O long-sought With-ness for a world without,
O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.
Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name
Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,
O quickened little wick so tightly curled,
Be folded with us into time and place,
Unfold for us the mystery of grace
And make a womb of all this wounded world.
O heart of heaven beating in the earth,
O tiny hope within our hopelessness
Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,
To touch a dying world with new-made hands
And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.
        Malcolm Guite, O Emmanuel

As with the financial world and some non-western cultures, the Church year differs from the western calendar year. The Church year commences on the fourth Sunday before Christmass. The four Sundays before Christmass make up the season of Advent. This year Advent Sunday was celebrated yesterday.

Advent is a complex season, the complexity being provided by the fact that the themes it addresses include both beginnings and endings, as well as expectation, preparation and fulfillment.

One of the products of this complex of themes is that together they invite us to see that the way the world is now, is not the way it has to be; that this wounded world can become a womb for grace and love, if we seek to work with the Divine to make it a better place.

In Advent we are asked to look for signs of what God might be up to in order to make the world a place where everyone flourishes. We are also invited to join in the process of bringing to fruition the vision of what the world might be.

One of the ways we do that is to question and examine the status quo.

Last year IPAN (Independent and Peaceful Australia Network) invited me to be a panel member (Social and Community Impacts Chapter) for their Inquiry into the costs and consequences of Australia’s involvement in US led wars.

The Report was launched in Parliament House, Canberra, on Thursday 24^th November. I and other panel members were in attendance.

The report invites us to challenge one aspect of our current status quo by imagining Australia’s relationships with other countries differently. The Report can be accessed here:
https://independentpeacefulaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/CHARTING-OUR-OWN-COURSE_softcopylinks.pdf

Peace,
Peter+

Brother of birds and trees, God’s Troubadour,
Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor;
Our wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men,
Come, let us chant the canticle again
Of mother earth and the enduring sun.
God make each soul the lonely leper’s slave;
God make us saints, and brave.
                Vachel Lindsay

The Cop27 meeting in Egypt is now entering its second week.
My prayer for those present is that the Spirit of St Francis might wake in them all.

My prayer for the western world is that together we find the Spirit of Francis waking in us.

It seems to me that St Francis is the saint for our times even though he died nearly 800 years ago. He understood humanity’s relationship to the other creatures who share our common home in ways that would transform our approach to life and living should his understanding be more widely adopted.

The first week of Cop27 saw the issue of Climate compensation raised in earnest. At the heart of that cry from the poorer and more vulnerable nations was the idea that there can be no flourishing without justice. That the way forward for humanity must be paved by Climate Justice as well as justice for those affected by the lifestyle choices of the richer nations; of nations like ours.

St Francis would encourage us to see those affected by climate change as our sisters and brothers and the care for them as family. Compensation would then be seen as a sign of love and familial affection.

Francis would also extend this desire to cherish the other to the animals, birds and trees. He invites us to see the biosphere as a household and to care for it accordingly.

May Cop27 bear fruit that will make the family, as Francis understood it, flourish. May those who attend Cop27 be brave for the sake of all creatures.

Peace,
Peter+  

It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened…

So begins a poem by Henry Scott-Holland. He wrote it while working as a priest at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. It was first read while the body of Edward VII was lying in state in Westminster in 1910.

The poem, is a very popular choice at funerals and it is, in my opinion, an incredibly unhelpful addition.

I am sure Scott-Holland wanted the poem to express the Christian hope that when we die we continue on in Christ. The reason that the poem is unhelpful is because that these days it feeds into our culture’s death denying practices.

It is very rare these days to hear someone talk about death. We say that someone has ‘passed away’ or ‘passed’ rather that saying they have died; that death has taken them away from us and has destroyed the life we once knew. It is not the case that death is nothing at all.

To talk euphemistically about death and to minimise its effects by suggesting that it should be nothing to those who have to live with the aftermath of a death is an act of culturally-imposed cruelty.

The reality is that the death of a loved one is traumatising and life-shifting. Many people find that death takes away their key support person. Some are plunged into poverty as an income stream dries up. Others lose their accommodation. It is not uncommon for the grief-stricken to experience depression or other mental health effects.

To live through these effects while receiving messaging that tells us death is nothing, is to be told that we are not coping with life. I often talk with people who feel that there must be something wrong with them because they have ‘not gotten over’ the death of their spouse or a child.

In order to offer a counter-point to our culture’s unhealthy approach to death, we recently hosted a number of Death Talks. And last night we held our annual All Souls’ Day service. On All Souls’ day we do express the Christian hope that we have in Christ but we also acknowledge the reality and depth of grief that the death of our loved ones leaves us with.

We never get over the grief instead we learn to live with it. The death of a loved one changes us, therefore it cannot be said to be ‘nothing’.

The All Souls’ liturgy can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/PzFWlthdgwo 

Peace,
Peter+  

It managed to make a small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still.

What the person – out of kindness and his eagerness to help – had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were Nature’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.

Modified from a Story told be Paulo Coelho,
                       based on a story provided by Sonaira D’Avila

Coelho’s words encourage us to ensure that our institutions and helping agencies continue on the trajectory we have been seeking to follow over the last few years of allowing those who have a need to provide leadership in developing the response to meet that need.

Client-centred program development and delivery was one of the ideas that drove the introduction of the NDIS. More recent developments demonstrate how easily we can lose that focus.  

As we move towards the referendum about the Voice to Parliament leadership by First nations people will be a key factor in ensuring that The Voice helps to address the long term diminishment of First nations people caused by the process of colonisation.

Coelho’s words also encourage us to use the catechumenal method when working with people as they undertake Christian formation and preparation for Baptism and Confirmation. The Catechetical method assumes that each newcomer brings with them a wealth or experience and insights that we can receive as gifts. We learn from them and they learn from us.

We need to keep in check the constant temptation to do ministry to others instead of seeing them as partners in the gospel and partners in the process of their own becoming.

Peace,
Peter+

St. Francis of Assisi had a fear and abhorrence of lepers. One day, however, he met a man afflicted with leprosy while riding his horse near Assisi. Though the sight of the leper filled him with horror and disgust, Francis got off his horse and kissed the leper. Then the leper put out his hand, hoping to receive something. Out of compassion, Francis gave money to the leper.

 But when Francis mounted his horse again and looked all around, he could not see the leper anywhere. It dawned on him that it was Jesus whom he had just kissed.
             https://www.franciscanmedia.org/franciscan-spirit-blog/st-francis-meets-the-leper

Reflecting on the experience, Francis wrote:
When I was in sin, the sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure; but then God himself led me into their company, and I had pity on them. When I became acquainted with them, what had previously nauseated me became the source of spiritual and physical consolation for me.
              Francis of Assisi, My Testament

This incident reminds us that Francis was the subject to ongoing conversion throughout his life and that he communed with societies outcasts as well as with the animals.

Francis invites me to embrace the process of ongoing conversion and to deepen my commitment to the poor.

