[ hold :: this space ]

this is beautiful.

The world is getting ready for Christmas.

The newspapers are full of glossy Christmas catalogues.
People are already complaining about prices, queues, crowds,
of how busy things already are,
and how quickly this has come around.
They’re arguing about who should be invited
and where Christmas should be.

We wish we could complain about that too.

Come, God,
into our monotony and anxiety
as we begin the walk to Christmas.

Bring love into the empty spaces in our days
and lives,

and into the waiting for what is to come,
bring peace.

amen.

a little something from week one of advent, when the gospel reading is Matthew 24:36-44… no-one knows the day or hour…

confession

we confess that we no longer wait for you, God
or the love that comes in your name.
we no longer eagerly anticipate the advent
of hope or joy or peace
because the disappointment is too great
when you don’t turn up.

we wonder why you can’t make a better plan than this
something a little less risky, and a little more foolproof.

we confess our cynicism,
our fear,
and our doubt.
and with what little faith we have left,
we pray you will wrap them with forgiveness
born of infinite love and compassion.

may today be the day that we find you.
may today be the day that you come.

amen.

intercession

we have had enough of the waiting, god

where the world is crushing itself with intolerance or indifference,
come now as life
where nations are destroying each other with bombs or apathy,
come now as hope
where people rip each other’s lives apart with hatred or disinterest,
come now as peace

and where we have given up on the power of love
to change anything in our lives or the world,
come now as faith.

amen.

my desk is divided in two today. On the left is a growing pile of research reports and statistics about prisons and inmates in Victoria… on the right is a collection of poetry by Rilke and Rumi, inspiring a wee idea i’ve got stirring at the moment.

prison stats:

Where do prisoners come from? 25 percent of the Victorian Prison population comes from just 2.1 percent of the 647 postcode areas in Victoria. These postcode areas are also the ones with some of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect, psychiatric hospital admissions and long-term unemployment [Source: Jesuit Social Services, 2003]. I’ve met men in prison who come from families where within memory, no-one has ever had a job. We’re talking 5th generation unemployment…

Rates of crime in Victoria are decreasing: The crime rate in Victoria has declined 22.4 per cent over the last five years and is the lowest in more than a decade. [source: Victorian Premier's website]

Rates of imprisonment in Victoria are increasing: The number of prisoners in Victoria increased 60% between 30 June 1996 and 30 June 2006. [source: Department of Justice website]

Recidivism: 53 per cent of the prison population on 30 June 2006 had previously been in prison. [source: ABS]. Almost 60 percent of 17-20 year olds return to prison within 2 years of being released. 43 percent of prisoners whose initial sentence was between 6 and 12 months will return to prison. [source: Department of Justice]

And from the other side of the desk, a taste of Rilke…

Title Page [from The Voices]

It’s easy for the rich and fortunate to remain silent,
nobody wants to know who they are.
That is why the destitute must show themselves,
must say: I am blind,
or: that is what I’m about to become,
or: it’s not going very well with me here on Earth,
or: I have a sick child,
or: this is where I’m kind of all stuck together…

And perhaps even that is not enough.

Despite everything, as if they were things,
people walk right by, and so they must sing.

And one hears good music there.

Truly, people are strange; They’d
rather hear castrati in boys’ choirs.

But God himself comes and remains a long time
when these disfigured ones begin to disturb him.

Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Cliff Crego)

[i'm gradually picking up all the loose strings i dropped when going away. today i met with jenny, to talk through prison worship and restorative justice... this week is all about liturgy writing...]

call to worship

this is a holy space and a sacred time

not because god is here in any special way -
god is no different in this place
to anywhere else -
but because we are here in a special way

in this space and time
all of who we are
is welcome

so bring the broken, darkest parts of you -
the parts which strive to be beautiful
and those which are nothing but flawed -

put them next to mine

as together,
in this holy space and sacred time,
we let them be shaped
by god.

welcome to worship.

a bit of background about the restorative justice project

The Uniting Church - like many other faiths communities and christian churches in victoria - has had an extensive prison ministry over many years. This includes a team of prison chaplains, and also some post-release care through various Uniting Care agencies. It is, obviously, important work, but it’s a little like putting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. There’s been a growing commitment over the last few months to broadening our focus - or really, to changing the paradigm out of which we operate, hence the restorative justice project.

