[ hold :: this space ]

I’ve been working over this last week to get ready for NCYC, a national youth convention organised by the Uniting Church, and few other things happening in the women’s prison and in the basement during the next 6 weeks. We’re curating a sacred space for 1400 people next Wednesday evening at NCYC - an extraordinarily tricky event that is waking me at 3 each morning with its impossible permutations - and i’m also doing a workshop on Lament on Monday afternoon. I’m not sure i’ll get to much else during the week, disappointingly, but Shane Claiborne is speaking and he’s always brilliant…

So there’s not much time for writing here, but before i forget it all I wanted to get down a few things from the last couple of weeks… It’s a bit disjointed, and i’d keep it as a draft but maybe it’ll make sense to someone else too!

Christmas day in the prison was lovely, but very, very sad. Like last year, there was ten minutes of absolute silence at the end of the service, out of which the men gradually came and started telling their stories - speaking of families who would be visiting them the next day, or those who would be conspicuous in their absence; of things they wished for, prayers they wanted.

I’ll put up the service because it worked, though the words don’t communicate what it was like [download it here: ptphilipxmas]. The service again was evidence of how words are always changed and interpreted by the context in which they are spoken. What seemed pretty optimistic in the planning was actually very subdued and melancholic in reality. But then the story of christmas isn’t actually about happiness, and to make it such turns it into a story for everyone else.

I’ve been thinking about that while I’ve been watching the news this week as the situation in Gaza unfolds. It seems ironic that this is all happening at a time when many churches are telling the story of Jesus’ escape to Egypt - which has to be one of the most fraught passages in the New Testament. For some reason it’s all been bringing to mind a phrase I read in an article last year written by a Rwandan community development worker: ‘God spends each day travelling the world, and comes back to Rwanda to sleep’.

The absence of God has been a theme of the last year - unintended, as these things normally are. I began the year inspired by the story of restorative justice in Rwanda, and have used that as a foundation for some of the work we’re doing here. It’s perhaps appropriate, given how difficult all that has been this year - how unending and complicated the task is - that i read this article last week. I’m so profoundly grateful for the way the article ends because, you know, that’s the truth of so much of what we do. Just turning up and being faithful doesn’t guarantee success. Quite probably most of what we are trying to do will fail. And we’re playing with heart-breaking stakes.

If the beginning of last year was defined by hope and great dreams, this year it’s coloured with a prayer that hope isn’t what’s needed to survive or keep going. I think i ended last year feeling pretty flattened by reality, but with some perverse instinct to keep doing what we’re doing. Hope doesn’t factor into it; just a knowledge that it’s only by doing this that we find - and keep - our humanity.

the candle lighting for christmas… the 4 advent candles are lit on the ‘we have faith’ lines, the Christ candle at the last…

We gather

because we have heard a promise of peace
and we have faith its day will come

because we have heard a rumour of justice
and we have faith its day will come

because we have heard a whisper of hope
and we have faith its day will come

because we have seen a glimmer of love
and we have faith its day will come

because we have heard of the birth of the Christ-child
and we have faith his day is here.

welcome to Christmas
welcome to worship

the benediction for worship in Port Phillip Prison on Christmas Day

The story tells us
that it’s those who wait in the world’s shadows
who are the first to know the story of the Christ-child
born into darkness,
bringing great light.

So leave here today
- you who know shadows
and trust the promise of light -
to be carriers of the rumour of peace
and the truth of love.

Pray for the justice another is waiting for,
and speak of the hope another needs to breathe.

And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
the love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with us all

amen.

[I won't be blogging again until after christmas... may yours come with peace...]

I’ve written an opinion piece for today’s Sunday Age… it’s on the search for messiah’s, and other such christmassy things…

i can’t remember an advent quite this busy or complicated. It was partly self-induced, but other things ended up on my desk or in my calendar that were quite out of my control.

Last night was the last of the things I have to ‘perform’ before Christmas Day. I was in Port Phillip Prison with Ross, the UCA chaplain; we were leading worship in the Marlborough Unit, which houses men with intellectual disabilities and acquired brain injuries. I saw some old friends there, a few who had been out and come back, and met some new guys. The very best thing was seeing Alf and Trevor who wrote a couple of psalms when we did that last year in the unit, and giving them copies of the ‘Hold This Space’ book [available through Proost] in which they are published. They were a bit chuffed.

We arrived as the men were finishing dinner, just after 5pm, and worship started around 6, so we chatted for a while. The men would come up one by one and tell their stories of what was happening at home, of lawyers and appeals, of loneliness and longing. For some of the men, the Marlborough Unit is the best and safest home they have known. For them, getting out of prison is a terrifying thing. The world isn’t safe.

We’ll be back there to do worship on Christmas Day next week. I woke up with an idea for that service in the middle of last night, which I wrote down at the time, but I’m too scared to look at it in case it’s crap!