Peace,
Peter+

He was an incredible wordsmith who could capture human experience in prayer and poetry in ways that spoke to me soul. He was also a gay man and so often wrote as one living on the margins.

Yesterday we kept Pride Sunday in the Cathedral. With that frame in mind, here is piece Jim wrote as a reflection on the passage in The Book of Numbers in which the Israelites, while in the wilderness, sent spies to check out the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey. On the spies’ return the Israelites were unwilling to enter the land despite it being a place of incredible promise (Numbers 13). Jim asks us if we are willing to enter a land of promise where all people are cherished and love celebrated?

I vow to you, my friends of earth,
all worldly things above,
Entire and whole — yet broken.— the service of my love:
The love that dares to question,
the love that speaks its name,
That flowers still in barren ground,
yet hides no more for shame:
The love that struggles through the pain
and whispers in the night,
Yet shares its secret with the world,
to bring the truth to light.

 This is that other country we heard of long ago,
When called to be the spies of God where milk and honey flow:
A world where hurts find healing,
where all th’oppressed run free,
Where friends who have been sore betrayed each other truly see
It is our earth, transfigured, new,
where wars and hatreds cease,
Where spy and friend walk hand in hand in Christ our Lover’s Peace.

Peace,
Peter+

is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
         William Blake

There is something about being amongst other creatures that makes us feel different. It is not by accident that we seek out parks and gardens when we are in the middle of the city. The feeling of connection and belonging can shape our mood and reduce our stress.

There is much in our modern way of living that can insulate us from this life-giving sense of connection. Even the now ubiquitous use of aur conditioning in cars means that we often don’t experience the smells of the landscape as we drive through it.

During this season of creation we are invited to find ways to make sure we connect with the world of which we are a part.

Peace,
Peter+  

The Season of Creation demonstrates that the liturgy of the church can evolve to reflect the Church’s understanding of its mission.

In recent years we have come to see that we have an important role to play in not only looking after the planet but in changing human perception of the planet.

Currently we westerners tend to view the rest of ‘nature’ as ‘other’ as something from which we are separated and independent from. Because it is ‘other’ we feel that we can exploit it without consequence.

Mystics such as St Francis of Assisi help us to see the other creatures in a different light. St Francis saw them as kin, members of the same family. The concept of family conveys connection. We treat those with whom are connected in very different way to that which is seen as ‘other’.

May this unfolding season enable us to see and live differently.

Peace,
Peter+

an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it…

Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted.

The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.
                  Dave Snowden, Cynefin Co

Recently I had the privilege of being involved in a Retreat/Conference hosted by Cynefin Co. It was led by Dave Snowden and some of his colleagues.

We have been using the Cynefin Framework and related tools to assist us in delivering the project we are undertaking as part of the Resource Church initiative for the Diocese. Last year that project enabled a number of faith communities to begin exploring what was emerging in and for their life.

The Cathedral community has been using techniques such as Talking Circles and Open Space for a number of years as tools to help us understand who we are (what Dave refers to as coming to understand a sufficiency of the present) and to help us discern what might be emerging out of our current life. In so doing we have found ourselves living into a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate. I think it has seen us flourish as a community.

In theological terms I think this way of approaching life and ministry has seen us trying to honour Rowan Williams’ description of mission. His understanding is that ‘mission is finding out what God is doing and joining in’.

Peace,
Peter+

hidden to most but open to all.
There is no handle.
You enter by seeking and weeping and prayer:
or by sheer serendipity.
Once inside, the space is vast and endlessly expanding.
Like the Tardis or those Russian dolls that fit inside each other,
the spaces go inwards, infinitely unfolding.
And there is not only one room, but many
           Nicola Slee, The Mansion of Mary

 Over the years I have become increasingly devoted to Mary, the Mother of Jesus. For me she is a symbol of powerful non-violent resistance, of bravery, wisdom and compassion; a spiritual power house who seeks to align her life with God’s commonwealth, and makes herself available to be an agent of that unfolding transformation of the world. For me she is the embodiment of being a person of faith; a mystic and an activist.

It took me quite some time to develop my Marian devotion. Seeing her for who I now know her to be was slowed by the ways in which the various parts of the church have portrayed here. In the catholic tradition she is often turned into a saccharine, docile figure; a symbol of purity and virtue, where virtue is equated with not making a fuss, being pleasant and self-sacrificing nurturer. The protestant wing of the church on the other hand largely ignores Mary, portraying her as the necessary vehicle for bearing the Christ but otherwise diminishing her role. And the idea of ‘God’s plan’ being fulfilled reduces Mary’s agency.

Over the years I have discovered the Mary who challenged societal norms and who put her body on the line to make that challenge real. I have discovered the mother whose influence made Jesus into the radical lover of people and challenger of destructive ideologies and theologies we encounter in the gospels. Her influence as parent cannot be under estimated. I suspect her mystical prayer life also formed the spirituality of Jesus. I think for him she was also an image of the compassion and love of the Divine. After all, most parents shape their children’s understanding of God in some way.

Mary’s feast day is today, Monday 15^th August, so today I give thanks for her ministry and example, and with Luke (and the angel Gabriel) and countless people down the ages I say:

Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death. 
Amen.

Peace,
Peter+

If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

 This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

 Until now.
              David Whyte, Enough

While The Deans of Australian Cathedrals were in Conference last week, we were invited to attend a rally called to urge the Minister for the Environment to protect the Gelorup Corridor from being cleared for the Bunbury Ring Road.

Most of the Bunbury Ring Road has been built across previously cleared land. The Gelorup Corridor is a small parcel of land that features ecosystems that support a large number of endangered species. A previously cleared alternative to the Gelorup corridor exists nearby.

We continue to clear land, most often in the parts of the country that host the greatest biodiversity, as if the supply of land is infinite. It seems that we think that if clear this or that bit of land, the birds, animals and plants will be able to move to another area. The reality is that we are running our of other bits of land, so each loss of habitat is becoming more critical. Loss of habitat was described as being one the key drivers of species loss and endangerment in the recently released State of the Environment Report.

David Whyte’s poem asks us to consider whether it might be the case that we humans have trouble knowing when we have enough and when we have taken enough. Do we know what enough is?

During the rally the Dean of Bunbury, The Very Rev’d Darryl Cotton, asked those assembled to join him in blessing the land and creatures of Gelorup. Over 90% of those present joined him in that act of goodwill towards the creatures with whom we share this planet.

Seeing the land as a precious gift and the other creatures as companions might help us realise that we have enough and that because we have enough we can leave some for the other creatures to enjoy.

Peace,
Peter+

Thursday is the Feast Day of Jean Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests. Vianney was the parish priest to the small parish of Ars in France from 1818 for 40 years. He was a passionate supporter of the poor and treated all people equally. He became world famous as a confessor. Those who visited him felt like he understood them as individuals.

By 1855 he was sitting in the confessional for up to 16 hours a day in order to give advice to over 20 000 people a year. People would queue for hours to spend time with him. Occasionally a noble would use their influence to skip ahead in the queue. John would greet them by sending them back to their place in the queue. It says something about his appeal that the Nobles would meekly comply. And wait their turn.