[if you're new to this, wikipedia has an excellent overview of the principles and practice of restorative justice.]

Why is the Uniting Church making this a focus?
theologically… i said in the last post that the prison work had become the question to which the entire alt worship project needed to answer. i was understating the case somewhat - Luke has Jesus beginning his ministry with the verses from Isaiah 58 [Luke 4:16-20], in part to remind us that every part of our ministry - our community life, our worship, our theology - needs to answer first to the blind, the widow, the poor and the prisoner… if our theology, and its outworking, doesn’t first bring freedom to the prisoner [and there are no convincing arguments as to why we shouldn't take that literally], then it won’t actually bring freedom to anyone [our natural inclination is to reverse that: to get 'ourselves' right, and then we'll 'do' justice and compassion].

We link justice to punishment; the bible links it to restoration. We talk about God being pure grace, love and justice; yet when it comes to prisoners we’ll invoke vengeance without a second thought. Sure, it’s prisoners who make it hard to speak of a god of grace, love and justice - but that’s the exact point. it might be hard, but it’s in that context we have to make it work. There are some people i would quite happily judge as irredeemable, but it’s not up to me to do that. If i’m to call myself a person of faith, then i give up the right to judge another person.

sociologically… the politicians keep telling us that crime rates are down in victoria, yet statistics tell us that the rates of imprisonment are higher. The basis of this project is for the Uniting Church to join others involved in this area, to do what it can to reverse that trend. It needs to be said that the aim of this project isn’t to close all prisons. There are some people who need to be kept separate from the community. But for the many prisoners who don’t fit this category, there are other forms of justice that actually restore wholeness - both to them, and to the community they’ve damaged.

so, what does the uniting church need to do for a prison to be closed?

This is not a short term project, obviously. And it needs to be approached from a multitude of angles: for it to work we need to begin conscientising the members of congregations and faith communities to the issue - much like the process that was undertaken with asylum seekers a few years ago… though of course, this is a much less sexy issue, and it’s much harder to do the face to face conversations that helped so much in that issue. We need to begin speaking in a different language - in our theology and our worship. As Jenny said last week, we basically need to convert congregations to a vision of the kingdom of heaven. Alongside that, we need to be talking with politicians, members of the judiciary and the media.

so, the next twelve months looks like this:
gathered events

• we’re beginning with a community justice forum - listening to the groups and people involved in the existing justice system, and in restorative justice already, learning from them, and then discerning what it is that the uniting church can offer to that conversation

• then we’ll launch into other more general educative forums for the uniting church - starting a conversation between prison chaplains and Uniting Care community service agencies, to identify the gaps in the care of people who are moving through and beyond the justice system.

• there’ll also be a couple of forums that are open to members of the public, and church members, in order to get some broader community awareness.

• the commission for mission staff gathering next year will involve Elaine Enns, who is a restorative justice practitioner [she will be in australia with her partner, Ched Myers].

communication

• we’re going to blitz the church newspaper with stories, articles, interviews about restorative justice, and the people affected by the justice system.

• we’re developing a community information pack, including ways people can get involved on an individual and local level - advocating to their local members of parliament, establishing forums for restorative justice in their own context

• i’ll write faith columns about this for the newspaper

humanising the issue

• finding ways to tell stories of people who have been through the prison system [the film project will be part of this]

worship and theology

• workshops, resources, conversations with faith community leaders about the language and imagery we use in worship

That’s just the start of it, and it’s a massive amount of work… but we’ve started on it already, and that’s the most important thing…

Stay tuned, or come along for the ride if you’re able…

i met Andreas yesterday who’s visiting from Denmark, researching alt worship / emerging church. We had such a good conversation - well, i don’t know if it was really helpful to him, but it helped a stack of different threads come together in my head.

