[ hold :: this space ]

Over the last year or so we’ve been talking about changing the direction of this blog, to reflect the breadth of work we’re doing here, and to make resources much easier to find and use – and today it’s ready! We’ve taken this opportunity to get a new address as well: www.holdthisspace.org.au. I hope you’ll come on over, and change your bookmarks and rss feeds when you get there… [and I hope you love the new site as much as I do...]

from Karen Armstrong:

From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfil their humanity. They were not religious simply because their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historically sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or merely because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. They were not bludgeoned into faith by power-hungry priests or kings: indeed, religion often helped people to oppose tyranny and oppression of this kind. The point of religion was to live intensely and richly here and now. Religious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly and justly and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted, as Confucius suggested, to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life. They tried to honour the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that honoured the stranger, the alien, the poor and the oppressed. Of course they often failed. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this.

I’m speaking at the Mission Now forum on November 5, at St Michael’s here in the city. I spoke at one of these forums earlier in the year, introducing the concepts behind communal justice, and developing it as a framework for the church’s mission. The forums have continued the theme of communal justice throughout the year, exploring how it works in different parts of the church’s work: with mental health, indigenous issues, multicultural tensions, etc. This is the final forum of the year, and the intention of the day is to explore new language that will offer healing and restoration to the world… I think that’s a gentle way of saying ‘evangelism that doesn’t suck’.

I’m part of a panel, and also presenting on the day. I’m going to use part of the epilogue to Karen Armstrong’s book, The case for God, as pre-reading for participants.

The irony is, i’m less and less sure about the capacity of language and words to do anything… The argument about evangelism in the tradition I belong to has always been about the tension between words and actions [show them you're christian / tell them you're christian]. with the demographics i work with [including those in prison], neither is transformative, both seem strangely out of place. We have to find the third way.

wash me.

wash me in the water
that tells the story of life.

wash me in the water that has soothed the ache
quenched the thirst
bathed the sore

wash me in the water
that has carved valleys
from recalcitrant rocks
and new landscapes
out of the impossible
and impermeable

wash me in the water that has destroyed and created
that holds the promise of living and dying
in every drop

wash me in the water that holds all history’s story

wash me in the water
so it will tell mine…

Blythe and I went and learnt how to do guerilla projecting on saturday night, under the Banana Alley bridge…

We got some good tips, including a great ‘how to’ guide, and insight into some nice touches [simple things, like making the background to all the movies black, so that there's no edge between the projected image and the wall]. The movies of the eyes were absolutely brilliant – they were close ups, edged in black; quite disconcerting, very beautiful.

The artists were quite freaked by the idea that people were coming specifically to see what they were doing [it was advertised as part of the melbourne arts festival]. They normally do stuff for an accidental audience… an intentional audience is a much harder sell: what’s their motivation for coming? will this fill the need they look for?… i’ve been pondering the distinction ever since…

I haven’t been in the city on a saturday night for a very long time. even the street outside my office seemed like such a different place. I don’t feel like i know it at all.

I went to the opening of the Women in the Bible: Tricksters, Victors and (M)others* exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia last week. I was part of the reference group for the exhibition, although i confess i hardly made it to any of the meetings.

The exhibition is wonderful. Rebecca Forgasz, the exhibition curator, has done an great job at pulling together a collection of art that explores, subverts, challenges and honours perceptions of women in the stories of faith. I particularly loved Heléne Aylon’s pieces, ‘The Book that will not close’ and ‘I look into the passages’ [and while you're wandering around Heléne's website, have a look at this video]. Sue Saxon’s piece, ‘Sarah and Hagar’ was also remarkable – an image made out of emu shell and layered with meaning… Some of the artworks were especially commissioned for the exhibition, others were collected from galleries across Australia – in particular the National Gallery of Australia, and the National Gallery of Victoria.

I found it all unexpectedly moving. I think that was to do with the courage of artists who make themselves vulnerable to honour a truth, especially one that costs to say, and is hard to hear… and perhaps it reminded me, again, that resonance and like-mindedness has nothing to do with the language of one’s faith, and all to do with the longing for liberation, a way to live, a story to put ourselves alongside… Our journeys are completely different; the search is so often the same.

There is also a public program of events that’s being held alongside the exhibition, including forums, performances, discussions.

It’s on at the Jewish Museum of Australia, 26 Alma Rd St Kilda, until March 14 next year.

[*How good is that name?!]

Yesterday and today have been reading days – the plan was to read a chapter or two of half a dozen books, just to start my thinking in a few different areas [i'm still on a very steep learning curve with this new role!]. Instead, i’ve found myself absolutely engrossed by Karen Armstrong’s latest book, The case for God, and haven’t moved past it.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about moments of transformation – we can’t create them, but we can make space where they might be possible… In the first chapter of Armstrong’s book, she walks us through a history of religion and ritual since humankind first existed, beginning with the rituals that shape pre-historic life. For the pre-modern person, myth only makes sense in the context of the ritual which brings it to life. It isn’t the myth that’s important, or even the truth behind it; instead what matters is the transformation caused by the ritual. It’s pointless knowing that death is intimately entangled with life if you don’t live as though that’s true. So, 30 000 years ago, a boy would crawl through a mile of underground labyrinthine passages – with no light, and to the terrifying sound effects of screaming and thumping – to find himself in a cave covered with paintings, where he would be introduced to the tribal rituals surrounding hunting, victory, death and birth… and there in the cave he wouldn’t just hear the stories; he would know them through a new lens of courage, because he’d had to find that courage simply to make it to the cave. And, when he left the cave and faced the inevitable terrors of the adult world, he would know where to find courage to live…

‘Like any work of art’ Armstrong says, ‘a myth will make no sense unless we open ourselves to it wholeheartedly and allow it to change us. If we hold ourselves aloof, it will remain opaque, incomprehensible and even ridiculous.’

Which is the luxury and the peril of our time – that we can hold ourselves aloof from the myths of life and death…

So how do we create the places where we can come face to face with fear and desolation… and where we practise courage for the moment we need it? It’s going to be fun trying… Perhaps the turbine hall at the Tate Modern is an example… the last two paragraphs of the Guardian’s review make me want to get back on a plane and go visit…

It was lovely to see Mark Pierson over breakfast this morning. Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story came up in the conversation:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last pages.

from Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

It was number 7 Mark and I were talking about; create spaces with just one person in mind…

I think they might be the framework for my next workshop on sacred spaces / alt worship… I’d rewrite 6 [acknowledge that awful things already happen to people...] and 8 [give participants as much grace as possible, as soon as possible, and let them write the end of the story themselves...].

taken on the phone, yesterday, at Bruno’s Sculpture Garden in Marysville

Update: Kel left a link to a photo of the same sculpture, surrounded by lush green, which she took a few years ago.

we wash you
little one
in water that has bathed all history’s children before you

each with hopes and longing
and a life to be lived

each with fear and sadness
and a death to be borne

we wash you with water
that has the power to bring life
to shape worlds
and to destroy

we wash you with the knowledge
that its story is beyond us to hold
and to control

and so we wash you with our love
and with a thousand prayers
and unspoken dreams
and with voice only for these:

that you will know you are not alone
and you will know this life is yours only
to live

wash me
with the water
that isn’t clean

the holy water

wash me with the water
that holds the dirt
of all history
the sweat from hard work
the grime of play

the scrubbed sin
the diluted confession

wash me in this
so i will know i am human

wash me with this water
that holds the tears
of all of history
cried by the broken and the fragile
the resilient and the strong

bathe me with the water
that has showered with joy
and flooded with fear
that has rained on both the just and the unjust

wash me in this
so i will know i will survive

and wash me
with the water that has quenched the thirst
for drink
forever
but never the thirst
for longing

so i will know
what it is
to live.