John Vianney stands as reminder that spiritual and emotional intelligence are not related to intellectual capacity. John almost failed to become a priest because his capacity for study was very limited. In fact he was sent to Ars because only 230 people lived there and the bishop considered that he would not be able to do too much damage.

Whilst he had a quick wit, in the end, he was known, not for his intelligence but, for his sensitivity to people and attentiveness to their needs and concerns. He loved his people.

Peace,
Peter+

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
                       Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing his poetry at the height of the Industrial Revolution. He was dismayed at the way the new factories were fouling the environment and the way in which the working and living conditions were wearing down the working class people. In God’s Grandeur he laments that humanity is degrading the beauty of the planet, the beauty that expresses God’s grandeur.

Against the backdrop of the destruction wrought by humanity Hopkins found hope in the fact that nature is never spent and that God’s presence in creation is a constant source of hope. 

  The latest (2021) State of the Environment Report, (https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/) which was finally released last week, demonstrates that many of Australia’s ecosystems are at the point of collapse and many species are approaching the point of extinction.

Our current situation differs from that which Hopkins encountered in that the environment in our time is subject to systemic pressures and collapse. In his time the effects tended to be more localised. So, in our time it is looking like nature might just be ‘spent’.

Hopkins and some of the other poets of his time played a pivotal role in getting people to recognise the damage that was being done to the environment. We can play a similar role by reminding our utilitarian culture that that the environment and the other creatures have value because they reflect God’s grandeur. Valued things are always protected.

Peace,
Peter+    

to make a scene, I’ve chosen here.

 Of all the doorways in the world
to choose to sleep, I’ve chosen yours.
I’m on the street, under the stars.

 For coppers I can dance or sing.
For silver-swallow swords, eat fire.
For gold-escape from locks and chains.

 It’s not as if I’m holding out
for frankincense or myrrh, just change.

 You give me tea. That’s big of you.
I’m on my knees. I beg of you.
        Give, Simon Armitage

On Sunday of last week, 21 members of our community, along with few members of the wider public, met in a talking circle to explore the Cathedral’s ministry with the rough sleepers who find themselves on the Cathedral precinct each night.

The Circle was called as part of an action plan that arose out of our Visioning Day in June.

During the Circle we reflected on the question, how has my life been touched by the homeless? Answers to this question revealed that some in our community live on the edge of, and with the fear of becoming, homelessness; others talked of transformative encounters and of being challenged, and of being gifted with insights into life and living through their encounters with rough sleepers.

Homelessness is produced by the interplay of a large number of policy settings, societal attitudes, personal life experience and access to services.

The Circle did not solve the problem but created a closer knit group of people who are determined to be part of the solution.

Peace,
Peter+    

This week is NAIDOC Week.

NAIDOC Week exists to celebrate and recognise the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

This year’s theme, Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up!, is a call to action. In the first instance, the theme is intended to encourage Aboriginal and Torres Strait people to be active in bringing about the changes needed to ensure that proper environmental, cultural and heritage protections are developed, Constitutional change is achieved and there is a comprehensive process of truth-telling, that will help the nation move towards developing treaties, and ending racism.

The NAIDOC Committee hopes that living into the theme will help our nation move beyond the potential tokenism of acknowledgement, and bring about more than good intentions.

They write, ‘The relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non‑Indigenous Australians needs to be based on justice, equity, and the proper recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights.’

For this to be achieved, those of us who are not First Nation’s Peoples are also going to Get Up! Stand Up! And Show Up!

The challenge for us will be to do that in such a way that will honour the leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the process. We need to be present as sensitive allies.

The Church was one of the agents of colonisation and so can have an important role to play, if we attend sensitively, in the healing process.

Peace,
Peter+

Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
                      William Blake

The Old Testament readings on Sundays from 1 Kings are certainly providing us with some stunning imagery. Last week it was The Still Small Voice, this week it is The Chariots of Fire.

William Blake takes up The Chariots of Fire image in the poem known as Jerusalem.

In 1916 Blake’s poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry (orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar) to become the well-loved hymn.

By 1916 the reality of the First World War, with its daily unimaginable carnage, was beginning to take hold of the psyche of the people of the UK, so the hymn was used as a rallying cry.

The hymn was used to suggest that the war, as horrible as it was, would provide the opportunity for the people of the UK to build the New Jerusalem; that out of the costly destruction of the war a new, more just, less class-ridden and poverty-riven society would emerge. In the process, the dead were given that now familiar gloss of being called ‘glorious’.

Significant numbers of people embraced the vision of building the New Jerusalem out of the rubble as a way of surviving the war.

After the war many experienced profound disappointment when the New Jerusalem did not appear. This feeling of disappointment was exacerbated by the fact that the very people who had promulgated the vision of the New Jerusalem during the war – political, military and church leaders – worked to ensure that the vision did not come to pass. Casting the vision of the New Jerusalem was nothing but a cynical exercise.

When William Blake wrote his poem he genuinely held to the idea that it was possible to build the New Jerusalem.

Like the people of the UK during and after the war, we too are often victims to the cynical machinations of those who wield power and influence. As disheartening as that is, we should not allow ourselves to be distracted from trying to build a better world.

Peace,
Peter+

outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.

 I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

 this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

 what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What

 to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?
                      R S Thomas, Threshold

In the poem Threshold R S Thomas picks up some of the imagery we encountered in the first reading (1 Kings 19.1-4, 8-15a) at the Eucharist on Sunday. That reading contains the story of Elijah encountering God as a still small voice rather than as force revealed in a whirlwind, in an earthquake, or in fire.

He reminds us that if God is coming to us as a still small voice, on occasion we need, in faith, to reach into the unknown.

Peace,
Peter+

There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured 
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get 
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
                   R S Thomas, The Kingdom

R S Thomas’ poem, The Kingdom, came to mind as I was reflecting on the theme for the Cathedral Visioning Day to be held on Saturday.

At times the transformation of the world that Jesus worked towards also can seem a long way off. We still have way too many people whose bodies and minds have been ‘fractured by life’. And there are way too many who don’t care about what happens to others.

Jesus held fast to his vision of what might be and worked towards it one encounter at a time.

We can take heart from and emulate his methodology.

The question before us on Saturday will be how we can be a source of hope and transformation in this topsy turvey world?

Little things can make difference as we seek to be part of Jesus’ commonwealth on earth. In the end for me it comes down to building a community in which people can have the experience of looking at this place and the people in it and finding that ‘love looks at them back’

Please do join us on Saturday.

Peace,
Peter+

The dawn is breaking
The world is waking
To a bright new day
When none defame us
No restriction tame us
Nor colour shame us
Nor sneer dismay.

 Now brood no more
On the years behind you
The hope assigned you
Shall the past replace
When a juster justice
Grown wise and stronger
Points the bone no longer
At a darker race.

 So long we waited
Bound and frustrated
Till hate be hated
And caste deposed
Now light shall guide us
No goal denied us
And all doors open
That long were closed.