Andreas is involved in quite an amazing community in the Lutheran church in Denmark. they organise alt worship at night time in a central cathedral in denmark. i love the idea of that… wish our churches were places that people felt they could go into.

I came back from that conversation and went straight into a scoping meeting for the restorative justice project [after, literally, bumping into matt damon and his entourage in the laneway across from the office… surreal…]. i’ll outline the restorative justice project in the next post, but it will probably become about half of my workload over the next 12 months – and along with the alternative space in the city will shape pretty much the entirety of this project. in some ways it feels really discordant to hold both of those things together - thinking about sacred spaces in what’s probably one of the most sparkly clean designer communities in the centre of melbourne [on the surface, anyway]… and alongside that focussing on the restoration of people incarcerated in the prison system. In talking with andreas, i realised how closely they are linked.

the worship i’m involved with in prisons has become the question to which the rest of the alt worship project has to answer. If the alternative city space doesn’t hold water when it’s held up against the restoration and redemption of people who are most removed from our society, then we can’t do it. And i’m not talking at all about challenging those who visit the docklands space to go out and do good works [something we do over and over in the church - exhorting people to be the good Samaritan which is such a gross distortion of that bible passage]. everything in the space must be about an alternative vision of society - it has to be built into the fabric of the space, painted onto the walls, people need to breathe it in the air from the moment they walk in. it’s not an optional extra, a program for wednesdays at 8. it’s the sole purpose of the space.

whenever i’m asked to offer a biblical mandate for this project, i keep coming back to luke 4:16ff – to the words that are echoed throughout the bible, and which are offered as the starting point for Jesus’ public life - it’s no less than radical ecclesiological, social and political revolution. and our work as people of faith is to make the places where that can happen; to subvert the structures, to speak prophetically to the systems, to model a different life. that has to be the starting point of every act of worship, every constructed sacred space, and every part of community. it’s the ‘why’ behind everything we do. it’s the measuring stick, the question mark.

[and the other passage i talk about, of course, is from Amos, who, in his full glory, sits on my right shoulder...
‘i the Lord hate and despise your religious celebrations and your times of worship...']

oh… and we’ve got enthusiastic buy-in from some key players in the film making idea … all we need now is some money [which is, in the scheme of things, the easy bit]… after a few weeks of really hard slog in virtually every part of this project, it feels like we’re finding some momentum. for one silly moment yesterday it occurred to me that going to the uk in 10 days time was a distraction from what i could be doing here. but i got over that pretty quick.

i’ve been up in kyneton all day, meeting with jenny who heads up prison chaplaincy in Victoria. we’re beginning to plan a conference on restorative justice which is to be held next year. our conversation kept coming around to the fact that restorative justice is something that can only happen when a whole community is brought to restoration… Since our australian community is built upon a fundamental lie that the country has swept under the carpet for the last 200 years, and we can’t even look restorative justice in the eye in that issue, how do we even begin …

[speaking of which, lisa hall is a teacher in Utopia, a remote indigenous community in the NT. she's a voice I trust in the current sea of ignorant opinions... her blog posts at the moment are heartbreaking and eyeopening].

we realised pretty early on that working out what needs to happen before redemption and restoration are made real in our society is a never ending process, but that we need to begin asking the questions and naming the problems even if we don’t know the solutions to them. that’s counter-cultural in the church, we only like asking questions we can answer.