If i were called in
to construct a religion,
I should make use of water…

- Phillip Larkin, Water

I went to church on Sunday for a baptism. It seems to be baptisms that get me back to church at the moment, and I can’t think of a better reason. I’m a big fan of baptism, especially infant baptism.

I love that water has been around forever… that the water that baptised Lucy on Sunday has washed over every generation before her. And before there were people on earth, this same water carved valleys and coastlines… Water has shaped our landscape, and it shapes our lives.

I tried to block my ears to the words of the service on Sunday – only because the words always seem to try too hard to describe that which can’t be said. Instead I just looked at Lucy, this gorgeous little bundle of life, being washed in this water that has both been around forever, and keeps her alive right now… I thought about how even though she has no concept of that, her parents who loved her into being were giving her over to that truth… That all the people in that community of friends and family, who love her and make sure she has water to drink and wash her clean, also know that there are things to this life that are beyond them – and for that reason we wash her in this water that holds the memory of the tears and dirt and thirst of all life before and beyond her. That’s why I love baptism.

If I were called in to construct a religion, I should make use of water…

That said, I’m not a fan of water at the moment. I remember saying to someone a few weeks ago that if i had to pick one element to work with and explore for the rest of my time, I’d pick water. But then my apartment was flooded, which has been horrendous, and a million times worse than that [so much worse that i'm embarrassed to write it in the same sentence], there was a tsunami in samoa and tonga… and now when i picture water it’s laden with debris, and tainted with the smell of decay and mould and the ruin of lives. Maybe that’s not a bad image though: the story isn’t always clean; the ritual has to be held hand in hand with reality.

But I read Mark Vernon’s article yesterday, and heard the call again – that since i love ritual and celebration, and know how much i need them, that my challenge is to offer places and moments for people who can’t block their ears to the words, but know they need to wash themselves in water that connects them to a story of life that’s bigger than us…

We are beginning to plan for Advent. I’m traveling to Marysville and Kinglake on Thursday to start the planning for that with Mike and David. We’re going to have a go at creating public waiting spaces that offer moments of transformation and ritual… where people will know themselves as part of a larger story, and be made different through the knowing. I know it’s going to be harder than we think it will be to make that happen. More after we’ve met…

Mark Vernon says everything best.

I’ll let the article stand on its own before i editorialise – except to say that i did go back to church yesterday, for a baptism… it was really lovely to be there, and it confirmed i don’t want to go again…

I’ve been a little distracted by the Polanski story this week, and the world’s reactions to it, and choked on my breakfast over the last sentence of this paragraph from an article in the Guardian today:

The five members of the jury at the Zurich film festival, headed by the actor Debra Winger, yesterday released a statement protesting that the event “had been exploited in an unfair fashion”.

At least one jury member, producer Henning Molfenter, has now boycotted the festival, with others expected to follow suit. “There is no way I’d go to Switzerland now. You can’t watch films knowing Roman Polanski is sitting in a cell 5km away,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.

[my italics]

It’s a failure of imagination that leads to us being unable to believe that someone we admire and respect can be capable of doing something terrible.

It’s the same failure of imagination that makes it impossible to see that those who have done terrible things are also capable of being extraordinary and amazing… and worth the investment of grace and forgiveness.

I keep thinking that one of the hardest concepts we have to grasp is our complexity as humans. Even those we know best are always more than the story we know of them… and the more is always both beautiful and terrible.

It’s hard to look past the disaster in the Pacific Islands region today. I feel sick for the people i know who live there, and for those here who are waiting on news. I haven’t been to Samoa, but I know the little island villages in Tonga are so fragile… I imagine that even $5 would provide a lot of sutures, or a fresh water container, or a blanket…

I came across Laurence Weiner’s work for the first time while in the UK – I saw the piece below in the Tate St Ives, and the fact that I could still remember the piece, and quote it in its entirety without effort two weeks later led me to buy this book that then doubled the weight of my luggage…

Fire and Brimstone in a Hollow Formed by Hand, at the Tate St Ives

I’ve been dipping in and out of the book today [penance for avoiding using my imagination by writing reports all day yesterday]. It’s a collection of essays about Weiner’s work, along with photographs and descriptions. As one essayist describes it, his life’s work is ‘the introduction of language as a sculptural material’. As he says himself:

Sculpture by virtue of its state
presents a material reality that by its presence
changes the inherent meaning of whatsoever place
it finds itself
bringing about a change in the relationship of
human beings & objects & producing a change in
the ambience
Caveat Emptor: It can at times block the way

[Weiner, 2006]

I’m thinking today about the myriad of possibilities that the basement space offers [while simultaneously contemplating how easily a myriad turns into a mire...]. I get the feeling we should be trying something new there; that we’re ready for a jump into a different kind of thing. I think the thing that holds us in common, as a group, is that we’re searching for a different way of being human, and a different way of being in relationship with the world and each other… [though i need to test that with the group], but we’ve been limiting ourselves a bit by seeing the possibilities through a singular lens. Maybe it’s time to add in a few other lenses. I don’t know what they are yet.

I just read this paragraph in Weiner’s book [it's a retrospective of his work, and includes a collection of essays]. The last sentences are just brilliant:

During the 1950s and 60s, Weiner grappled with an existential crisis in the aftermath of the war by investigating more conceptual challenges to authority and prevailing hierarchies. Today, his approach – language as the material of sculpture – seems ever more relevant when considered within the context of a culture struggling with information overload and a lack of fixity. His work is generative and generous, capable of embedding itself just about anywhere and empirical enough to engage all of our senses. To experience Weiner’s work is to accept its logic and its material reality, as well as to be seduced by the beauty of its chain of associations and offers of discovery. Entering into it is to risk a state of bewilderment, like stepping into a fog without discernable boundaries, to risk being “perplexed in public.” In that moment, one locates oneself in relationship to the work; afterward, some part of what has been encountered, what’s proposed, stays.

Donna De Salvo, in As far as the eye can see

In the panel on curation that Jonny Baker led at Greenbelt, Martin Poole said that he hoped the spaces created by Beyond in Brighton offer a moment of epiphany. I said that I hoped the basement spaces here offer a moment of grace. I think I still think that… but i wonder whether we also want to offer a moment of incongruence; a moment of bewilderment that once encountered you can’t quite shake. I’ve been wondering if that’s a way that transformation happens – how people make the irrational, incongruous leap into being different, not just thinking differently. Bewilderment’s not quite the right word: I think I imagine something like what happens when you are told a parable, and the world reorients itself, just for a moment… and even though you recover your balance, quick as a flash, you’re never quite be able to shake the knowledge that the axis you think the world rotates on, is not the only one at all.

Paul Emerson Teusner has emailed to let me know that Dr Heidi Campbell is going to be in town in October, and that Paul’s organising a dinner with Heidi in Fitzroy, for people interested in a conversation about religion, culture and media. I think it will be an amazing opportunity…

For those of you [like me] who are out of this particular loop, the following information might entice you [like me] to put it in your diary…

Dr Campbell is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and one of the world’s leading scholars in religion and online media. Her research has taken her from inner urban life in Glasgow through mainstream churches in Auckland to where religion, history and politics collide in Israel.

