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FEATURES SERVICE

From Audrey Whitefield <a.whitefield@quest.org.uk>
Date 27 Feb 1997 02:47:57
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Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 10:53:25 +0000
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Jan. 17, 1997
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NEWS SERVICE
Canon Jim Rosenthal, Director of Communications
The Anglican Communion Office
London, England

[97.1.3.15]

FEATURES SERVICE

(ACNS) The Anglican Communion Office receives most of the diocesan
papers from
around the world. We use these as resource material for ACNS and
Anglican
World magazine but we often find features which we know will be of
interest
to other parts of the Communion but which we are unable to reproduce in
Anglican World. With the advent of this new weekly ACNS we hope to be
able
to post up features which we believe will be of interest to other
Provinces. The views and opinions expressed in these articles may not be
those of the Anglican Communion Office. Please credit the author,
newspaper
or magazine and ACNS if you use this service. We would also be grateful
to
know whether you find this service useful.

The article which follows will appear with photographs in the next issue
of
Anglican World but we believe it might be useful to editors preparing
Lent/Easter papers and have therefore sent it out early.

Taking the cross from Sudan to Ireland

Marc Nikkel serves the Episcopal Church in the Province of the Sudan as
a
joint appointment of the Church Mission Society and the Episcopal Church
USA. After a recent journey away from his work in Sudan to Ireland he
reflects on his own pilgrimage and the similarities between the scholar
pilgrims of Celtic Ireland and of modern Sudan.

A pilgrim from a distant land travels toward his home... One who has
tasted
the honey of eternity knows the pilgrim will only find his home above.
Here
he is restless from morn to night, ever longing for his home...

adapted from an old German hymn.

 Throughout my travels I've toted, not without difficulty, a 55-inch
coffin
shaped wooden box containing some 15 Sudanese crosses. Entrusted to me
by
friends and colleagues during my last sojourn in Bor, each long (two or
three and a half feet) hand-held cross provides an evocative touch stone
with those who've fashioned them. How i've enjoyed seeing folk in
America
and Britain pass them round, smell and caress them, pondering their
origins
as I told their stories. Each conveys a narrative of faith and survival
in
the war zone, of continuity amidst displacement and famine, carried in
processions, exorcisms, and through flights from gunfire and cattle
raids.
Some are rough and rugged, others quite refined. Crafted of various
woods
or metals, some decorated with ivory, cow horn, or brass bullet castings
(one topped with the head of a rocket-propelled grenade), they reflect
the
traumatic, sometimes exhilarating, processes of culture change now
underway. They declare tangibly, as women and men must in this era,
that,
amidst displacement and death, God is present among his people. These
crosses have also helped me to remain inwardly rooted during months of
transience, often tempted by the lure of affluence and apparent
stability.

Pilgrim churches

In Ireland it seemed I'd brought this new generation of crosses to meet
their forebears in the ancient High Crosses of the Celtic Church. How
moved
I was to kneel before the stone Scripture crosses, some seven yards
high,
standing as they have for a 1,000 years and more. From those worn images
carved in relief, I'd try to decipher, and then to contemplate, the
progression of Bible stories, all rising to their crescendo; there, at
the
heart of each immense, circled cross is portrayed the Crucifixion or,
alternately, Christ the reigning King, at the fulcrum of eternity. In
the
cross heaven and hearth are interwoven round our compassionate,
self-offering God.

In numerous ways I found the stories of crosses and their makers,
present
and past, Sudanese and Celtic, mingling across the centuries. In Ireland
the crosses were the immovable centre point for trekking, sailing
pilgrims,
ever searching for "the place of their resurrection." In Sudan they are
portable shrines of desperate uprooted peoples longing for a homeland,
immediate, tangible, and eternal. In the crosses they fashioned these
great
peoples, European and African, confirm the good of their existence,
their
loves and longing for continuity, while reaching toward eternity. These
first luminous reflections on the Cross of Christ by newly Christian
peoples have much to teach us who are too often satisfied with the
appearances of wealth and paucity of meaning.

I've learned how Celtic saints crossed seas and ventured through alien
territory establishing monastic centres of prayer and learning at such
sites as Kells, Glendalaugh, Monasterboice, Ion and Lindisfarne. Sadly,
there'll be no stones remaining for future generations to ponder our
life
at Panyagor and Yomchir in Upper Nile, nor will our purpose-built
structures of wood and grass endure much beyond a year (recent flooding
has
swamped them), Nonetheless, with our determined student-evangelists
traversing far distances by food and in canoe through contested regions,
carrying few provisions but their crosses, our efforts to build
worshipping-learning communities in virgin territory cannot be
dissimilar.

Tasting the honey of eternity

As I've reflected on the early pilgrims whose journeys the stone crosses
punctuated I've thought as well of my own forebears. The quote from the
hymn above were once scrawled in German and tucked into the casket of my
great grandfather: "Pilgrim in a foreign land, wandering from his
home...".
In the 1870s Benjamin Nikke immigrated to America from a colony near
Dnieper River in the Ukraine. Plying his skills as a farmer he
homesteaded
in the state of Kansas, but soon ventured further west to Colorado, only
to
return to Kansas. A refugee, as our Mennonite ancestors have been time
and
again over 400 years, he vested his life in "looking for his home." Only
recently have I realised that, just as far as my great grandfather
traveled
westward, so far have I 'returned' eastward. Tracing the longitude due
South from Benjamin's starting point near the Dnieper I come to Bor, on
the
Nile River in Southern Sudan, the heartland of my present work. It
appears,
from recent years, that I continue his pilgrimage. East to West, West to
East, but now embracing a Southern route. Here, with the displaced and
the
refugees, kin of our kin, our passage continues, "tasting the honey of
eternity" and together "longing for our home."
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