 See plain the promise
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over
And though long the climb
New rights will greet us
New mateship meet us
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.

 To our fathers’ fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
the glad tomorrow.
            Oodegeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), A Song of Hope

Oodegeroo Noonuccal wrote that poem in the 1960’s after noticing that the attitudes held by the non-indigenous population towards First Nation’s people was changing. She saw signs of hope.

This week as we observe Reconciliation Week we note that the journey towards the hope-filled future Oodegeroo looked forward to has been, and continues to be, long and slow.

We too can see signs of hope. The Government has pledged to implement the vision captured in The Statement from the Heart.

To contribute to this movement forward, The Cathedral Council has requested that we move the Acknowledgment of Country from a written piece in Service Notes to a spoken acknowledgement at the beginning of each service.

We are also exploring ways to develop and enact our own Reconciliation Action Plan.

Peace,
Peter+

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
                          Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

St John’s is currently hosting an exhibition celebrating the rich diversity of the Toondah Harbour wetlands. The exhibition is also intended to draw attention to the threat the wetlands face from a proposed development.

Toondah Harbour wetlands are located in Moreton Bay, and are currently protected under the Ramsar Convention. The Ramsar Convention seeks to ensure that wetlands are protected and cared for. Many wetlands, including the Toondah Harbour wetlands, play an important role in the life cycle of migratory birds. One species of particular note found in the Toondah wetlands is the critically endangered Far Eastern Curlew.

The proposed development by Walker Corporation would involve dredging and drying out about 40 hectares of the Ramsar-listed wetlands.

One of the simple solutions we have applied for centuries to the complexities of living on this planet has been to clear, drain or flood land as if such a practice was without consequence. This has been driven by the simple and erroneous assumptions that the supply of land is limitless and that if it isn’t being used for a human-centred purpose it is going to waste. We are beginning to see that this approach to land is not so much a problem solver as a problem exacerbator.

Sometime soon we are going to have to reorientate ourselves.

The church has something to offer is this space. The relational spirituality of St Francis of Assisi offers us a way forward.

Peace,
Peter+

I referred to it in the weekly update I provided on Saturday.

By the time we got to that motion the Synod was pressed for time so the President of Synod allowed just a few a speakers for and against. I was planning to speak but did not make the cut.

Had I been given the chance to speak I was planning to read the poem, Luminary, by R S Thomas:
My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy’s
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers.
               R S Thomas, Luminary

I thought of using the poem rather than making a more regular speech because sometimes a poet can make a clearer point than any constructed argument. I wanted the poet to speak to the idea that God blesses what God blesses and that the Church cannot stale that blessing by refusing to bless that which is good.

In the end it is the fruits of the blessed thing that reveal if that something is a really a blessing or not.

So, I would contend that on the many occasions that the church has blessed warships serving the purposes of despots, as The Russian Orthodox Church has in recent months, that God has not added an amen to the Church’s prayer. While in the case of the relationships enjoyed by LGBTIQ+ people, God has been offering a blessing, a blessing recognised by those in the relationships and those who benefit from the love they contain, despite the church’s denial to join God in that act of blessing.

The Church can be a dispenser of Grace but it is not the only one. And when it chooses to withhold a blessing on that which is good the blessings will flow through other sources. Sometimes even a thrush will be called upon to replace a priest.

Peace,
Peter+

I should make use of water.

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
                      Water, Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin fascinates me.

During his life he didn’t have much time for religious practice and yet some of his poetry captures deep religious truths.

His poem, Church Going, describes the importance of having buildings set aside for use by anyone who needs a place ‘to be’.

The poem I quoted above, Water, captures baptismal imagery in a most unorthodox, but compelling way.

When he died he left a substantial portion of his estate to St Paul’s Cathedral, London, which he saw as a blessing to humanity.

People like Larkin remind me that religion at its best is an expression of something that is deeply embedded in the human person. There seems to be an innate spirituality that has its origins in and expresses our essential humanity; which bubbles up when we get in touch with the source of our being.

For me this helps to explain why the use of water is to be found in a wide range of religious practices and why buildings like St Paul’s in London, and St John’s here in Brisbane, draw into a prayerful stillness people who claim to have no faith.

Peace,
Peter+

Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears it’s pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.
         The Stations of the Cross,
               XIV Jesus is Laid in the Tomb,
                   Malcolm Guite

Yesterday we began the most intense week of the Christian Calendar. We call it Holy Week.

The story of Holy Week and Easter is the story that captured the imagination of each of the four gospel writers. The story of this week takes up the lion’s share of each Gospels. It covers the time between Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to his resurrection on Easter Day.

Holy Week is recorded in such detail by the gospel writers that we are able to recreate it:
Palm Sunday on Sunday,
The Last Supper on Thursday night,
Jesus’ trial and execution on Friday,
A day of waiting on Saturday,
The celebration of Easter joy at dawn.

We hold services to mark each of those steps in the journey; a journey that takes us on a roller-coaster ride of emotion: hope and celebration, tension and anguish, intimacy and foreboding, betrayal and fear, deep grief, confusion and transforming joy.

It is a very powerful thing to immerse oneself into every aspect of the journey through Holy Week. I think it is something that every Christian should give themselves over to completely at least once.

Come to everything and experience how it can transform you.

Peace,
Peter+

I became highly sensitised to the host plants of the bacteria I was studying. I could recognise individual plants of the various host species even from a fast moving train. Over time I developed a capacity to notice the subtle changes in biodiversity while moving through areas of vegetation, particularly as one moved around or over a mountain. As one moved, the aspect with reference to the sun changed and so did the mix of plant species; sometime dramatically.

I only recognised how significant this gift was, when after a whole day of bush walking, I asked a friend who had accompanied a group of us for the first time, what he made of the changing scenery. He responded that he had not noticed any changes and that the ceaseless scenery of trees had been rather boring.

His comments made me realise that through my work I had been given a new way to see.

One of the purposes of spiritual practices is to give us a gift similar to that given to me by my study. Meditation, prayer, contemplation and worship are intended to give us new and different ways of seeing the world.

Peace,
Peter+

A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

 For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

 But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

 And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.
                 W H Auden, Here War Is Simple

war is simple like a monument…

Auden’s poem reminds us that we slip into war too easily. Picking or taking up a fight seems to be a quick fix. Like a monument with it sharp, clean lines, war seems to be straight forward. Putin thought his war would be like a monument.

But the reality of war or any conflict is anything but simple. When we add the human aspects it always becomes a source of terror. The ripples go on for generations.

The same can be said for the conflicts that we mount in families.

One lie can sustain a conflict for decades.

Some involved in public discourse delight in stirring up conflict, often for cynical short-term gains, or to please a small group of electors. Or to stir up fear. The effects however are long-term.

Monday of last week was Harmony Day.

Our quest for harmony needs to be robust if we are to counter such destructive forces.

Harmony is much more than a romantic concept, it is the way to counter evil.