Heidi’s teaching and research centres on the social shaping of technology, rhetoric of new media, and themes related to the intersection of media religion and culture, with a special interest in the internet and mobile phones. She has written a book, Exploring Religious Community Online: We are one in the network, looking at how members of online religious communities connect their online and offline social-religious networks. Her current research is an investigation of Jewish, Muslim & Christian communities’ historic perceptions and contemporary use of media technologies, forthcoming as a text, When Religion Meets New Media.

For those who have any interest in how online technology is shaping how people are seeing and interacting with the world, or want to know how creative uses of new technologies are making new opportunities for people to connect, grow and learn, this is a chance to have questions explored.

Heidi is also keen to hear stories of Australians who have tried out religion on the Internet, whether the experience is good or bad or somewhere in between. Come along and share with her what the 21st century Australian spirit sounds and smells like.

Date: Monday 12 October 2009. 7pm.
Venue: Pireaus Blues Restaurant, 310 Brunswick St Fitzroy (Melbourne).
Sit-down dinner, a la carte (Main prices from $15 to $30).
RSVP: Friday 9 October to paul@teusner.org

For all the wrong reasons, it’s been a memorable return home… long story short, my apartment was flooded out while I was away. We only discovered it when i opened the door after the 24 hour flight, to be greeted with mould, stench and the detritus of the upstairs neighbours’ lives…

So I’m back at work today, trying to get my head back into the space it was in on the way home, where i wrote notes to myself about writing poetry on the walls of the city, literally and metaphorically… where my head was filled with imagining different realities and futures into being… where the 24 hours in transit literally flew by with dreaming about parables and glimpses of promise. I’d remembered again why I do this, and why it matters.

I got home, opened my front door and found other things do matter – and while I’d rather the shit didn’t happen, it does [too literally, at times]. Perhaps the best I can hope is that poetry looks better when it’s written on dirty walls, not clean white ones.

[please let that be so]

But my head was spinning last night. I was thinking about coming back to work; the daunting impossibility of that, and how very sad I was that I had lost vision I had last week. And I remembered how on tuesday of last week, jetlagged and exhausted, I stood at the door of my apartment looking at the wreckage that had to be cleared up – and even though the insurance company sent restoration contractors within an hour, I didn’t know where to begin, or what to do, or what to feel, or how to survive the day. The only thing I could think of was to copy what my friends would do: Sue would say ‘just do one thing to begin…’ so we picked up a rug and threw it out. Jane would say, ‘we all need something to remind us of beauty’, so I went down the street and bought flowers to put in the kitchen. Maryanne would say, ‘coffee?’, so we stopped, often, and made some. Nadia would swear and say ‘pray’. I swore a lot, but couldn’t pray, so I emailed her and told her to for me. Jonny would take photos, so I did as well.

[i won't show you those, though - instead, these photos were taken from the balcony of my temporary apartment after I moved in on Friday...]

I was thinking about that again last night – that sometimes we need to pretend we are someone else, to practice life as they would, in order to become who we are. That sometimes there are moments when who we are is lost, and all that is left is to act our way into being.

So this afternoon as I sit here at work, wondering where the hell to begin, I’m remembering the people who have inspired me over the last few weeks and months. I’m using their courage and imagination as my own… and I’m holding faith that i’ll act my way into being me again.

So this is for everyone else who is today wondering how to survive. If it helps, i have faith that you will.

take a moment
in honour of who you are not
in honour of the courage and grace borrowed from another source:
may it be made your own
in the act of trying

and may you be made your own
again.

Really wishing i could get to this on the weekend:

Fifty-three artists in the Yarra Valley area will open their studios to the public in one of the biggest single arts projects in the region for many years. Visitors will be able to spend an afternoon, a day or a whole weekend exploring the rich diversity of art as it is made by Yarra Valley artists in September 2009.

Mike and Claire have been very involved in making it happen – Mike has some of his photography showing at three stories art gallery, and there’s a group exhibition at the Sticks Winery, 179 Glenview Rd Yarra Glen. It all sounds absolutely fantastic.

I hate travelogues, so I won’t bore you with the fact that I’m on a train from Manchester to London. Or with photos from idyllic english locations.

I have drunk tea with… an installation at the Eden Project

This next blog post was going to be an exploration of what we’re doing next year, but i realise that my last post could easily have given the impression that i had some great truth to unfold, and that this might now simply be a massive disappointment. Alas, we will live with that.

There have been a number of lines from conversations over the last few weeks that have been rolling around my head: Nadia Bolz Weber’s line, ‘the stranger will always make things messy’; Padraig O’Tuoma’s line [and i paraphrase and destroy it here], ‘be the miracle you do not yet believe in’… and a throwaway line from Alistair Duncan in Brighton: it was the same search for the more that led him into Christianity, which is what now leads him out…

I’ve probably already said that what i loved about the Garden wasn’t that it was trying to redefine or reconstruct christianity; that their search for the more doesn’t come from angst or despair or disillusionment with the church. I liked that because, truthfully, the church was bloody good to and for me for a very long time. And it still is. Its beliefs may no longer be where I am at, but it represents a search and a longing that I respect, remember and still resonate with. And while my search has taken a different turn, I couldn’t be here without having been there. I am still profoundly grateful for the transformation that I was offered through that story. It saved me, literally, even though it’s no longer me. [I know that sounds like I think I’m somewhere better; I don’t. I just can’t find a different way of saying it.]

Oddly, this helps me make sense of why I can write liturgy using words and imagery that are formed from a belief that’s no longer my own. After all, when it comes down to it, Christianity has all the best words. I don’t think it created them, though – it just appropriated them. I’m loathe to give them up. And while I use the same language to mean something different, perhaps that doesn’t matter [read: I need to let it not matter!]. Perhaps words, in themselves, whatever they mean, can be transformative. They’re kind of like a parable in that sense. They carry a transformative power in their saying that is much more than their meaning. [Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I love Sigur Ros. They didn’t have the words to make sense of stuff, so they made up their own language.]

So that’s been floating around my head as I’ve walked through Manchester over the last couple of days, thinking about next year’s trip… And the question that keeps coming to mind as I’m trying to work out how the trip will work is where are the places in the city [/the corner of the world i inhabit] where people can be human… and how can we manufacture them, if they aren’t there? I said in the previous post that the invitation to human-ness is at the heart of everything i do at the moment – and if I think about it, it was always the part of Christianity that I found most compelling and transformative. And what I’m really coming to love is that the longing and prayer for that is what I still hold in common with those who still hold the faith…

More to come, when I’ve worked it out.

You’ll never walk alone, the Fab Collective exhibition inside the St Luke’s bombed out church, Liverpool.

There’s a blogger’s rule that posts are not meant to be more than 500 words long… alas, this is well over 1000, but i’ve always thought that anyone who reads this blog must be particularly tenacious, so i’m happy to break the rule with you in mind… In a similar way, I’m including the following photo for no other reason than it makes me happy…

I’ve just landed in Bath after 5 idyllic days in Cornwall with a friend, where the weather was unbelievably lovely, the scenery gorgeous, and the people generous, friendly and fun. I don’t think I’ve ever actually holidayed in England before – it’s almost always been work that’s brought me here – but I’m sold. it’s been fantastic. And today it’s back to work, which I’m loving already. Of course, it helps that I’m doing it in Bath.

