[ hold :: this space ]

I’ve spent the last two days at a conference with Diana Butler Bass, which some colleagues of mine were organising. It was a last minute decision to go, and I’m so, so glad I did.

Diana is the author of A People’s History of Christianity, Christianity for the rest of us, and numerous other books on the practices of spiritual communities and congregations. Her expertise is in articulating contextual realities about culture, faith and church community, and making them accessible to a church which is largely confused by them… and seriously, i don’t think i’ve heard anyone express it better. She created a tinker toy model for explaining the continuums on which we ‘define’ different communities, and how all of that is changing in a postmodern landscape. In a nutshell, she talked about the continuum that we normally use to define church communities [liberal - conservative], added in another dimension [conventional - intentional], and then the third, new dimension of modernity and postmodernity. It offered such a useful framework for conversations, and understanding the emerging tensions and subtle differences between expressions of community that often look the same, but are somehow very different. It was lovely to hear someone talking about postmodern communities who has herself come from a liberal / progressive background. When so many books and blogs about emerging church are from people who are so passionate about disavowing any liberal inclinations [i always feel like the odd one out in emerging church circles], it was just brilliant - and a weird kind of relief, actually - to hear the possibilities of emerging communities from someone who values that part of her heritage, even if, in a postmodern world, it is no longer the defining paradigm.

North American speakers often don’t translate well into an Australian context. We’ve often wondered why that is - perhaps there’s too much of the readymade in what they present; perhaps it stems from a lack of awareness of how steeped in the American culture that their stuff actually is, or a lack of understanding of the diversities of cultures in australia. Diana got the subtleties of the audience really well, and seemed really interested in how her input made sense here, not just in telling us what was happening there. She was articulating our reality here, and it was quite astonishing to hear our truths being reflected so accurately back to us in an American accent. I feel unexpectedly grateful for the whole experience.

We decided last night that we will organise a gathering for people in the uniting church [or those not in the UCA, but who have come from similar 'quadrants'], who are working with or part of communities that have developed within a postmodern framework and know no other way of being. It would not be an event for those who are working with hinge communities, or for leaders who want their church to be different and are trying to work through the transition. Diana talked about the necessity to experiment and try new things, but to learn from the things that do and don’t work - this gathering [which would hopefully birth a network or ongoing learning community] would be a place to reflect on experiments and learnings. There are, after all, plenty of opportunities for those who are trying to create or lead hinge communities, and not many for those who are at another point in the story. It’s part of an attempt to build a body of people who can start the conversation at a different point, rather than covering the ground of ‘why’ and ‘what’ yet again…

I realised when I walked into the venue on Tuesday that i haven’t been to a church conference or meeting for the last two years. It was surreal. For the first time I realised how far away I have moved from the church, and how different the air i breathe now is. In the first plenary, someone talked about the implications of new forms of community for ordination, and i realised that i haven’t been anywhere where the subject of ordination has been raised for a very long time, where that’s been a consideration or a category. I felt like a fish out of water for much of the two days, and in the group conversations I realised I no longer knew or understood the language which was being used. It’s not my world or reality any more. Which is not a bad thing, it’s just surreal. And I realised that while i deeply respect that group of people and that community [and I do], I really love where i am now.

So I went home last night feeling more courageous, i guess, about a few things; more confirmed in what we’re trying to do in this new unit, and this project, and oddly less lonely. It goes to show that you don’t always need the company of other people to make a journey. Sometimes you just need to know that your story holds its own with another’s.

And i feel like i’ve made a new friend in Diana, which is just lovely too.

I went back to Port Philip Prison last night to see the men in the Marlborough Unit. Ross, the chaplain, and I decided that we’d like to do some midwinter services, so last night we were planning to write some prayers and psalms with the men, which i’d then take away and use to design worship for two weeks time.

It didn’t quite work like that, but as with all things in the prison, it worked in its own way.

It was a very different group to last time I was doing writing in there. We read a couple of psalms, we talked about the solstice and the longest night, we handed out the templates… and then there was silence, and blank looks. We offered the option of people taking them away and doing it themselves, later in their cell, and there was enthusiastic nodding… so we’ll see what comes out of that! Quite a few men who didn’t come to worship came up afterwards and wanted copies of the templates to write their own as well, so we’ll see whether they come back too… It’s always unexpected. I have a backup plan for the worship, if we don’t get anything - and either way it’s going to involve lots of candles and communion at the end…

Last night worship was planned for 5pm, but dinner was late, and then medication… so it was about 6 before we started. And then two minutes in, the dessert message came across the loud speaker, so the men traipsed outside, got their icecream and brought it back in… By the end of worship, those who had had their medication for depression were completely zoned out and nearly falling over.