Peace,
Peter+

the minister of the environment addressed the nation
with cowboy economy codes
at the coffee hour
he urged the spaceship spinning
with tetrapak histories
watching from LED screens
non-soluble, to follow another axis.

 It does happen every year
he said, X marks the day
we grew more gold
in the croplands
thank we could eat
milked cooking oil
from shifted plates
left bruised crusts, continental
levels of polymer
replaced with synthetic kingdoms
of packaging, one-time use
for sunlight and water
industrializing air
for supermarket conveniences
stirring radioactive profit graphs
into salt, and forests
with laminated carbon bars.

 Our footprints fuel
a legacy of anthropocene fossils
leaving crushing doubts
as to weather, how many earths
will spin for consumer fashion
wither a year leaps
before the next overshooting.
                    Mrinalini Harchandrai, Earth Overshoot Day

Wednesday will be Australia’s Overshoot Day for 2022.

Overshoot Day is the day in the year when a full year of the Earth’s regenerative output is consumed by humanity. The human family as whole consumes a year’s worth of the Earth’s production by late July. This means that from August until New Year, humanity lives by using up The Earth’s ‘capital’. Year by year we are therefore depleting The Earth.

Australians consume the planet’s resources at a much higher rate than most of humanity. We reach our Overshoot Day in March. Australians are consuming the planet four times faster than it can regenerate.

The policies that both major parties are taking to the election are inadequate both for dealing with Climate Change and for winding back overshoot. As we observe Australia’s Earth Overshoot Day, let us demand of them something better. Something better for the planet and better for our kids to whom they most definitely owe a duty of care.

Mrinalini Harchandrai’s poem can also be accessed here, should you wish to share it on Social media:
https://youtu.be/j3m3XOhryKw

Peace,
Peter+

They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

Still Jesus cried, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do,’
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary.
                                         Indifference, G A Studdert Kennedy

There is a subtle but sinister form of ‘prosperity theology’ infecting our public discourse at present. It manifests most often as a call to exercise ‘personal responsibility’.

At first glance this seems like a reasonable call. Afterall, being personally responsible is part of being an adult, and it is one of the ways that we show respect to others. We behave responsibly and respectfully towards them.

The toxic edge that comes with some of the current manifestations is that ‘personal responsibility’ is being pushed into areas, which in order to be fruitful, require corporate responsibility; shared practice driven by communitarian values and aims. Achieving these often requires governments and politicians to do the things they are elected to do.

A simple example was seen at play in the call to do away with ‘mask mandates’ while advocating that individuals should take ‘personal responsibility’ to protect themselves. The fact that this was nonsense was revealed by the surges in Covid-19 infections that occurred in the parts of Australia and in places across the world where the idea was peddled. Some of the comments made about flood victims recently have been just as cruel and equally misguided. It turns out that the rich are better able to exercise ‘personal responsibility’.

The wider implications of the current  ‘personal responsibility’ push are unmasked by G A Studdert Kennedy’s poem, Indifference. The problem it unmasks is that ‘personal responsibility’ is being conflated with self-sufficiency. This ignores the fact that we are interconnected and that illness and tragedy can befall the most ‘responsible’ person.

Once again we hear of victims being blamed for their plight.

The number of homeless on our streets, and sleeping on the Cathedral precinct, is increasing and sadly the ‘personal responsibility’ push sees many in our society thinking that it is there problem to deal with. And so as a society we ‘pass down the street leaving them in the rain’, leaving them to exercise ‘personal responsibility’.

Peace,
Peter+

Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
            John Donne

Any one’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in humanity….

This poem by John Donne is one I keep coming back to. I think it carries such weight for me because it stands as a corrective to our culture’s tendency to isolate us one from another.

One of the challenges we face is learning how to imaginatively use the tension created by trying to hold on to our identity as individuals while also coming to terms with the fact that our identity is also the product of our relationships; we form and deform one another.

Further complexity is added by the fact that we each have rights as individuals, which not only press against the rights of others, but are also nestled into a complex of rights that protect our life in common.

Add to this the fact that we are told that we matter, and yet many of us know what it is like to be treated as expendable by the demands of the wider society.

During the COVID pandemic we have seen so many of these tensions being highlighted.

Many parts of the Christian tradition offer access to techniques that allow us to take the time and create the space to subject these issues to reflective investigation. Often such an exploration leads us to explore what it means to be in relationship; to recognise that we are each A part of the main.

As we continue to move through the Omicron stage of the pandemic, a stage that well might not be the last given the First World’s reluctance to help the Third and Fourth Worlds access vaccination, I am find myself increasingly disturbed by the way we have started to minimise the significance of those who are dying from the pandemic. For weeks we have had tens of people dying on a daily basis. If we had just a single bus crash that killed those sorts of numbers we would be mourning deeply and flowers would be gathered at the site of the crashes.

The, soon to be non-existent, daily press conferences seem to be structured to normalise and minimise the losses of the pandemic. We never hear the names of those who have died. A number is mentioned and we move on.

Imagine for a moment what we might be doing for one another if the press conferences included a minute’s silence to honour the lives that have been lost.

Any one’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in humanity…

Peace,
Peter+

In our most recent podcast, Fierce Love, Jacqui Lewis takes on a journey to explore the Ubuntu philosophical idea that we make each other through the sharing of our lives and through the community we develop together. Fierce Love is the name of her most recent book.

Jacqui leads a church in New York and in the podcast suggests that the only way we are going to negotiate the division and isolation of our time will be to practice love. She refers this as fierce love to ensure that we are not going to think she is talking about a soft romanticised understanding of love. The love she talks about seeks to make difference because people matter.

In his book, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa, Michael Onyebuchi Eze, points us to the essence of Ubuntu when he writes, A person is a person through other people strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an “other” in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the “other” becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The “I am” is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.

It is easy to see how ubuntu resonates with the ideas that are being expressed in relationally interested parts of the church as they reflect on the dance of the persons of the Trinity and how we mirror that in our lives.

The Fierce Love conversation and our other podcast offerings can be accessed here: https://www.stjohnscathedral.com.au/podcasts/

Peace,
Peter+

         Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
         I tune the instrument here at the door,
        And what I must do then, think here before.

 Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
        Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
       That this is my south-west discovery,
       Per fretum febris, by these straits to die…
                      John Donne, From Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness

 I love the imagery that John Donne incorporates into the first two stanzas of his poem, Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness; that we are in the process of being made into God’s music and that we are maps, crafted by the loving care of cosmographers, those who tend to us.

Both images remind me that religious practice is first and foremost about being transformed, a concept captured in the prayer over the water at Baptism. In that prayer we give thanks for the Holy Spirit who forms us into the likeness of Christ.

Our role in the process of being transformed is to make ourselves open and available to God’s transforming presence. We do that through our prayer life, our worshipping life and through spiritual conversations with trusted people. By immersing ourselves in such things we find ourselves ‘tuning the our instrument’ as John Donne has it.

At St John’s we offer many opportunities for people to be involved in these processes.