I wanted to post about the last few weeks before my memory gets musty. As we drove out of London last week I was writing posts in my head, but as soon as we hit the countryside they disappeared, so my reflections here will be very sketchy impressions or instincts, rather than facts and quotes.

Can I just say again how grateful I am to the people and groups who we visit – and who put up with us probing into their innermost beings and thoughts. Without their generosity and vulnerability it simply wouldn’t work… each year I’m increasingly aware of how lucky we are to be the recipients of that. It’s no small thing to have a group of unknown people come and question your existence and reason for being…

We changed the structure of the trip dramatically this year – both Ikon [Belfast] and Sanctus [Manchester], who we normally visit, are going through significant transition so we didn’t visit them. I missed them… but Safe Space in Telford were our carry over champions, and we visited again for their Thursday night community meal. I love that there is nothing pretentious or cool about Safe Space – it’s just ordinary people being in community and through that, managing to change their world. This year Mark was telling us about Sanktuary, the community’s weekly commitment to be a presence in the nightclub district – working with police, the council and local nightclubs to make telford safer for people who are out for the night. i feel somewhat convicted to do something like that in Melbourne, which has a terrible problem with alcohol-fuelled violence in the city on the weekends. I have an awful feeling that the only thing stopping me is my dislike of the messy… luckily, however, this post is not about me, so i need not ponder that publicly. Telford continue to be an amazing example of hospitality and community, and I love watching their story develop each year.

We went to Liverpool from Telford. I’ve never been there before, and for the first 24 hours I didn’t get it… but after meeting with people from Dream, visiting the Antony Gormley installation at Crosby beach, and then dinner at Keith’s in Lark Lane, I’m converted. Dream are a network of communities – another example of communities that have formed quite naturally and non-dramatically, and become something much larger than the sum of their parts. I posted my notes from the Dream conversation home, but i remember really liking how they have kept evolving and how they are searching for how they can keep becoming more, together; for what’s next around the corner. They’ve been experimenting with guerilla worship – marking the city as something sacred… In fact, that was probably the unifying theme across all the communities we visited: there’s a desire to be present and transformative within the community. They want to make culture, not be relevant to it. i really liked them.

After meeting with Dream a few of us went to the bombed out church in the centre of the city. St Luke’s was bombed in 1941, and has never been restored. It has a memorial garden that surrounds it, which seems to be a sanctuary for the lost and lonely [i loved that the bombed-out people of the city made their home around the bombed-out church], and inside the ruins of the church there are occasionally installations and art exhibitions. There was an amazing exhibition of photographs while we were there – a really moving and lovely collection of images depicting the essence and heart of Liverpool by the fab collective. I liked that we had to sign waivers when we went in to the church that we wouldn’t sue for damages…

And then we went to Crosby beach to see the Gormley ‘Another place’ installation… I loved that the sculptures that are covered with water were now covered with lichen. It’s like they are coming to life…

The first half of the trip was largely community focussed, as it turned out. The second half had quite a different flavour… We travelled from Liverpool down to Brighton. People kept telling us it would be way too far to go in a day, but we’re australian’s and we’re used to just driving til we get there… so we were on the beach in Brighton in time for a late lunch… and then met with Beyond for drinks on the Sunday night. Beyond are perhaps the most entrepeneurial group that we met with – amazing for their capacity to have ideas, draw people in, and make them work. Their beach hut Advent calendar has been widely written about, and it really does sound remarkable. It was great to hear their story of how the creative process interacts with community – about the human-ness of the project, and about how people from such different backgrounds and theological perspectives are drawn together, and find common expression through art and installation. It was an amazing story to hear.

And on the Monday night we met with the Garden. The first I’d heard of the Garden was at Greenbelt last year, where they curated a really lovely installation that had stuck in my mind. I’d really hoped we might be able to get together with some of these guys, and it took until the last minute for it to come together. I’m so, so glad it did. This felt like the selfish part of the trip for me, the bit I knew would be least accessible or relevant for most of the group, but the thing i was most hoping would come together for me! I felt like i was listening to the thoughts in my own head being played out through the conversation between Chris, Mark and Alistair… and you can have no idea how rare and lovely that is. i haven’t heard anyone else talking about finding new language for the space beyond christianity, which doesn’t use christianity as its reference point. It’s nice not to be searching for it on my own… I can’t wait to get back with them for more conversations. I’ll come back to all that in the next post, when i talk about where to from here…

Jonny Baker put the whole picture together for us on Tuesday, which was brilliant – beginning to make sense of it all for the group. As an outsider’s perspective, it feels like the emerging church scene is at a really interesting transition point here – on the cusp of something quite new. It’s going to be lovely to watch it unfold…

I’m in the UK for the rest of the week. I’m staying around to do some work on next year’s trip, which is taking a different focus. I can’t wait for that. Our reference point won’t be the church, or any new forms of it, but rather public installations and expressions of where the human becomes more than human – thinking through how to create public places where people can be human, and see what happens then.

At the risk of being misunderstood [and pre-empting a future blog post, as already indicated], i’ve realised how removed from the idea of god i am at the moment – but the human, the really human, at its most fragile and transcendent and transformative: I find that fascinating and moving and extraordinary… and so rarely explored and honoured.

So we’re in Telford, slowly recovering energy after a full-on Greenbelt. Post-Greenbelt, ‘just wait til you hear what you missed’ posts can be horrible to read… and they feel indulgent to write. Which doesn’t seem to be stopping me…

I had a great Greenbelt. One of the best I’ve been to, i think. It was filled with the kind of unexpected moments that serve to knock me out of my jaded, comfy, cynical corner of the world.

As always, the very best thing was the people who inspire, provoke and make me feel like i’m at home in the work i’m doing and the place I am. I know I say that every year, but I’m so grateful for the chance to feel normal for a while! The absolute highlight in terms of the program was HFASS bluegrass liturgy, which was captivating and beautiful… it swept me away with its confidence and grace… and serving communion with Nadia felt like such a gift. And Nadia’s talk on Monday gave me my best Greenbelt line – a throwaway line in the middle of sentence: ‘the stranger always messes things up’…

Ikon was lovely on the Friday night. I rely on Ikon to push me into another place, and for the first ten minutes I was anxious that I’d done my dash with them, but then the punch came and I remembered again why i loved them so much.

Being on a panel with Cary Gibson, Heather Cracknell and Nadia Bolz Weber was really fun. i love those women.

And Foy Vance on the Monday night was simply extraordinary. One of the best hours of music I can remember…

And I wondered if we might have it in us to do worship again next year…

We spent Tuesday night in Cheltenham, where we remembered how fabulous it is not to sleep in tents… and yesterday we came to Telford to meet with Mark Berry and Safe Space. We have a great group of people travelling this year [like every year, of course!]. In fact I must go join them for drinks…

So I’m in London – no jetlag to speak of, and the weather is perfect… The tour part of this trip starts on Wednesday, when Nicole and I meet up with half the Australian group to travel down to Cheltenham. The rest of the group will be joining us over the next few days, then we’ll be at Greenbelt from Friday, then make our way to Telford on Wednesday, then onto Liverpool and Brighton before coming back to Melbourne. It’s a big trip this year – lots of travel and new places.

