suspicion of their own family and friends, to the point of cutting connections with them.

In the third, those who fully embrace the NPP, perhaps as a right reaction to this over-individualistic reading of the scriptures, often end up unable to clearly articulate the gospel in a way that doesn’t lose the assurance of faith that the New Testament writers seem to have, and succumb to a bland ecumenism (which seems a wonderful unity until you arrive at it and try and figure what gospel you have left).

<sup>Countries colored with green have cultures that are more individualistic than the world average. Countries colored in red have relatively collectivistic cultures.Reference
Beugelsdijk, S., & Welzel, C. (2018). Dimensions and dynamics of national culture: Synthesizing Hofstede with Inglehart. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 49(10), 1469-1505.

TheCultureDemystifier, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.</sup>

But as well as these general trends in church life in Ireland, I found the tug of activism on my own heart as a Staffworker.

1. As a lone staffworker in Munster, I was tempted to think that I needed to work harder and longer, particularly with such short campus semesters. Campus X would not have a gospel presence unless I got there this week and met with strategic leaders and got everything done. That perhaps was true to some extent, and there are indeed times for sacrifice and hard graft (like in any part of life). But living on high doses of such activism without deep gospel roots would soon make me think more of myself and my role that I ought, and would soon lead me to burnout, cynicism and fatigue (as sadly happened with quite a proportion of staff who I served with, in different ways).
   
2. The more I lived like the above, the more I would be tempted to start trying to take short-cuts to make life/ministry simpler and easier. Instead of shaping student convictions by discipling with God’s Word open and letting them lead (even if that meant in weakness or with failures), I would be tempted to primarily give my (good) advice, turn up to every meeting and try and maybe implicitly control the direction of things by my presence or reasoning. Instead of seeing that the longterm way that faithful gospel witness might be on a campus was to develop a sustainable model that didn’t depend on me, I would be tempted to run round trying to be the hero in some ways, receiving praise from many Christians for such “radical, sacrificial living”.
   
3. And the more I was tempted to give myself to activism in small ways and big, the more exhausting it became, and the further from enjoying God’s heart I would drift. His yoke being light and his burden being easy were not recognisable to me in the day to day life I sometimes lived. And if His heart was not that of a generous Father, why would I pray?

…if His heart was not that of a generous Father, why would I pray?

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I found prayer was the first thing to disappear when my hands crafted activism, my heart was enveloped in busyness and my mind chose reason. When I was weary or tired, I was filled with cynicism and bitterness. When I was unsure, my mind replayed scenarios again and again. When I had not completed my task list that day, my hands applied to work longer hours.

None of it brought it to our Heavenly Father in prayer.
None of it brought it to our Servant King ruling on the throne.
None of it brought it to the Holy Spirit for Him to be at work even when we couldn’t be.
None of it enjoyed the freedom of the gospel which meant things weren’t resting primarily on my shoulders.
None of it basked in the gentleness of Jesus.
None of it modelled a life, communing with our Triune God.

I must say that through it all, none of this may have been obvious to the outsider that I was battling and wrestling deep within me to decide each day who I worshipped. I prayed with everyone I met. I filled in work monthly report logs which showed my working hours. I sat under fantastic gospel teaching which sought to persuade my heart that people did not need my good advice (primarily) they needed to meet the living God and hear Him speak. I knew that team life was the ideal. And God graciously seemed to be powerfully at work in the region on the campuses, drawing many to Him. But the tug of activism was still strong.

If you want to hear my full story of how I ended up broken by my own activism physically, I tell it in my book (chapter 2). [Ironically my thoughts on travel were part motivated from long hours living the “activist” life on the road between campuses! How gracious He is to bring good from ugly times!]

• It took many car journeys to turn my cynical thought cycles into hours of prayer on the road.
• It took many prayer letters to persuade myself that I was not the hero telling my story, but that God was building His Church through His ordinary people and their prayers.
• It took many months of realising that God could, would and had raised up many to follow Him, even on the days I felt most alone in that role.
• It will be many years before I will ever be as content as the old ladies in many of my supporting churches, who sit in their living room and pray all afternoon, with sparkling joy in their eyes as they do so.