Peace,
Peter+

The school added some requirements to the enrolment contract that were, not only hurtful to members of the gender and sexuality diverse community, but were also seen as an attack on their very being. The school claimed that the approach they took on dealing with gender and sexuality was a Christian one.

A number of parents of children already enrolled at the school countered with the response that they could not sign the amended contract because of their understanding of the Christian faith. To them the faith draws them to inclusiveness and to a celebration of human diversity.

As I see it, the divergent views reveal two very different understandings of God and two very different understanding of humanity. Both can claim that the Bible supports their position. Here at St John’s we affirm the view held by the parents who refused to sign the hurtful contract.

To resolve the dissonance that these events have revealed is not going to be easy. There are difficult conversations about power, privilege and world view that must be embraced if we are to find a way to represent the light of the gospel to a world that is hungry for meaning and hope.

The events of last week hurt our mission. This week we will need to try a little harder to be seen as people who have something beautiful to give to the world. And try a little harder we will.

Peace,
Peter+

And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

 It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

 Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,
Changes of heart.

 They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.
               Richard Wilbur, For the Student Strikers

This week we observe Australia Day, a day that is becoming increasingly divisive; a day that has attracted to itself a second name, Invasion Day.

A National Day is intended to bind the people of a nation together, often around their national narrative. The conflict over the narrative that is told on Australia/Invasion Day demonstrates that we have some work to do. The dissonance between the two stories will not be resolved without some intentional work.

Richard Wilbur’s poem reminds us that listening to one another, rather than dismissing one another, is a good way to start. We certainly want to avoid falling into the use of the rock, the bullet, the blunt slogan…

Peace,
Peter+

In the book he talks about his own personal transformation in this way: I’ve tried to explain to those willing to read my story how I reached the point where I could no longer drink the grape juice of American consumer Christianity and call it wine. I’ve done my best to chronicle how Jesus did a miracle in my life by transforming watered-down pop Christianity into something glorious and intoxicating — the full-bodied wine of a deeper and richer faith.

Brain reminds us that the story of the Wedding at Cana in Galilee that was featured in our worship on Sunday is not really a story about wine at all, but an invitation to go on the journey of transformation.

 L’Chaim!
Water turned to wine
The miracle is the time
That it did not take
For common to turn extraordinaire
Tap water into carménère
Drawn from pots of ritual purity
Taken to the master of the party
Hints of plum and kingdom come
Salute!

In Nazareth he was called the carpenter
In Cana he became a master vintner
Sommelier said it’s a hundred point wine
The miracle-worker did it without a vine
A whole barrel of vintage year thirty
Better than the best from Cape Verde
All so the feast would not cease
A toast to Mary for her idea
L’chaim!

We walked from Nazareth to Cana
In the fall of my fifty-fourth year
Talking Jesus all along the way
Took us the better part of a day
Every other store up and down the line
A Christian selling some kind of wine
Call it a entrepreneurial witness to —
Jesus’ first miracle
Cheers!

Water turned to wine
The mystery is the time
It takes for my own transformation
A slow and painful fermentation
With a soul like crushed grapes
I’m a dusty bottle in God’s cellar
But the winemaker knows his craft
He makes all things beautiful in their time
Hallelujah!
                            Brian Zahnd, Water to Wine: Some of My Story.

Peace,
Peter+

Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
      The Stare’s Nest by my Window, William Butler Yeats,
      From Meditations in Time of Civil War

Some of our community have already chosen to enter into a period of lockdown. The number of people at Church has reduced dramatically since mid-December.

W B Yeats wrote The Stare’s Nest by my Window during the Civil War in Ireland in the 1920’s. His family had also been significantly impacted by the Spanish Flu Epidemic in 1918, as well as by the aftermath of World War 1. It was time of incredible stress and challenge.

In the poem Yeats, I think, captures the sentiments held by many of us in these days as Covid finally takes hold on our community:
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty.

It is interesting to note that Yeats also writes about discovering honey, something sweet and somewhat miraculous, in the midst of his experience of being locked-in and uncertain.

Years later Yeats was to say that his poem was the result of ‘an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature… a strange thing happened. I began to smell honey in places where honey could not be…’.

A Starling is called a Stare in West Ireland.

Peace,
Peter+

Here is one of my favourite Tutu quotes:

When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.

Peace,
Peter+

was not what made her frightened. The surprise
he gave her by his coming was no more
than sun or moon-beam stirring on the floor
would give another, — she had long since grown
used to the form that angels wear, descending;
never imaging this coming-down
was hard for them….

No, not to see him enter, but to find
the youthful angel’s countenance inclined
so near to her; that when he looked, and she
looked up at him, their looks so merged in one
the world outside grew vacant, suddenly,
and all things being seen, endured and done
were crowded into them: just she and he
eye and its pasture, visions and its view,
here at the point and at this point alone:-
see, this arouses fear. Such fear both knew.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Annunciation to Mary
From The Life of Mary

The encounter between Mary and Gabriel, which occupies a pivotal moment in the story leading to Christmass, is an event that has captured the imagination of many.

Poets and artists have sought to plumb the depths of the complexity and meaning of that encounter. Was Mary meek and compliant? Was she strong and defiant? Did she interrogate the Angel?

It is an amazing exercise to act out the scene imagining Mary with different personality traits.

These reflections are important because they help us explore the idea of God’s will and how we exercise our capacity for free will in that context. Could Mary have said ‘no’ to the angel’s request? I understand that the answer to that question is, ‘Yes, she could have said “no”’.

Rilke in the poem, The Annunciation to Mary, explores the idea of Mary being of equal stature to the angel. The angel was as afraid as she was during the encounter, and yet there was a deep connection between the two. Out of that deep relationship and encounter, Mary felt enabled to say ‘Yes’.

The encounter invites us to reflect on the times we have felt a deep connection to God and others and the way that sense of connection enables us to act in adventurous ways.

Peace,
Peter+

As we observe this important day, I want to reflect on the idea that individualism is an increasing threat to individual rights.

Individualism is an increasing threat to individual rights.

The thing about our basic rights is that they can only find genuine and universal expression in a social context; they need society to operate in a particular way for them to be delivered. So, our rights to feel safe, and to have access to clean water, good sanitation, health care and education can only be universally accessed when there are societal systems that enable and protect them. These systems ensure that education and health care, for example, can be accessed by the poor. Access is not restricted to those who can afford to pay; access is by right and enabled by a particular way of being together.

Christian social teaching refers to the framing that guides the development of such a society as the pursuit of the common good.

Vatican II expressed the concept of common good in this way:
The common good is the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.

Individualism is seen as an increasing threat to individual rights because there is an developing tendency to see rights as pertaining to the individual in isolation, as not being dependent on the social context. This leads to many losing sight of the role that the social context plays in ensuring that our rights are not only safeguarded, but also enabled.

One example of how this is playing out is provided by the pursuit of what is claimed to be ‘the right to bear arms’ in the USA.