I’m very much looking forward to Greenbelt. I’m sure my list of reasons mirrors many others: Royksopp, Duke Special, The Welcome Wagon, Nadia Bolz Weber, Ikon… I’m looking forward to stumbling across talks and music that i didn’t plan to get to, and finding amazing inspiration. i’m looking forward to seeing those people I rarely get to see, who add such wisdom and fun to my world…

I’m speaking on a couple of panels. The first is a panel on worship and curation, which will be on Saturday at 12 in the Winged Ox. Jonny Baker’s moderating the panel, which includes Steve Collins, Lily Lewin and me. The second is a panel on worship and leadership, moderated by Doug Gay. The panel members are Heather Cracknell, Nadia Bolz Weber, Cary Gibson and me [yes, all women...]. It’s on Sunday, 2pm in New Forms. I’m really looking forward to that…

A random thought for today that i don’t want to lose… Taryn and I walked down to the Twickenham Green this morning for breakfast. We were talking about Antony Gormley’s installation at Trafalgar Square… how hundreds of thousands of people must have walked past and seen it, but millions more have talked about it, clicked on the website… and in response, they’ve felt a bit of inspiration and imagination, and are maybe a little more creative, and proud to live in a city where such things are possible. They don’t need to go into the city to see it; just the knowledge that it’s happening somewhere is transformative – it makes us know ourselves and our world differently.

I love greenbelt. I love the idea of it, and the reality of it. Preparing for it makes me think about things that I wouldn’t think about otherwise. It gets my head into a very different space; one that probably wouldn’t be possible without it. I’m so grateful for the chance to be here again – and believe me, i can’t believe how lucky i am…

We’re travelling down south today to meet with Pete Pillinger and then with Brian Draper tomorrow, before coming back to head into the School of Life on Tuesday morning – and then the tour proper begins on wednesday… I’ll post again when there’s a moment…

I want to put this here so i don’t forget it, even though it might not make much sense yet.

One of the intentions for those of us working in the new Culture and Context Unit is that our unit meetings will be biased more towards developing a learning community, rather than spending time catching up and listing events / diary dates. As part of our scope is to help develop the conversation within the uniting church that explores how we can be transformative presence in a post-christian world [and that phrase is proof of the need for new language...], we’ll be creating reference points by exploring a collection of articles and books. It falls to me to sort through which articles and books will help us start that process. I love my job.

While reading an article by Simon Barrows yesterday i came across this quote:

The world’s darkness is beyond human explication. What gives us hope is the strangeness of evil encountered by the greater strangeness (mystery) of grace, gift.

For some reason I really love the language of strangeness. There is nothing that makes sense in this.

One of the things i think we want to explore further next year is about being an alternative presence in systems that hold incredible power – the church is one of those; hospitals, prisons, schools are others. These are many of the places that the work of our unit is focussed. I think we need to do some work on understanding how people can be ‘present’ in a system without buying into the power dynamic within it, so that their presence is not defined by the power dynamic [either for or against], but instead is a different kind of transformative presence. When we watch people who work out of that different dimension, the words gift and grace come instantly to mind…

And today marked the day I recovered a tiny moment to get back to thinking about alt worship… it’s been literally weeks since i had the space to focus on that, and it does feel a little like coming home. The following is the draft of a prayer for an advent candle ritual that we’re developing for communities / congregations, which will highlight the prophetic vision of a transformed world, where prisoners are set free, and communities are made whole:

We are so easily mesmerised by the flicker of the flame
and dazzled by the brightness of the lights
that shine in your name

Yet your light comes not to overwhelm
but to illuminate the world around us,
so that we will see the deep cracks and stains
that mark the foundations and walls of our community.

Dare we pray for the faith of advent?
to pray for your coming
even though we know
that we will never look at the world
with the same eyes
again.

Sarah sent me this Judy Horacek cartoon in response to the last post. [Judy is a Melbourne cartoonist / illustrator, her work is simply amazing...]

I’m impatiently awaiting the delivery of Robert Wright’s new book, The Evolution of God. I loved this article he wrote for the NY Times:

If salvation is indeed about feeling that you’re on the right side of the law, then you don’t need God — or even, as in my case, the looming memory of God — to seek it. You can be an atheist and feel that there’s such a thing as right and wrong, and that you’ll try to align your life with this moral axis. In fact, I think you can make a sheerly intellectual, non-faith-based case that there is some such transcendent source of meaning, and even something you could call a moral order “out there.” I even think it’s fair to suspect that there’s a purpose unfolding on this planet, leaving aside the much tougher question of what’s behind the purpose.

But, for my money, there’s nothing quite like the idea that what’s behind that purpose is something that can approve or disapprove of you. It keeps you on your toes, and it keeps your life mattering, even when it’s only a feeling, and no longer a belief.

“the looming memory of God… even when it’s only a feeling, and no longer a belief.”

Perfect.

As it turns out,
every map has an artificial edge
prescribed by those
who define its scope;
who draw the thick black line,
however arbitrarily,
around the edges of the world.

But here, at the edge of the map,
where it tells me the road should end
by way of a thick black line,
i can see
quite clearly
that it doesn’t.

And to be sure,
I’ve taken the step;
I am proof that the road keeps going.

I check myself for grief,
prodding my heart and mind with inquisitive fingers
to inspect for bruises.
There are none;
just the feeling,
as i step off the edge
of the much-worn, grubby map,
that i am kissing
a much loved friend
goodbye…

Read the rest of this entry »

We launched the new Culture and Context Unit yesterday, with champagne and cake…

We whipped some postcards together at the last minute, as a take-away for those who came to help us celebrate. We’re framing the work of the unit around the questions we’ll be exploring, rather than the answers we’ll be offering, so the front of the cards showed some of those.

On Tuesday we had our first staff meeting. I had no expectations of it, or really of the way we’ll work together as a team, but I came out of the meeting thinking that I couldn’t ask for better company to be doing this with. I think this is going to be fun.

I wrote a faith piece for the Age today… [a friend from the UK emailed to say that he's read it online, but i can't see it there. i'll paste it below ].

I haven’t written for the paper for a few months – i’ve been writing for other things – but coming back to this feels really good. I think the Age is my favourite audience. The piece is a bit clunky, and quite possibly a bit too honest, but so be it…

Last Thursday I spent time with some of the men from Port Philip prison. I go into the prison a few times each year as part of my work, and while it’s a very transient population there are always a few men who I see each time I return. When I arrive they’ll come up alongside me and ask ‘Do you remember me, miss?’. And when I leave they’ll do the same. ‘Don’t forget me, miss.’

Every visit to the prison converts me. I’m reminded that the assumptions by which I live my life outside are the product of privilege. What I so glibly think is achievable, for both humans and any God I can imagine is beyond hope inside. Sometimes love doesn’t conquer all. Sometimes justice doesn’t come. There are some places hope can’t exist.

It’s made me an awkward Christian – bad company, I fear, in the circles of faith. If truth be known, by most definitions, I couldn’t be called a Christian. I’m not at all convinced by the being of God, though the event of God – the actions and transformations that have been traditionally attributed to God – entice me. But much as the label ‘Christian’ doesn’t fit, I’m loathe to give it up. It’s not for nostalgia, it’s certainly not because I’m superstitious, it’s not even because I have a need to belong or be part of a group. It’s because I need to be held to an expectation that is way beyond myself, and I’m compelled by the expectation that Christianity has of me: that I will live as though everyone can begin again, and that I will act as though the impossible might one day be true.