I haven’t been back there since christmas day, so in the hour or so that we were waiting around for dinner and medication and whatever else, they were asking questions about what i’d been doing and where else i’d been. I mentioned i’d been in the women’s prison over Easter. I was sitting next to Craig, who shivered and said ‘I’ve heard they’re scary in there’. It was like i had instant [undeserved] street cred for daring to go in there. It was somewhat ironic coming from someone as big and threatening as him, who has spent his life in and out of prison, is decorated with prison ink and battle scars - the kind of person i would instinctively cross the street to avoid outside [in fact, the kind of person who makes me catch taxis home so i won't even be walking on the same street]. The truth is indeed contextual…

I’ve been reading Marilyn Robinson’s book Home for the last few days. I was talking about it yesterday to someone, saying that it’s everything she doesn’t say that makes the story so beautiful - that the space she leaves between words and sentences is filled with this kind of fragility that leaves us aching. As we were leaving the unit last night, Alf appeared. He’d waved at us from his cell door earlier in the night, and then he came down and sat outside the room where we were holding worship, i think to wait for us to come out. He told me that he’s decided to give up his medication, to try to manage things on his own. It felt like there was such importance behind those words. I don’t know what it was - that he was taking responsibility for himself in a new way? that he’d decided that he wanted some kind of different future? I don’t even know what the medication was for… But in the silence between his sentences, i felt that same kind of aching i’ve been feeling as i’ve been reading Home. That sense of the other that’s found in the meeting point of resilience, fragility and longing. Maybe it’s that sense of holiness that comes only in the encounter with that which is most broken and is trying to be human.

So we go back in a couple of weeks to think about the longest nights again. And i feel so lucky that i get to encounter human existence at its most raw and most fragile. Who would ever want to be anywhere else?

Most conversations about new forms of church or christian community are about rethinking the table at which the disciples sit. True confession: this project doesn’t emerge from any interest in that table, or even really in the disciples. i think the really interesting stuff of the gospels is the other stories - the tables Jesus went to where the disciples weren’t invited, or where they were so absent no-one thought to mention their presence - the afternoons at Mary and Martha’s, the nameless person’s house where Jesus met the syro-phonoecian woman, dinner at Levi’s house, dinner with Peter’s mother, the ‘water into wine’ wedding table. I think they’re the fun tables.

- from a post I wrote last year.

I’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about the fact that many of the assumptions about what shape expressions of faith and community should take are debunked completely when one takes them into another culture and context, especially one where we don’t play host. Our language and patterns of being and behaving are stripped away when we don’t hold the knowledge or the power, when we don’t get to decide what happens, or what meaning it will take; when we are invited guests. It’s a very good place to be.

[This is a bit of an historical paragraph about structural stuff before talking about why i'm bringing this up again no...!] This alt worship project is part of the Commission for Mission [CFM] in the Uniting Church’s Synod of Victoria and Tasmania. Over recent years the Synod has been reconfiguring the way it resources mission in local congregations [the recent restructuring / focus on resourcing of presbyteries is a primary means of this]. What it’s meant is that the CFM no longer needs to take a primary role in consulting with / resourcing congregations. And that’s making possible some new things…

This week, the CFM has announced some structural changes. The old Mission Planning unit [MPRU] is to be reconfigured, and a few other independent streams of work that have been formed over the last couple of years to explore the edges of the church’s thinking about community, mission and presence, have been drawn together to create a new unit, named Culture and Context.

The Culture and Context Unit will have as its broad aim the discovery of new ‘language’ [in its broadest form] for faith that resonates with communities outside the mainstream. In practical ways, various people in the unit will be focussing on different areas: taking lead roles in some inter-faith work [in schools, disability services and chaplaincy]; exploring and extending chaplaincy education and development [in prisons, mental health institutions, hospitals, etc.]; through liaison work with schools [including a great 'schoolies with a cause' project], and the development of a road trauma memorial project with the victorian government. I’ll be continuing to work in alt worship, although we’re going to re-title this project so that it more accurately reflects what it is - the exploration of expressions of spirituality in postmodern contexts. I’ll also be co-directing the unit with Adrian Pyle, who will be focussing on the development of spiritual intelligence in communities and organisations.