• I am thankful for the life of my praying mother, always starting each day in prayer over breakfast.
• I am thankful for the life of my praying father, leading the family to rhythms of prayer and worship in different ways over the years.
• I am thankful for praying churches that I was part of who always valued corporate prayer.
• I am thankful for those in other churches I learned so much about prayer from, as we prayed for the nations together each month.
• I am thankful for the example of many fellow-labourers, like the Cork campus workers/lecturers prayer group that met once a week to pray together without fail.
• I am thankful for my first ever supervisor, who suggested to me to take working hours (sometimes days) to spend in prayer alone.
• I am thankful for an older worker from another organisation who took me away on silent retreat to show me just how entwined my heart was to the noise and busyness of life.
• I am thankful for individuals and families who have lifted me (and the work in Munster) up to God for years upon years in faithful prayer.
• I am thankful for those on our island who for generations have been praying for the gospel to go out everywhere.
• I am thankful for those in other parts of the world who have been praying for Ireland, unbeknownst to me, not only in historically Christian parts of the world, but in places like China, burdened for unreached Europe.

And I’m thankful that the good news of a Triune God, played out over all history across all peoples, is a wonderful corrector against individualistic activism done from a restless heart. This, of course, is the evangelicalism I grew up with. A deep-rooted, apostolic faith, founded on God and His words (in the scriptures) which gives us much strength as we live out our faith in light of His finished work on the cross and his intercession on our behalf, and as we act together as a Church on our knees. Will the young church scene here embrace it and grow to participate in that tradition, contextualised to Irish life today? We pray onwards.

Kiss the Wave: embracing God in your trials (Furman, 2018, Crossway)

I was given this as a free review copy by the Evangelical Bookshop Belfast. You can buy it from them here, with free UK postage. (Postage to Ireland is normally cheaper than Amazon too.) This in no way meant I had to give a positive review of the book.

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As I’ve said before, I’ve been using this lockdown period to explore more why as a western individual, I struggle so much with suffering in my worldview. Despite following a suffering Saviour for years, every time I experience suffering or talk to those who suffer, I feel not only the fact that this suffering ought not to be in general, but I feel grieved that this has happened to me personally. I deserve better! (Or so I think.) The response of my fellow believers in Africa stuns me. And teaches me a lot.

Dave Furman is a church planter in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). And although his story (see the video above) appears at several key points in the book, it does not dominate the book. This book is centrally focused on helping us grapple with the God of the gospel more, so that Dave’s story, can be our story – of being sustained and even finding deep-rooted joy in the midst of horrific pain, that never seems to cease, and which leads to emotional and relational distress. In fact, I nearly at times lost sight of Dave while reading the book, which in my eyes, was not actually the most helpful. None-the-less, the book is an absolute delight, refreshing, simple and a treasure to ponder, even for someone who reads an awful lot.

“We came to the village intending to change the world for Jesus, but I couldn’t even change my jeans without help.”

Dave’s writing feels like a powerful collection of quotations of many ‘greats’ of recent Christian writing, combined with huge chunks of Biblical wisdom and comfort and finely honed into a soothing package of goodness. It is easy to pick up and read in one go, or perhaps better, taken chapter by chapter and processed over two weeks of devotions.

Quoting Keller in the introduction, it is for everyone, because even if you’re not suffering right now:

“No matter what precautions we take, no matter how well we have put together a good life, no matter how hard we have worked to be healthy, wealthy, comfortable, with friends and family, and successful with our career — inevitably something will ruin it.”

Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering

Each chapter starts with a short story from someone Dave knows who has deeply suffered, followed by a connected meditation on some of the most beautiful and encouraging truths of scripture. Because of Dave’s own story, you know these are not just glib comforts trying to stick a plaster over a gaping wound, but treasures that will help sustain you and shape your perspective even in the darkest of times.

One quotation from the book which particularly resonated with me as I work in a graduate context and with many Irish students who’ve considered going or have gone to Dubai:

“I often tell those in our church’s membership class my prayer for each of them. I don’t pray that they would ultimately get promotions, make more money, and be successful in the marketplace (though those aren’t necessarily bad things). I pray they would love Jesus more when they leave Dubai (nonce of us is allowed to retire here, so we all must leave at some point) than they do at that moment. I pray the same for all of us in our trials.”