Christianity has often been confused with a moral framework, a divinely auspiced golden rule. But at the heart of Christianity there’s something much more radical than simply doing good to another in the hope that will be returned to us. There are some people it isn’t humanly possible to forgive, and some redemptions will always be too hard to contemplate. When I go inside the prison I’m confronted with those things that are beyond human resolution, and I have to make a choice about whether I will give up on someone, or if I’ll believe there is a story of grace and forgiveness that goes far beyond my feelings and responses to any individual. Christianity, with its ancient story of what brings life to our broken world, holds me to a commitment to treat the most dehumanised and the most despicable with grace and compassion. Even though I mostly fail at the task, it calls me to do what I can to re-member, to bring back into the world, those our society would rather forget.

I’m sure there are those who can live with such beliefs without faith, but I know I can’t. Calling myself Christian holds me to what I find impossible, irrational and unreasonable. It’s what makes me able to go back into prison, and to look the men there in the eye when they ask if I’ve remembered them. It means I can tell them that I’m trying the best I can.

I keep coming back to this image from Gareth Holt, part of an exhibition of his work focussed on visualisations of statistics of social hierarchy. The only thing that’s missing in this image is the baggy green tracksuit pants worn by the men screwing nuts onto bolts in the work room at the prison…

Mark Vernon is my favourite writer / blogger at the moment. i loved this review he wrote for the Guardian of Robert Wright’s book, The Evolution of God. I ordered the book today, along with Karen Armstrong’s The case for God: What religion really believes. I wonder where this conversation is happening in australia – the really intelligent, post-christian, ’stretching at the raw edges of faith and theology without any need to defend the idea of God’ conversation… and i wonder, if i find it, if they’ll let me listen in…

It’s time to think about christmas! yes, already! the ‘between the spaces’ basement collective are gathering for a lazy, all things are possible, ‘let’s imagine what might happen in a summer solstice-y, christmassy kind of way’ drink in a couple of weeks… there’s always room for more at the table [which is in one of the booths at the back of the wesley anne in northcote], so if you’re interested in coming along for a drink, let me know.

And this one’s for the tired and cynical, who feel sick at the idea that christmas might ever come again…not just this year; ever. You’re not alone…

i wish i had the faith to search for a hint
already
that christmas might come this year

i wish i had the faith to pre-empt the shops with their bling and glitz,
to be the first to herald the promise
of a new beginning.

but i’m tired.
weary of preaching grace
and love
into places too dark for them to exist.

too sure that the promises we proclaim
each year
are too fragile to place another’s hope in

praying desperately to a god
i so long to believe
that my faith
in this love
will be born again…

[dawn]

we had a few queries from people asking whether copies of the images we used at the solstice are up for sale… and now they are! I’ve put all the images into 2 low res pdfs here: solsticeweb and solsticeweb2 [about 4mb each], but if you’d like to see one in a higher res, let me know. The quality of the images is quite lovely… Mike and Blythe are remarkable photographers. i’ve labelled each of the images in the pdf, which would obviously not be in the final print…

The rectangular images are available in two sizes – approx 30 x 20 inch [A$50 each + p&h], and approx 22 x 16 inch [A$35 each + p&h]. The square images are available only in 20 x 20 inch size [A$35 each + p&h]. The prints are on photographic paper.

Anyway, if you’re interested, let me know by email or in the comments, and we can take things from there…

Today’s task is to finish re-tagging and re-categorising every post on this blog… i’m half way through [i spent six hours on it yesterday / last night]… There is reason for the madness [a new blog / website that's about to launch]… but it’s one of those things that if you know how crappy a job it is, you just wouldn’t even begin…

it’s a weird ride, going through everything again. it’s funny being able to see the peaks and troughs… the moments of radical rethinking [i wonder, when i went to the UK in 2006, if i knew how pivotal that trip would be...]; the waves of feedback, resonance, criticism, attack, affirmation; the self absorption and introspection at moments [i'm so sorry for them!]; the cringe of embarrassment when i see ideas that never actually took off…

i think in my mind that so much of what has happened in this project is defined by what hasn’t happened – stalled attempts, things that just didn’t quite work, outright failures; the absolute fragility of everything we do. it’s been a bit of an eye opener to realise those things are in the minority, and how they almost always turned out to be the spark that created another possibility… the ideas that didn’t work took everything into another direction, where we wouldn’t have gone if they had.

i’m a little shocked that it was only two years ago  – july 2007 – that we launched into the communal justice project. i could swear it’s been ten years. i had no idea that we’d done so much in such a short time. i was feeling like we were failing at the whole thing… maybe not…

i’m much more cynical now than i was a few years ago, and my writing has a harder edge to it now…

and i love how names start appearing at different points… remembering where alliances and collaborations and relationships begin, and how they have changed everything.

the repeated pattern is that the new edges and directions haven’t come from strategy or planning; they’ve come from a lot of layered thinking, and then from the random connection or event or person that suddenly pulls the next dimension into being.

Yet it all feels a little wistful and sad, as i read through it… and for the life of me i can’t work out why…

Rob left a comment on a previous post asking if we organise an australian get-together at greenbelt. we do do that, but it’s not in a highly organised way – the group that Nic and I take normally decide to make a time and place each day to touch base and have a drink or a meal together [it's entirely optional, but most of the group end up doing it, and it's a really lovely thing to see some familiar faces if you've spent the day with unknown hordes!]. so, if you’re an australian at greenbelt [though we'd welcome anyone, of course!], and aren’t sure who else you’ll know, leave a comment or send an email, and i’ll email you my mobile phone number… we can text at greenbelt and let you know when and where we’ll be…

I’ve been writing an article today for the Journal for the Jewish Museum of Australia [it's a long story why, and a very lovely honour!]. It’s on my perception of the place of Biblical stories of women in the Christian tradition… I’ll put the article up when it’s published, but i didn’t want to forget this…

The context of this is that i’m basing the article around the stories of Jesus being anointed by women [each of the gospels has one, probably based around two distinct events], and in the Lukan story, the woman cries her tears onto Jesus’ feet. When i write articles on topics not of my choosing i do a lot of cramming, and yesterday, when i did just this, reading commentary after commentary in a short space of time, i got increasingly pissed off with the assumptions that people were making about the woman in this story, and about the motivations and emotions behind her actions and responses… I kept going back to the bible story and thinking ‘where the hell did they get that idea from?’. Mostly the ideas come from ‘tradition’…

I don’t know why i want to put the following paragraphs up here – mostly, i guess, it’s because i cut it from the article but i want to say it somewhere… and this is my blog, after all… I just want to reclaim the story a little, open up the possibility, again, that we don’t know what it means. We’ve lost our capacity just to encounter a story without bringing our framework of interpretation in to make it say just what we want to say. To be honest, though, i suspect christianity is no longer able to do anything else…

Anyway, this is what i cut:

One biblical scholar poses the question about why the woman is crying: it could be either that she is overwhelmed with sorrow at her sin, he says, or joy at being forgiven – as though they would be the only possible reasons for tears. Both interpretations come from a paradigm that sees women only as brought undone by their sinfulness, whereas the things that move women to tears are as complex and rich as every memory of love and grace: just the smell of the ointment could trigger an association. She may be remembering the last time she anointed someone’s feet, in preparation perhaps for their burial. She may be remembering the person she loves whose feet are no longer hers to anoint. She may be tired. She may be at her wits end. She may be exhausted from the day and from yet again needing to do what no-one else remembers to do. She may be overwhelmed with the sense of wonder, awe and fragility that comes when human and divine find a meeting place. There would be reasons we could never imagine, if only because we are not living in that culture, and we will never know her. Tears fall for many reasons, and sometimes even for none.