At its heart, this new unit won’t be on about working in these areas on behalf of the church… we’re on about a serious exploration of what theology, spirituality and transformative community looks like in places that the church often doesn’t reach, or where it doesn’t know what to do when it’s there. In essence, we’re going out to to be guests at some of those different tables, in order to discover more clearly what hope, love and life look like when we’re there.

Saturday night turned out to be the longest night for quite unexpected reasons, but the solstice space itself was really lovely…

[We projected onto the ground, at the entry, images of the solar system in real time, with the earth at the centre, showing the darkness moving over australia - this photo was taken on my mobile, hence the lack of quality]

We turned the space into an art gallery of sorts, lining the walls with large prints of images of darkness, which were footnoted [an idea inspired by Roni Horn's work]. These are a couple of them:

We had two video spaces - we projected the same loop of dawn over Docklands through black fabric, with the words i posted here the other day [split in the obvious place]… and we turned one wall into a story wall, putting up postcard sized copies of the different images which were hung around the basement wall, inviting people to take one and in its place to write the story of their longest night. Those stories are really beautiful. And in the centre of the basement we laid out tables with food and wine which became the gathering point. Mike and Claire printed out wine labels - black wax print on black labels, with the words

in our darkness
there is [no] darkness

oh god

That was it, really. We had originally intended to keep the space really dark, giving people torches at the entry to see their way around the pictures, and then having downlights over the table - but the space absorbed much more light than we were aware. As someone said on the night, your eyes never adjust to the darkness in there, which was kind of nice… but it did mean that we had to do a last minute dash to the shops to buy more sources of subdued lighting. We also used blacklights in a few places, which was quite nice too.

We learnt a lot: $2 torches are $2 for a reason. We could see their light dimming from the moment we put new batteries in… We got better at signage out the front, so more people walked in off the street. Some stayed for a minute, some stayed much longer - we still need to find better language to explain what we’re doing. Most importantly, we learnt that the settings in the alarm and access system for the building aren’t as infallible as one would hope… but rather than remember the last horrendous two hours of cleanup, it would be nice to remember the rest of the night instead, which was, I think, quite beautiful…

As always, it was such a lovely thing to work with this group of people. I always feel so lucky…

open from 8 until midnight tomorrow night, in the basement at 130 Lt Collins Street

And what is the darkness for you?

a refuge?
an escape?
a solace?

where you can no longer tell
where you end and everything else begins?

where you can no longer see the horizon?

The dawn will come
but there will be another night…

And how is the darkness for you?

menacing?
unnerving?
forboding?

where you can no longer tell
where you end and everything else begins?

where you can no longer see the horizon?

The dawn will come
as will another night

but the dawn will always come….

We noted its beginning, so it seems appropriate to note its end… the last of the fires that started burning on February 7 is finally out.

The landscape and the psyche of the state is still scarred. It’s all very raw still, and it will be for a very long time.

we endure the darkness
for what it makes possible:
the seeing of the stars
the coming of the dawn
sleep.

but we don’t always have to see
and we don’t always have to know.
sometimes the darkness is good
just for being itself

so if you would like
and if you can
let it be dark.

crawl into it
let it wrap you
let it hold you
let it be the end to your beginning
let it hide the edges of your world
let it call you out from the knowing that holds you in
let it be what it is:
let it be dark.

the dawn will come
as it always does.
perhaps all too soon
perhaps just in time.

for now, though,
let it be dark.

I loved these last two paragraphs from Mark Vernon’s review of Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

“There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will even be born,” is how Eagleton ends.

But, you know, there is an optimism that lurks in the dark heart of pessimism. For pessimism is not nihilism, that wants nothing from life, nor cynicism, that doubts everything about life. Rather, if it expects nothing, it gives everything, because it knows it is onto something. Isn’t that what the loser Jesus speaks of too?

‘If it expects nothing, it gives everything, because it knows it is onto something…’ What we do to change the world isn’t going to work, but we do it anyway, just in case it does, and simply because it’s the only way we’ll ever hold on to our humanity. And, as i’ve realised more and more over these last few weeks, i have no interest at all in people becoming christian - or even being christian myself. I want to put the focus right back on becoming human.