I got home and was flicking randomly through some websites, something i haven’t done for weeks. There’s lots of talk about the Advent Conspiracy stuff, which looks brilliant… and which I’m all for in theory. But you know, I just felt guilty. I’ve got nothing left of myself to give to anyone this year. I just thank god that christmas presents are an option.

written for prison, but it’s too abstract to use with the men in the unit i’m in on thursday…

We live in a world where hope is dangerous
and where waiting is painful

where too many pregnancies end with stillbirth
and every promise seems fated with despair.

If the prison were to hang Christmas lights
in the dark corners of its life
they’d be shaped in the words
‘why?’
and ‘not this!’
and ‘enough.’

We know it’s better to have no hope than false hope,
so this Christmas, God,
may we ask of you nothing you cannot do:

give us courage to wait in the darkest places,
and hold faith for us that love might be born there again.

Mike and Blythe have sent through photos of the basement space, which look great. At some point i’ll put up a fuller description of the space, but - like everyone at the moment - i’m hurtling from one event to the next just now, and there’s not time to think about tomorrow, let alone remember what happened yesterday…

As I said in a previous post, it was a retro ‘welcome to christmas at our house’ theme. We had a life-sized diorama at the entry, welcoming people to the space

This is a very creepy photo of mike’s kids standing with them…

Blythe and Dave produced a fantastic stop-motion animation of the nativity that we projected large onto a wall [with a frame drawn around it so it looked like a picture in the loungeroom]. And this is Henry, who’s 2, standing in front of it - he was a little gobsmacked by the whole thing. ‘Oh!’, he kept saying. ‘Oh’.

The invitations we sent out for the space were a tiny baby doll with a tag attached, that included the line ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water?’, so we had a baby bath with a projected image and sound of water being drained down the plug hole. people could put the doll they received into the water if they wanted.

Henry got worried about them so pulled them out to put on the side of the bath where they could talk to each other…

Here’s where you could sweep the crap of christmas under the carpet:

this is the dining room table, set up for christmas dinner:

We wrote prayers and words onto the plates - I had this thought this morning that if we were to do it again I’d write each setting from a different ‘voice’ - so one would be something like ‘It’s like we’re strangers sitting around the table’… another would be ‘I hope they know I just want them to be happy…’, another would say ‘why does every other family enjoy this, and not ours’ - and then there’d be prayers written onto the table cloth ‘unwrap our grief, leave space for joy… unwrap our despair, leave space for hope….’

We also had a living room space with retro christmas nibbles [mixed nuts and coconut ice!], a ’spare room’ out the back, and a christmas tree with the most complicated origami stars ever… but more about them at another time…

for worship next week in Port Phillip prison

Not all anticipation is hopeful,
and not all waiting is good;
so we pray for those for whom this season brings only despair.

We pray with those here in prison who long
for a decision from the parole board
for any news from a lawyer
for a phonecall from a loved one that never comes:

God of the waiting, turn anxiety into peace.

We pray with those we know who long
for a diagnosis and healing
for death
for life:

God of the waiting, turn fear into joy.

We pray with those in the world who long
for bombs to stop
for gunfire to cease
for wars to end:

God of the waiting, turn hatred into peace.

We pray with all who long
for arguments to be stilled
for a new way to be made clear
for justice to be made real:

God of the waiting, turn dread into love.

And we pray for those of us who no longer wait,
because our dreams have been shredded by the razor wire that surrounds us,
our hopes lie crumpled under the weight of systems and structures,
and our courage has been mocked by the reality of life:

God of the waiting, can you wait for us?
In this Advent, turn our despair into hope.

Amen.

i wanted to get that last post off the top… and in the temporary absence of good photos of Sunday’s space, i’ll put up one taken on my phone of the entry to the basement! It was kind of a retro ‘christmas at our house’ space. I really liked it.

We’re learning that we can’t do anything low-key, and that we’re starting to get good at this…

Half way through the evening I got a text from Andrew, who sits at the desk next to me here at work. His wife had just given birth to twins, at 28 weeks. Much love to Andrew and Sal, and to the two little ones. The promises of this christmas seem to be wrapped in very fragile realities.

Christmas in the basement, this sunday, between 5 and 7 pm… email me to rsvp. We tried to keep this low key, i’m not sure we’ve succeeded - we never have yet.

I’m then concentrating on prison stuff for a couple of weeks, including worship in the lead up to Christmas and on Christmas Day in Port Phillip Prison, and making bookmarks to hand out as gifts in the prisons… then we’re on to NCYC in the first week of January, where a few of us are planning an alternative worship service for the convention. This is proving one of the trickiest alt worship things i’ve been involved with - the space we’re using has only just been finalised, and the venue is such that we won’t be able to have all 1200 people together at any point in the service, and there’s really only one spot that will ’seat’ a group of people [400 seats], so we need to do installations / stations for 800 people, and work out a system of moving people safely through hallways and foyers, and rotating the whole group through the auditorium … Some of it will need to be outside, which is fine unless it coincides with a Melbourne summer storm [at which point we might just all adjourn to the Skinny Dog to drink gin and tonic]. Of course, we have no budget, very limited tech resources and only two hours to set up… luckily, we love a challenge… and function best with no sleep…

… then it’s Valentine’s Day - we’ll be working on promotion for that next week … it’s a fabulous and frightening couple of months coming up…