But putting aside Dubai, I think of my prayers during Coronavirus season. Simplified, they could perhaps be summarised often as:

“God bless me. May I not suffer. May no-one I know suffer. May everyone have their jobs. Would you make clear the future?”

Reading this book, I am forced to abandon the centrality of myself and my will in my prayer life, and replace it with something oh-so-much better.

Camping in the Sahara!

One final glimpse from the book that I enjoyed but found utterly frustrating as someone who loves to go camping! I must disagree with him plenty here, but love his comparison, speaking about 2 Corinthians 5:1-5!

“It’s not surprising that Paul, a tentmaker by trade, compares our earthly bodies to tents. I don’t own a tent, but I used one on a couple of camping trips as a child. I think the worst thing about camping may be the tent itself. I easily get claustrophobic. When the rain falls, you can hear it hitting the tent just inches from your face. And the worst thing is the buzzing of the buzzing of mosquitoes next to your face, making you feel like they are feasting on your flesh all night long. That’s because they probably are! As you can see, sleeping on a hard floor inside a shabby tent isn’t too compelling for me. A tent is a temporary dwelling place, not a permanent residence. In 2 Corinthians Paul paints a picture of the better, more glorious body as a house in comparison to a tent. Today, Paul says we live in a tent, but a day is coming when our bodies will be more like a house. Tents break and often need to be replaced. They hardly protect you from high and low temperatures or from precipitation. … In this life, our bodies face disease and decay. Paul says, “For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our Heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor 5:2)”.

As someone who laughs at such shoddy dismissals of camping, and who perhaps rather longs to decrease the emphasis in my life on materialistic dwellings, it took me a little minute to get over it in order to appreciate the Biblical truth behind the passage he was speaking on.

For the wandering Cain, for Abraham (and descendants), for those in the dessert in Numbers, for exiled Israel, for Christ with no place to lay his head, for persecuted ‘strangers and exiles’ across the Greco-Roman world and beyond – temporary dwellings were things very real. Other dwellings were longed for. Camping was not the ultimate reality. These bodies are not our homes. And like Christ, raised in a physical body, so shall we look forward to the day our tents will be replaced, in earthy new ones. What a glorious new reality awaits!

To finish, I must say that although I come from the author’s theological perspective (a reformed one), I am very glad that he (perhaps unlike some reformed authors) at the end does acknowledge that amidst his ultimate trust that God is sovereign over all suffering and uses it for His glory and our good, that it is the devil who is responsible for such evil, which is a glimpse of hell-ish things to come. Those words in the final chapter were very necessary ones, which make it easier for us to approach this God, knowing He is not going to cruelly delight in suffering, pain and endless tears.

This book has helped turned my eyes from thinking I ought not suffer, and praying for my own comfort, to refocusing my heart and mind of the good God of the gospel. I pray it will do like-wise for many.

You can find out more about the Furman’s life in the video below. But before you do, consider buying the book (cheapest here – only the price of two coffees or your work commute for 2 days!), and reading it in lockdown – you won’t be disappointed!

To all those stranded…

Thomas Cook.

It was a household name in travel for well over a century, but yesterday one of the first ever travel companies, shut its doors all over the world for the final time.

Thomas Cook was an English Baptist missionary, intent on freeing people from spending their money on the short-lived pleasures of alcohol and other things which dull the senses, and instead helping people invest in an experience outside of their everyday world – in something that would open their minds and senses – in travel. First only using trains and short trips to other parts of England, but then finally, along with his son, in creating journeys which would take travelers on full voyages of the world! And from it, grew the world’s largest travel company (taking on various names and brands inbetween). You can read more here.

All that’s left of Thomas Cook online: a help page and this Twitter image.

Despite this, I, as a symptom of the way my generation travels, have never used them once in my life (prefering like most millennials and GenZ, to book my travels independently for cheaper), but there’s still something nostalgic that wells up inside me at the thought of them going, never to return.