Random thoughts in the absence of cohesion

I don’t read many church blogs, but it seems there’s a bit of a theme going around that people are stopping blogging for a while, and becoming a little jaded with social networking. Someone asked whether the sporadic posting here meant i was stopping blogging. I have no plans to stop blogging, but i don’t blog to network or be part of a conversation [I know, I really haven't caught the spirit of blogging at all. And these posts? Way too long for a blog] - i do it to archive, to remind myself what i think, and because it’s an easy way to get resources out to people who might be interested. And besides, we’re getting towards the end of a lovely re-design that i need to show off…

But given the nature of the days and the work at the moment, things will be sporadic for the next little bit. If you are looking for something to read, go read Jonny Baker’s blogposts about curation. His last one is here, and there are links to the earlier posts there. I’m loving them. It makes what we are trying to do here, randomly and non-strategically, feel much less random and a little more strategic… I love this line that jonny quotes in his last post: ‘a museum director’s first task is to create a public - not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution’ [pontus hultén]. That’s been bouncing round my head all week as i think about the responsibility of what we’re doing with our spaces, and whether we’re living up to it…

We are heading to Greenbelt and the UK in just over two months… Nic and I are organising two groups again this year, each with a slightly different focus. My group will be heading to Telford [we love Telford!], then Liverpool [a first for me], to meet with Dream, and then on to Brighton to meet with the Garden and Beyond, before heading to London to meet with Jonny. It’s a different trip to last year, mostly due to the transient realities of the communities that we visit… I realised last night that I have only scheduled one day off… here’s hoping my group are as resilient and tough as i think they are… Nic is organising the group that will be meeting with church / diocesan strategic thinkers and leaders. I’m staying on for a week or so after, in order to do some research for next year’s trip, which will be focussing on culture / art / spirituality - more of a curation focus than a community focus. i can’t wait.

(Do you think all the good names for groups have been taken? We don’t have a cool name for the basement spaces. We just call what we do ‘the basement’ by default. Perhaps we’ll keep doing that. All these other names seem to evoke landscape and vision and far horizons… which seems a little incongruous when you’re suspending projectors from sewage pipes, and kicking the rat poison out of sight in order to put a slide projector in its place… while hoping the rats don’t seize the opportunity to gnaw on the cord instead of the poison… [reminder to self: buy bleach to get rid of the urine smell at the doorway for next weekend...]. I quite often get told that what we’re doing is pretentious and dressed up. I so wish people would see the reality.)

And just to finish a blog post that’s all over the shop… Do you ever have one of those weeks [years] where everything is too big to write about? writing a blog post or an article feels like you’ve got an elephant to describe, but only the words to speak about the front left leg, and that does no justice to the elephant at all, and in fact the leg makes no sense without the rest of the elephant, but to start on the whole elephant is impossible and unrealistic, and downright silly, because the words haven’t been created yet to make sense of it? I’m in one of those years, i think. Maybe I’m also really aware that when i start to describe the elephant, i’m going to disappoint a lot of people, and they’re all people i quite like, and don’t want to do that to. Who knows. It’s not an angsty thing. Silence is good.

I started studying at the beginning of the year - professional writing and editing. Somewhat ironically, since i started studying writing I’ve stopped writing. It’s not that i haven’t had time, it’s that I’ve become aware of the bigger picture… spending every wednesday night looking around at a lecture theatre of incredibly talented people, who are all so confident and articulate, thinking that we’re fighting for the same column space in the newspaper, metaphorically speaking, and that they’ve all got something brilliant to say that i want to hear… Where do they get that confidence from? So the only possible response to that is to quit study, which i have just done. I don’t like quitting, and normally i stick something out to the bitter end out of stubbornness. But this time? It’s pure liberation. And here’s hoping imagination is born from liberation [which sounds like something brueggemann would say, kind of, although he'd say it more poetically]…

Must get back to working on the budget - which is, of course, just another expression of vivid imagination…

[you'll have to imagine there's a solstice image here (bloody wordpress)]

I can’t wait for the solstice.

We’re doing a space in the basement - something completely different to what we’ve done before. It’s not alt worship, hopefully it will be some kind of sacred space, though i think those who want to bring christian interpretations into the space will definitely find ways to do that… We met last night to do some final planning, and it’s really going to be lovely. It’s very low tech [the lowest tech we've ever done - perhaps the trick is to not say we need to go low tech. Every time we say that, we end up with 12 hour set ups...]

i think the lovely thing is that none of us have any idea what we want to say in the space, we just want to embody what the solstice is about… being in company that helps us survive the longest night, finding a story that helps us know we’re not alone…

The space will be open from 8 until midnight on the 20th June, in the basement carpark at 130 Little Collins Street. It’ll be cold, even with heating… When wordpress cooperates I’ll put the poster up…