But the Biblical stories of women in the Christian tradition are most often – and perhaps most crudely – used for lessons in morality and virtue, and interpreted through a lens of sexuality and sinfulness. And, you know, maybe they’re right. If you think about it, there’s a good chance that this woman could only get close to Jesus because of what people have decided is her sin. You have to be comfortable with your body and another’s to be able to touch someone so intimately. Perhaps it was actually her sin, as the world describes it, which made her the only one to be able to offer this gift to jesus; grace in a moment of exhaustion, touch in the dirtiest of space…

So we leave to go into the night time.

Don’t put your faith in the breaking of day,
although that will come,
but let your faith be that peace can be found, even in darkness
and that love can survive in the longest of nights…

- the blessing from tonight’s midwinter service

Tonight’s most surreal moment was before the service when a couple of the men saw that i had candles with me. I found myself having a conversation with them – these two quite large men, with prison tatts and shaved, scarred heads – about whether we like our candles scented with rose or lavender.

It was a lovely service, with its predictable share of unpredictable moments. We had a couple of psalms in the service – one from the bible, the other written by one of the men from Exeter prison and adapted by Nathan from Port Phillip. I asked whether any of the men wanted to read the first psalm and David, sitting next to me, volunteered. He would have had the reading age of a 6 year old, i guess, and stumbled over every second word. One of the other men, across the room, predicted the stumbling and chimed in with the words that he knew David wouldn’t get, so it became this sing-song reading of the psalm – it was really quite moving and lovely.

And part way through the service Ross switched off the lights, and the service continued just with candlelight. It was really beautiful.

When i was writing the service yesterday i remembered a conversation that the basement space crew had in the booth at the back of the Wesley Anne about what gets us through the longest nights – about how it wasn’t the idea of dawn, it was food and wine and company. I was thinking yesterday how these men don’t choose to be together – they tolerate each other, mostly, and their relationships are more alliances for survival. It would take a miracle to make them company for each other, the kind of community that brings you life – a much more difficult miracle than one that turns bread and wine into body and blood… but you know, as i listened to David stumbling through his reading, and i watched the men lighting candles, and holding the moment for each other as they did, and as we sat in silence and darkness for a long, long moment at the end, i wonder if we didn’t actually get close to that. i’m under no illusions it will have lasted more than 30 seconds after we finished, but maybe we need to honour the tiny moments as being remarkable just in themselves…

This was the communion. it probably won’t win awards with the orthodox police, but it did the job here. The rest of the liturgy from the service is at the end as a pdf:

In communion, we remember the story of the night
before Jesus’ death.

That must have been a long night.

With all the fear and confusion and loneliness
that Jesus and his friends must have felt,
together they found at the table
the food and the company
that would help them survive the night to come.

As the story tells us
On the night before Jesus died,
he had supper with his friends.
He took bread,
thanked God,
broke the bread,
and gave it to his friends, saying:
this is my body, given for you.
Each time you do this, remember me.

After supper he took the wine,
thanked God for it,
and passed it to his friends, saying:
This cup is the new promise God has made with you
in my blood.
Each time you do this, remember me.

We thankyou, God,
that we can remember you in this meal
that this bread and wine
are ways that we can put back together
and make whole
the promise of hope
and peace
that your life offered to us.

We pray, God, that your Spirit will make this bread and wine
signs of life
that we can carry with us
into the night time:

promises that we are not alone,
promises we will not be left empty.

Amen.

The whole liturgy as pdf: ppw_midwinter

I had a meeting near Kinglake today. As i was driving up the hill they were saying on the radio that the bushfire cleanup had finally been completed. It was weird hearing that and driving past this…

It was even weirder that just around that bend was the council sign saying ‘check your fire alarms and clean your chimneys now’.

The new green is garish, and clashes with the memory of the dusty colour of eucalypts… but it’s beautiful, and surreal in a Dr Seuss kind of way.

All the media reports from the royal commission into the fires are about how to never let it happen again. It still feels like we’re side-stepping the real conversation – how we learn to live with the realisation that we are human and fragile and all too mortal… but maybe that’s something we can’t focus on, at least not for too long, because it’s too blinding in its intensity.

I’m in Port Philip Prison on Thursday, for a midwinter service. I wrote this prayer for that today, while in a cafe in kinglake:

We gather today in search of the hope
that is tenacious and resilient enough
to be our company through the longest nights
and the darkest hours.

You have your work cut out for you, God.
We are not easy to convince.
We are not content with clichés
about light at the end of the tunnel
or glib promises of the dawn that will break.

We need to know how to survive this darkness,
how to find love in this most barren and desolate place,
how to live in this long night
and not simply wait,
holding on,
for its end.

Because it might not end,
and we need to live.

So we wait in the darkness
and pray for peace

we wait in the fear
and pray for wisdom

we wait in the loneliness
and pray for grace

we wait in the confusion
and pray for company

we wait in the emptiness
and pray for imagination

and we wait in this horror
and pray we will live.

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

with you

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…

I’ve a few posts waiting to be put up, but they have images attached, and wordpress seems to have stopped offering me the option of doing that…

In the interim, I’ve been reading about vengeance, and came across this article this week from Monitor on Psychology. One of the most human instinctive responses to crime is the desire to seek vengeance on the perpetrator… we see it played out in the media every night when the tv cameras show victims of crime on the courthouse steps saying ‘that sentence is not enough to pay for the crime’. the trouble is, no sentence would be enough… and as the research indicates, the seeking of vengeance rarely results in happiness. It doesn’t do what we think it will do.

from the article:

The results suggest that, despite conventional wisdom, people—at least those with Westernized notions of revenge—are bad at predicting their emotional states following revenge, Carlsmith says. The reason revenge may stoke anger’s flames may lie in our ruminations, he says. When we don’t get revenge, we’re able to trivialize the event, he says. We tell ourselves that because we didn’t act on our vengeful feelings, it wasn’t a big deal, so it’s easier to forget it and move on. But when we do get revenge, we can no longer trivialize the situation. Instead, we think about it. A lot.

“Rather than providing closure, it does the opposite: It keeps the wound open and fresh,” he says.

I’m not a fan of closure, but i am a fan of being able to keep living… and I wouldn’t want to say that those who don’t seek revenge are trivialising what’s happened – but I think there’s something pretty important at the heart of this. We’re not involved in communal justice simply because we’re trying to be compassionate and offer restoration to perpetrators of crime. It’s because the alternative continues to rip apart the lives of those who are living with the effects of crime as well…

The nights are getting long here… the winter solstice is coming up soon. We’re doing a basement space on June 20. We’ve been sticking notices up around melbourne inviting people to ring and tell us – anonymously – the story of their longest night.

If you would like to tell us your story too, we’d like it to be part of that night. If you’re local, you can ring 03 9018 7217 and leave a message on the voicemail, otherwise, you can skype us on thelongestnight and tell us your story on voicemail there…

We’d love to hear it.