Like when many companies go under, there’s infuriation from employees at the lack of communication from the top. Over 21,000 losing jobs worldwide, with families affected and very real circumstances to face tomorrow morning for many, waking up without this month’s pay and no work forseeably to go to. So often companies rely on last minute takeovers to save them, and can’t publicise their doom to employees without further risking the company’s last-minute deal making. Watching the shutters come down on our local Thomas Cook office here in Belfast, was harder because there were real people pulling those shutters down, with nothing to go back to.

A sad day for Thomas Cook staff here in Finaghy who are closing the shutters on the store for the last time pic.twitter.com/IcUDldjHnH

— Clodagh Rice (@ClodaghLRice) September 23, 2019

But there’s also deep frustration and regret from travellers. If any are like me, we (foolishly or otherwise) don’t often spend money on travel insurance often. In fact, many these days save huge amounts or take our loans in order to afford travel. For them, although they’ll get back home eventually, the dream has turned into nightmare. And even for the many that have insurance, some have their honeymoon ruined; their family reunion shattered; their once-in-a-lifetime adventure, gone. It’s not as easy as pointing fingers at individual responsibility,

The travel brochure image that was once tangibly real and in our grasp, now lies on its way to our recycling boxes, tear stained and no longer trusted. What seemed to jump our from our Instagram feeds on our screens and be ours to enjoy in full 3D colour, has gone back to being imprisoned behind cracked screens, still as distant as ever – perhaps moreso, for the fact that our appetite to dream, to save, to book another holiday will indeed seem far less mouth-watering a second time round.

Surely many smaller travel companies, who were already be feeling the weight of major political upheavals in Brexit, or fears of terrorism in parts of the world; the closing down of travel visas; or uncertainties of environmental policies impacting travel; will sense the weakening of this type of market will indeed be upon far more than the giant corporate brand too.

However it will be only a minor hiccup and a small dent in the overall travel industry, that was already bypassing such big corporations for other ways of globe-trotting that are less prone to the direct stare of environmental campaigners like Greta Thunberg. But leaving aside such large questions as will continue to loom over the travel industry and against human nature, may I finish by doing as I do in each chapter of my book, and asking for God’s guidance, wisdom and help in all of this, as we seek to respond well as Christians? None of us can predict the ins and outs of what will happen in the future, and although hindsight is a wonderful thing, my analysis of the past (or future) will not help many, compared with the very real promises of the One who made Travel, and the panorama He gives us over all time.

For the Thomas Cook employee:

Loving, Heavenly Father,
We find ourselves facing sudden times of unexpected great loss,
Without job;
Without livelihood;
Without means of providing for others;
And even in the bitterness of how it all happened,
We turn to you.

We turn to you as the author of travel;
We turn to you as the provider of all good things;
We turn to you acknowledging that no matter how insightful we are,
We cannot predict what will come to any of us.

And so we rest on you and you alone this evening.
You are the unchanging rock.

Would you use the hard events of the last 24 hours to help us trust you?
Would you warm our hearts again with your goodness,
And forgive us when we trusted more in our own provision?

And for these moments when things are taken away,
We pray we would know your presence and leading in very real ways,
As we are united to the One who lost everything,
To provide for us.

In His name,
Amen

For the stranded traveller:

Loving, Heavenly Father,
We praise you, the great creator God,
Who made all of this earth.
We’re excited to explore it, and plumb the depths of the good things you have given us.
But even more, we’re excited to know you,
Because you will be infinitely better than your creation.
For you were the one who came to rescue a stranded creation, that rebelled far from you.
We’d love to know your heart for this world – how you see it.

And so we pray you’d do just that.
That in our disappointment, you would show us greater joys.
That in our frustration, you would create in us thankful hearts.
That in the unfulfilled longings of this world, that you would cast our minds and hearts to the new heavens and earth to come.

By the power of the Spirit,
In your Son’s name,
Amen

Drive. Pray. Love.

What do you do while you drive?

Sing loudly?
Get agitated by other drivers?
Listen to drivel (and useful things) on the radio or podcasts?

Pray?