In Australia in 2019, the figure for gun deaths by homicide and suicide was 0.88 per 100 000. In the USA, the figure for 2017 was 12.21 per 100 000. Further, since we implemented stricter gun control in 1996 there have been no mass shootings in Australia, while in the USA, in 2020 alone, there were 611.

The above means that in the USA, society is not organised in a way to enable people to have access to such a basic right as the right to be safe. Every year, thousands of people have their individual right to life and their right to live in safety obliterated by individuals claiming a ‘right’ to bear arms.

The US therefore fails the basic common good test when it comes to the right to safety. Australia does a better job, but given that we still have way more deaths than say, Japan, the principle of pursuing the common good invites us to ask if we could be doing more.

So, as we observe Human Rights Day, we would do well to reflect on how increasing individualism is undermining individual freedoms by recrafting society in ways that make it more difficult to pursue the common good. And as we do that, we can take a close look at some of the ‘rights’ that are being claimed in the public discourse and protest around vaccination.

Peace,
Peter+

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
                   The Kingdom, R S Thomas

I see the poem as an Advent poem because in Advent we seek to imagine what the world will be like when it reaches its fulfilment, when the prophetic imagination is realised, and this poem gives us some hints about what that means and how we get there.

The poem suggests that while at one level the kingdom, the place of fulfilment, is way, way off, at another level we can see that it would not take much for a lot of its potential to be realised. After all, we live is world that produces more than enough food to feed everyone, so with just a little bit of imagination and generosity all the hungry could be fed.

The poem therefore is important to me as its speaks to the Advent theme of hope. We can make a difference through the exercising of our faith, and living the hope we proclaim.

Peace,
Peter+

One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

 He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

 He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

 He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.
                  Advent Calendar, Rowan Williams

The Season of Advent began on Sunday. Advent begins the Church year and serves a double purpose. It provides us with four weeks to prepare for Christmass as the Feast of the Coming of Christ. It also invites us to be on alert for the many ways in which Christ comes to us and for the fulfilment of all things in Christ. Rowan Williams’ poem captures this theme beautifully; Christ comes as leaf fall, frost, dark and child.

How has Christ appeared to you?

Peace,
Peter+

Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,

 We come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.

 Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

 Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.
                  Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

This poem by Rilke is one of the most devastating I have ever read. R S Thomas’, The Island, beats it by a whisker.

Rilke’s poem suggests that we are each so shaped by life events, the voices of parents and the opinions of others that our true self is lost, consigned to the repository of unlived things.

I actually don’t share Rilke’s view, but do take it as a potent warning. I think it is possible to live an authentic life, to be true to oneself.

The poem stands as warning because there are incredible pressures on us to conform, to be silent in the face of structural injustice and to accept that the way things are is the way they have to be.

Through Baptism followers of The Way are called to recognise that they are unique, uniquely gifted and uniquely loved. One of the calls this places on us is the we allow our true face to speak.

Peace,
Peter+

Of finding food, and keeping warm,
Are not like ours, and yet
A kinship lingers nonetheless:
We hanker for the homeliness
Of den, and hole, and set.

 And this identity we feel
– Perhaps not right, perhaps not real –
Will link us constantly;
I see the rock, the clay, the chalk,
The flattened grass, the swaying stalk,
And it is you I see.
                The Little Lives Of Earth And Form,
Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin’s little poem simply seeks to remind us that we are more like the other creatures that inhabit this planet than western human hubris likes to think. We all want to have a warm and dry place to sleep and hope not to go to bed hungry. Larkin invites us to look at the other creatures and see ourselves.

For the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow to be success, those leading the negotiations will need to find the capacity to see the ‘other’ – whether that ‘other’ be a human from a less developed nation or a creature whose habitat is under threat – and respond with empathy and compassion.

Thus far Australia has been portrayed as selfish nation as our politicians look to short-term outcomes. My prayer is that those who hold a more expansive vision of what life can be, the life we proclaim as the Commonwealth of God, will capture the imaginations of those who are determined to hold us back.

Peace,
Peter+

The deeper things are there just because they belonged to the world he lived in, and he could not have kept them out. For the reader who can appreciate them, there are terrors in the pit of darkness into which he can make us look; but in the end, we are brought nearer to what another modern explorer of the darkness has called “the laughter at the heart of things.”

All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween has long-held a place in the public imagination. These days it plays out as something of a pantomime, with over-the-top costumes and ‘trick and treating’. Yet dressing up, special food and lanterns made of vegetables were all part of the Christian festival of All Hallows’ Eve.

The interest in All Hallows’ Eve, the day – and more especially the night – before All Saints’ Day, reflects our human fascination with death, with what happens to the dead after they have been alive and the with the space between life and death.

Various parts of the Christian tradition hold that those who have died journey towards heaven after death, or that they do ‘soul work’ after death, or that some go to a place of waiting. Words such a Purgatory and Hades capture some of this.

If nothing else, these posturings remind us that each of us carries with us a sense that sometimes things can be in-between; that unfinished business can hold us back and that we can experience dark things, even when we believe that the light will eventually conquer the darkness.

Days like Holy Saturday, which reminds us that sometimes the only thing we can do is wait, and All Hallows’ Eve, which reminds us that there will be times when we have to look at what T S Eliot called ‘the terrors in the pit of darkness’, play an important role is helping us live into life’s liminality.

I think T S Eliot was also correct when he suggested that it is through embracing these journeys into uncertainty that we find that the path leads us to experience “the laughter at the heart of things.”

Peace,
Peter+

I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
                   Happiness, from All of Us: The Collected Poems,Raymond Carver.

Whenever I announced a life decision to my mum she would ask just one question, ‘Are you happy?’

Happiness, like joy, is a rather skittish concept. Both are deeper and more complex than we sometimes imagine. I think they are also closely linked. Raymond Carver’s poem, Happiness, I think captures that connection. One can sense the deep joy that the boys in the poem are experiencing, the joy of being alive and the joy of friendship, as well as their profound happiness.

Aristotle suggested that true happiness was to be found when one found oneself doing what one is supposed to be doing. In Christian parlance we would say happiness lies in living out one’s vocation.

This understanding of happiness, and of joy, points us to the fact that true happiness can be experienced even in the midst of challenging circumstances.

Peace,
Peter+

and too many windows were open.
A stormy wind hurled me along a passage,
and my foot dis­lodged the catch of a trapdoor that I did not know existed.
I fell down rotten steps,
the door clanged shut,
and I land­ed unconscious on the stone floor of a dark cellar.
There was enough air through a ventilation shaft for survival.
From time to time voices and shadowy figures would im­pinge on my awareness,
and they became clearer as my eyes got used to the dark.
Some were earthed enough to sit with me without intruding
and helped me discover that the stone floor was trustworthy.
And little by little the steps were re­paired with the help of ‘angel-messengers’
descending and ascending upon them.
A few sat on the top step and blocked out the light …
                       Brainsquall, Jim Cotter

Jim Cotter was a Welsh Anglican Priest and poet. In 1994 he suffered a breakdown. This was followed by a time in deep depression. He kept a record of his depression journey which he titled, Brainsquall. The excerpt above is his description of a dream he had as he descended into the depression.