I’m at Fitzroy Uniting Church on Sunday at 10am.

I wasn’t going to do spaces, but i have lost my voice [as has most of melbourne], and though it will be back by sunday, it won’t survive a service. So spaces it is…

It’s Pentecost Sunday. We’re using Ezekiel 37:1-14, Rabbit Proof Fence [by special request of someone in the congregation], lots of music, silence and the spaces. i’m kind of hoping that they’re not in the mood for some grand celebration. It looks dark, but it ends on a gently optimistic note [well it will, the blessing hasn't been written yet]. And i wrote it with this little community in mind, so hopefully it reflects their story and context, and might not make sense anywhere else…

The spaces go something like this…

1.
[images, large mound of sand]

The bones lie dry in our valley too
telling their stories of discarded dreams
and broken trust;
disillusionment, fear and tiredness.

If this is a story you know too well
or if those you love are living it,
take a handful of sand.
Let it trickle back into the ground
in the shape of your prayer
for yourself,
for the church,
for the world.

If you can speak with Ezekiel’s faith
into these stories with the promise of life,
take a handful of sand.
Let it trickle back into the ground
in the shape of your vision
for life,
for the church,
for the world.

pray for God to breathe life
into all that is lost…

2.
[sandpaper, images]

The world fights for breath.

We hoard our last gasps of oxygen
for fear there is no more to come.

And as the world slowly dies around us
our fear is that our lifelessness is too much
even for you, God,

that there is nothing more you are able to do.

Rip the shape of those things
you are unable to trust to God
into the sandpaper

if you can, leave them here,
to be held by the faith of this community.

3.
[bread, wine, images]

surrounded by the desolation and tiredness
we search for what keeps us alive…

the hunger for god
the memory of jesus
the promise of the spirit

take the bread and the wine
let their story of faith
be your story of life

4.
[black card, black pens, white pens]
in the valley
when everything is stripped back
to bare bones
it’s hard to tell which are ours
and which are theirs

we realise how fragile
the things that gave us shape and colour,
uniqueness, diversity,
- that defined us against each other,
are.

the most resilient part of us
- what’s left when everything else is gone -
are the things we have in common
with everybody else.

write your grief for what has been lost in black
and your celebration for what remains in colour…

5.
[newspaper, black markers, written onto black card]

you do not give up
on the broken and the lost

you do not give up
on the fractured
or the shattered
or the dying
or the dead

you do not give up
on the fearful
or the hateful
or the impossible

you do not give up
when there is no heartbeat left
or no heart at all

you do not give up
you do not leave us for dead

thank god.

when you ready
and if you would like
add to the newspaper the situations in your life and world
that you need God not to give up on…

I love the whole area of systems thinking and organisational / cultural change [it was a large part of the study for my masters, which ended up focussing on intuition as a valid form of knowledge, and it's place within organisational learning]. The ‘pop’ version of this can be found in Margaret Wheatley’s writings and Peter Senge… the more theoretical research begins with Argyris and Schon, and Beckett and Hager, and others like that.

Complex change theory holds that you can’t ‘fix’ one part of an organisation by focussing only on it – the reason being that a single part of a system or organisation is always influenced and affected by its part in the whole. Until this school of thought came along, organisations were treated largely like machines [if the car's overheating, it's probably the radiator; fix that and the car runs fine]. Complex change theory treats organisations like organisms – and if the organism is overheating, the results and solutions are often far more complicated.

And in semi-functional and functional systems [like churches], that’s a really helpful approach. But in fundamentally flawed and broken systems – like the justice and prison systems here in victoria – it’s becoming obvious that it’s overwhelming and impossible.* We pick an issue to focus on [post release employment, for example], and then realise it’s impossible to work on that without working on the issues that complicate that [mental health; low levels of literacy; housing - you can't apply for a job without an address...]. Each of those areas is massive and overwhelming in its complexity, and are themselves directly implicated by a stack of major issues… And the thing with the prisons is that there’s no part of the system that’s stable or healthy enough to be able to work from… In a church, business or organisation, there’s something core that we can agree on, and build out from, something that can be a reference point; something inherently good or valuable. It’s hard to find that in the prison. We can’t even decide what the fundamental purpose of the prison system is: are we separating people from the community, or are we rehabilitating them so they can be part of the community? You can’t do both simultaneously. And it’s funny – everyone in the system, from government ministers, department heads to prison officers and inmates, says that the system is flawed – but the task is beyond impossible.

I don’t know that we ever thought we could fix things. I think we’ve realised though that the systemic approach we have been taking just overwhelms and paralyses everyone involved. Sick systems do that.

This week we’ve been having some ’state of the nation’ conversations about the communal justice project. We know more now, and the picture’s not pretty. I think we’ve done good stuff this last year, but we’re at a turning point. Our sphere of concern is massive, our sphere of influence is, in all honesty, negligible. We’re not the only ones working on this area – but everyone seems to be throwing up their hands in despair at the immensity of the task. So today we’ve decided that we’re starting to work on finding a third way to approach this [and if that doesn't work we'll look for a fourth].

The justice unit here will continue to do research on the broader issues. We’re not going to keep meeting with department heads to hear the issues or get the bigger picture. We know enough. And for the rest of this year we’re simply going to host roundtables with uniting church agencies, ministers, involved lay people, prison chaplains, presbytery ministers who are directly involved in post-release support, with no other purpose but to get them together and hear what’s happening, and unearth the inherent wisdom around the table. We’re not going to solve the issues [i so wish we could], or commit to doing more. We’re not going to talk about how we need to reform the area of mental health, sentencing, indigenous justice etc. at the same time, although we need to and i wish we could… we’re not even going to talk about what the broader issues are. We’re just going to create an environment where people can learn from each other, and find ways of working differently together. We’re working within our circle of influence…

And secondly, we’re going to gather a group of ministers from congregations that find emergency relief a core part of their life and work, and hold a peer-led workshop about how that happens, what it means for congregations, and the wisdom they’ve learnt in the process. I think this particular idea has great possibilities on a range of areas.

It feels counter-intuitive, not to mention silly, to be doing such tiny things in the light of the massive problems that need to be addressed. I read back over what i’ve written here and i want to delete it, writing in its place world-changing policies and actions… mostly so i can convince you that we’re doing something good. But we are learning that the system will beat us if we play the game on the system’s terms, and we know we have to play the game differently, trusting what communities do when they’re at their best: unearthing their own wisdom, finding links among themselves, knowing what they are capable of, and trusting the rest to someone else. We’re changing the goalposts, we’re hoping to change the game…

It’s a little fragile, as plans go. I guess the alternative would be that all of you who are the praying types could pray that pentecost this sunday would do its chaotic, subversive best; dismantling the systems that oppress etc,. And I’ll keep working on the roundtables just as a backup.

* An afterthought: the really good thing about doing this project is that i no longer think that the church is fundamentally screwed. You think the church is irredeemable? Wait until you see the justice system… It’s kind of like when you’ve had the real flu, you realise that everything you called the flu before was actually just a pathetic cold…

ezekiel 37, again

you do not give up
on the broken and the lost

you do not give up
on the fractured
or the shattered
or the dying
or the dead

you do not give up
on the fearful
or the hateful
or the impossible

you do not give up
when there is no heartbeat left
or no heart at all

you do not give up
you do not leave us for dead

thank god.