Recently I’ve been encouraged to be part of a movement to memorise chunks of the Bible (more about this later). Someone suggested learning it as they drive. I struggle to do that well (and the Gards have interesting thoughts on verses on the dashboard too), but I do find the hours per week I do of driving, extremely useful time to pray.

Driving has the beauty of being phonefree (largely) apart from taking phonecalls through the speaker system, so there’s no messages to check and no scrolling newsfeeds.

So how can we use our travel time well as we commute or travel longer distances?

Well it’s one of my favourite undistracted times to pray. Get too many prayer updates into your inbox to read and pray through immediately? Well, I like to be honest with those I support, and yet still to pray. If they’re long I print them, but if not, I take five minutes to recap them before I start my journey and then have a few hours praying for them and whoever else is on my mind.

It’s surprising how unhurried the journey becomes, how hard it is to get annoyed with other drivers, and how refreshing car journeys can then be. Sometimes things I see out the window (junctions of a road that lead to churches, beauty and brokenness of the world, evocative things in my personal experience etc) stir a heart to pray for things. Not that it always works. Sometimes distractions and thought patterns still consume. Other times, I haven’t had time to read through updates again, and I’m just hoping I can remember what to pray for various folk.

So why not give it a go?

Do you make a regular journey by car, public transport or foot? Why not start each journey this week with 5 minutes of thankful prayer. Perhaps next week you can add things that are on your heart, and week the after some requests of those mission partners you prayerfully support across the world. And if you’re short of those, you’re welcome to drop me a line and I can suggest a few that will excite you with what God is doing in this world!

Praying while we travel

PrayerMate is a great App for us as travellers.  I used to keep a prayer journal and carry it round everywhere with me, so I could make a note of things to pray for and see how God had answered prayer.  Now I use PrayerMate!  It means that while on my travels, I’ve a Bible, a prayer App, a devotional guide on my Kindle (check our LiveDead Joy Bible reading planner for 1 pound) and catechisms, all in my pocket without thinking.  Does anyone have any recommendations for one for good hymns or Christian songs?

It took me an hour or two to figure out how I was going to best use it, and to input a weekly prayer cycle of my own prayer points that I wanted to pray through, but once I’d done that, it was easy!  And many organisations also use it, so you can hear all sorts of encouraging stories that will inspire you to pray.

For many of a younger generation, it’s transformed our prayer lives.  I could imagine that for a few, the discipline of staying away from your phone for things like this may be more valuable that accessing it all through the device that we’re already using too much!

All of this means I can be hiking up Irish mountains and can stop to pray, or to remind myself what I can be praying for as I hike, without taking out anything apart from my phone.  Or alternatively I can be stuck on a bus or in traffic, and, if it is legal to do so, check prayer points to make best use of the time, instead of getting frustrated.

For those who want to sign up for my work daily prayer updates, you can click on this link: http://praynow4.org/craicfromcork

A prayer for the traveller

Fountain of all goodness,

As we gaze at our Instagram feeds, we come and marvel at your Fatherly provision,

As we wake to another day of exploration, we delight in the sustaining hand of your Son,

As we consider your creation, we revel even more in the overflowing being of your Spirit within us.

We forsake any feeling that our travels are ours by right, because of any of our goodness, common-sense, self-discipline or ability.

And we pray that all our travels today would be done in the light of being united to your Son, by His sacrificial life, death, resurrection and ascension.

May our thoughts rise to you, our words point towards you and our actions be shaped by you, as we journey towards our goal in Christ Jesus together as your travelling people from all nations, en route to our true home in an infinite new heavens and new earth.

In His Name,

Amen

Barmouth, Wales (copyright mine)

An Islamic theology of travel

Silence.

 

That was what greeted my question “Could you write for me what you think Islam says about travel?”

I try to hang out with the Islamic community when I can, in my spare time in Ireland.  It’s not always the easiest in Irish life, given most of Irish life happens in the pub (and not just in negative ways).  But I try.  I do it, partly because I feel every city needs those who broaden their horizons and don’t just guess what different people think.  But those who live among them.  I hope legislation in this land will reflect not hostility or naivety, but will reflect the thoughts of those of us who live our daily lives in the midst of such beautiful communities.  And the other reason I partly do this, is because I feel that if the Christian message is true, these are some people from some of the most unreached places in our world with the good news.