I read Brainsquall when it first came out. At the end of that read I felt that for the first time in my life I had gained some sense of the experience that people with severe mental illness have to endure. I caught a glimpse of how deep and profound such experiences can be. It helped me learn how to listen to those who are experiencing a mental health crisis and showed me the importance of being present and available for those who find themselves in some of the earth’s darkest places. In Brainsquall, Jim pays tribute to the friends who kept on turning up.

In more recent times I have found Les Murray’s poetry equally helpful.

We are currently in Mental Health week; a week to listen and attend.

Peace,
Peter+

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…..
God’s Gandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing his poetry in later half of the Nineteen century. He was enamoured by the beauty of the natural world and the way it manifested the presence of God.

He was also troubled by the effect that the industrial revolution was having on people and the environment. It was the era of working-class slums and heavily polluted rivers and air. And so, his poem, God’s Grandeur, continues:
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Hopkin’s concern was shared by many poets. William Blake, predated Hopkins but shared his also concern. His poem, Jerusalem, visions England as a holy land: 

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

But laments the disfiguring presence of the dark Satanic Mills.

Blake then dedicates himself to fulfilling a vision of the earth restored. He will not rest
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Thomas Traherne provides a third example of this doublet that celebrates the presence of God in creation while lamenting the loss of that appreciation by many in his day. In his work The First Century, he first points the reader to the delight of being connected to the natural world: 
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

He then shares his lament and concern:
Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it that you had rather suffer the flames of hell than willingly be guilty of their error.

There is some comfort, a kindling of optimism, to be had as we note that previous generations faced an ecological crisis, a crisis that was largely overcome. Today England is far more green and pleasant land than it was in the days of Blake.

May their gift to us be a sense of optimism that we will see us tackle the ecological crisis that faces us.

Peace,
Peter+

but I have not felt at home in myself.
I’ve worked hard at being the hero of my own life.
But every time I checked the register of displaced persons,
I was still on it.
I didn’t know how to belong.
Longing? Yes.
Belonging? No.
            Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

The title of Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, comes from a comment that her adoptive mother made as she was evicting Jeanette from the family home. Jeanette was 16 years old.

Jeanette had just revealed that for the second time in her life she had a girlfriend. The meant that the adoptive mother’s attempts to have the ‘lesbian’ demon exorcised, following the discovery of the first girlfriend, had failed. And so, Jeanette herself was now to be ‘cast out’.

Why be happy when you could be normal?

Later in the memoir we discover that Jeanette’s adoptive mother had also sacrificed happiness for ‘normality’. 

The whole tale is one of the tragic waste of human potential.

Our culture, and much of the church, is still incredibly cruel to LGBTQI+ people.

I am constantly in awe of the LGBTQI+ people I encounter though my life and ministry. Most of them have had to struggle against some version of the pressure to conform to ‘normality’ at the cost of, not only happiness, but of their true self.

I for one, today, wish to honour the way so many hold to the living of an authentic life in the face of such a nihilistic demand.

The Cathedral Community is observing Pride Month during September.

Peace,
Peter+

Henry David Thoreau took himself off to live for two years, two months and two days in a cabin that built for himself in Massachusetts.

He attended to the place, observing the species of animal, fish, plants and trees, making notes and writing poetry in response to what he was experiencing. He was deeply transformed by the experience.

As we enter more deeply into the Season of Creation, Thoreau’s experience invites us to reflect on separated many of us have become from what we ‘other’ through the use of the word nature.

How can we reconnect to the world in which we live and move and have our being so that we too can be moved by the oratorios preformed by God in the world?

Peace,
Peter+

In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.

Nothing in this world is indifferent to us

The first two paragraphs of Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ second encyclical, set the scene for us as we prepare to enter the Season of Creation.

The Season of Creation commences on September 1, the day the Orthodox Churches celebrate Creation Day, and concludes on October 4, The Feast of St Francis of Assisi, the Western Church’s ecological saint.

Pope Francis reminds us that at its heart the ecological crisis and the related climate crisis both trace their origins to a breakdown in our relationship with our sister, Mother Earth. In this season we will reflect deeply on how we might be restored to right relationship.

Nothing in this world is indifferent to us

Peace,
Peter+

Has bestowed an emerald gown on the earth.
Deserts are like blood-stained silk
And the sky has the fragrance of musk.
With a mixture of musk and red wine
An artist has drawn an image of my love on the desert.
The world has become peaceful
For both the tiger and the deer.
For such occasions. we need a sun-faced idol,
And a moon. leaning on a cushion of sun.
We must have an idol with cheeks like rubies,
And red wine to match the cheeks.
The world has become a peacock,
With roughness here and smoothness here.
Mud smells of roses,
As though kneaded with rose water.
                                                Daqiqi of Balkh

I have been reeling as result of the imagery and reportage that has been coming out of Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of the nation.

I am deeply saddened by what I imagine will be the plight of women and girls. I can only imagine the feeling of terror that must be surging through religious minorities, those who assisted western nations and who have now been betrayed and abandoned to their fate, those who are fleeing and those who are unable to flee, those who face certain death.

I find myself thinking too, of those who gave themselves so wholeheartedly to the mission to which our government committed us; those who must be questioning whether it might all have been in vain; those who loved ones were killed or permanently altered.

It is a complex time, and the series of emotions are just as complex.

As is often the case when I face complexity, I turn to the poets. Today’s poem is by the Afghan (Persian) poet Daqiqi of Balkh.

Peace,
Peter+

Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length
You will look back along the star’s rays and see that even
The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.
                                         Sign-post, Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers was an American poet who died in 1962. He was deeply troubled by humanity’s self-centred approach to the earth and nature.

William Everson, in Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury, suggests that Jeffers ‘saw that only a humanity which contemplates unremittingly the divine Otherness can be whole, can maintain wholeness; that a humanity turned from contemplation inevitably becomes obsessed with itself’.

Although Jeffers was writing over half-a-century ago, his poetry places before something of the nature of the significant challenge we face as we come to terms with the Climate Crisis.

The relational and spiritual aspects of the challenge of dealing with climate change are not often included in the conversation we are having about how we move forward. Most often the needed response is seen in simple terms: reducing our carbon emissions, installing solar panels, buying electric cars, and eating less meat.

Understanding that the way out of the crisis also involves attending to the way we relate to the other creatures, to the planet as whole, and to our spirituality, helps us appreciate that both the problem and our response are more complex than they often appear. We must attend to the way we understand ourselves in nature and look for ways to live in balance.

Recognising the complexity of the situation enables us to look carefully at the simplistic approaches to solving the climate crisis that have been offered so far. Following simplistic solutions might see us trash the planet as we mine Lithium and ever more iron ore, further adding to the ecological crisis that is also with us.

Appreciating the complexity allows us to explore options that are more transformative than the simplistic approaches at present on offer.

Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes.
Things are the God, you will love God, and not in vain.
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. …
Now you are free to become human.

Peace,
Peter+