Now some of you may feel my categorisation of people as “them and us” is already a horrible one.  But largely it’s realistic in first generation immigration, in a quite racist society (to many extents).  Integration is not a reality widely embraced.  Vocal protests at the mosque application (in Cork), and general attitudes towards the international community who announce their long-term intentions may not be frosty, but they’re certainly not welcomed with open arms, contrary to what the Irish reputation is for short-term visitors.  In NUIG (Galway’s main university) yesterday, I once again took up my mantra, of helping people to see things in term’s other than “them vs us” but as “human, alongside human”.

NUIG Quadrangle

So it’s not without knowing Muslim friends and theologically aware ones, that I got my answer, or indeed, a lack of answer.

Yes, they were quick to tell me about Muhammad and his travels.  And how pilgrimage forms part of the central tenets of Islam.  But unless we are to mimic Muhammad’s travelling warfare, it’s hard to see where pleasure travelling fits in to Islamic theology.

Hajj – the pilgrimage prescribed in the 5 pillars of Islam, for those who can manage it.  Thanks to Allahsword.net for the image.

And that presumably is because the world is a bad thing in Islamic thought.  Following on from the dualism that so haunts much of religion (Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism and much of even Arminian Christianity), Islam frequently proclaims from the minarets:

“Prayer is better than sleep” (As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm)

The spiritual is better than the physical.  There is a dichotomy.  A dualism oft found in Greek thought, that haunts some of Christendom too.

And what does a life that lives that out fully look like?  Well a consistent one would presumably have to dump pleasure travelling and the delighting of the things of this world.  I’m not sure there can be any other take on such strong statements.  Even travelling to stir our hearts to worship the creator would still be lesser than praying, according to this.  And applied to the rest of life, you’re left praying or perhaps doing Da’wah (telling other people of Allah).

But in case you think I jump to conclusions too quickly, and I do not know my Hadiths very well, take it one step further back.  What is the god of Islam like?  Because we become what we worship.  Muslims will want to be like their god.

Not only are the 99 names interesting, but the proportion to which the Qu’ranic text emphasizes certain ones, is telling.  Thanks to Allahsword.net for this.

And there we find a distant and sovereign god.  One set apart from creation who rarely interacts with it clearly and who is not known in any meaningful way by his followers.  One who drops a book down to a single person, about a period in history where we have little to verify the contents of that book.  And one whose followers live in that pattern; not particularly concerned with the book or knowing the historicity of Muhammad; not engaging with much of this world.  Waiting.  Waiting for the moment paradise will come – the “real world”.

And yes, I’m sure there’s exceptions.  There are many Muslims who have shaped this world in beautiful ways and take their inspiration from Islam.  But my point is, that if you have a consistent systematic theology of Islam, one must abandon pleasure travelling.

And perhaps that’s where, if you’re going to poke holes in my argument, you would need to say that I misunderstand Islam in looking for a systematic theology.  Perhaps Islam holds tensions that are less dominated by western logical systems.  Perhaps the call to prayer and distance of god from this world can be reconciled by other truths I’m not yet aware of, within the heartbeat of the Qu’ranic text, Hadiths and life of the Prophet.

And so I leave this open for any of my friends to enlighten us and help us flee from dualism to an appreciation of this world – something that will help is yearn to explore it, plumb the depths of it, look after it and enjoy it for what it is…a beautiful creation!

It’s over to you…

Travelling mercies, whatever they are…

Christian lingo (Christian-eese as some may call it) is fine until you’re new to Christian things or have those around you who are and are wondering what on earth the last thing you said was.  Part of our International Cafe Team [Cork ISC] ate out last night at Sultan’s Restaurant in Cork as an end of year treat for all our hard work.  It was the last time one of the team would ever be there and the last meal another would have before flying home for the summer.

And so before leaving, I thanked God for them, and prayed for…erm, “travelling mercies”.  I’m not going to debate whether praying for safe travel has much Biblical warrant.  But none the less when I catch myself using such language I tend to think of GK Chesterton who said:

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”—G. K. Chesterton

A constant stream of thankfulness!