this was the beginning of our list today:

what do we, as a community, do with prisoners with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities when they leave prison, and when their primary carers [normally their parents] are too old / unable to care for them… and when the government has dismantled the institutions that could have cared for them?
how do we, as a community, look beyond ’single issues’, which tend to focus on symptoms not problems… [take away gambling and some other addiction will take its place]?
what do we do about the fact that often the only accommodation, post release, that recovering drug addicts can find is with people who are still using?
what do we about the cycle where the parole board won’t release prisoners until they have accommodation, but prisoners can’t get accommodation without knowing when they’ll be released from prison
what do we, as a community, do about the fact that the prison population is increasing, even though the rates of crime are decreasing
what do we, as a community, with the knowledge that the majority of victoria’s prison population comes from just 14 postcodes… and with the knowledge that we’ve known this for years and done nothing about it….
what do we, as a community, do about the fact that much of the prison population is made up of people who are 4th generation unemployed and dependent on welfare…

[i've been thinking about why i'm pro-denominational recently, even when i'm pretty ambivalent about church! this is one of the reasons: a denomination has the capacity and resources to work on issues like this. the church has a vision of redemption and restoration which it can offer the world; a denomination has a loud enough voice to advocate to governments, and can do so unapologetically, as well as having resources to put into work that simply wouldn't get funding any other way.]

we were just talking about Paris Hilton. isn’t everybody?

i might get stoned for this, but i’m really not sure Paris should be in prison. of course I believe she should get the punishment that everyone else gets when they commit this crime - absolutely - but i’m not sure i think that anyone who has committed her crime should be in prison. We have to get better at finding punishment for crimes like this that actually restore and rehabilitate people. Or we have to change our prisons so that they do just that. Which, of course, the US system might do better than us in Australia.

i know Paris says that prison has already made her a better person, and i don’t have the insight or the right to judge that. i do know that for people to emerge ‘better’ from the prison system here, they need to be amazingly resilient, have great courage and imagination. it’s not an easy thing to do. Prison is the ultimate institution - it’s intentionally designed to crush any individuality, any imagination, any self-responsibility and any independent thought. to come out of it better is an incredible feat. all power to you, Paris. i hope you do.

i’m the first to dump on Paris, and society’s elevation of people who are celebrities just for being celebrities … what i read of her makes me feel pretty nauseous. but i keep thinking of something i’ve said over and over as i’ve reflected on the worship we’ve been doing in prison over the last year: we are all more than the story that has brought us to this place, and we are all more than the story that the world tells of us. Even Paris.

From the prison yesterday:

The psalms of boredom are missing from the Bible…

How long must I wait, God?

Every day is the same
Time seems to stand still
It’s the same thing just on a different day
Time goes by so slowly.

How long must I wait, God?

The days are marked only
by the constant musters
and the loneliness when I get locked away by myself

How long must I wait, God?

All I do is listen to the same stories
day in and day out
of people talking about drugs and crime

How long must I wait, God?

Every day I ask for forgiveness
and happiness
I hope for a better life
I just want to be able to be myself

How long must I wait, God?

Every day I wait for the good times to come
for the love of my family
for good intentions

How long must I wait, God?

- Billy

—

How long must I wait, God?

Every day is the same
I wake up and I see the same things every day
The news is never good
Each week it’s the same thing
I dream at night that I’m home, I wake up and I’m here.

How long must I wait, God?

The only things that happen
are the same things, day by day.
The officers stare at me, all the time
every move is watched
I get sent to bed like a kid at 7.30
even if the sun is still shining.

I look at the same walls in my cell.

How long must I wait God?

We do nothing new
it’s the same shit every day
Kitchen food
giving orders to billets
the same ones, over and over.
We get counted
we look at the walls
will it be forever?

How long must I wait, God?

Every day I ask for my kids and family to be safe
I hope my health stays good
so I can be healthy with them when I’m out.

How long must I wait, God?

Every day I get up and wait for that miracle
for it to be time for me to leave
that the parole board will change its mind
and today will be the day.

How long must I wait, God?

- Phil

here endeth the psalms.

it’s been such a good experience to do these…i’ve learnt a lot about working with a group who don’t have the foggiest idea about creative process and have low literacy skills. each week they would say that there was no way they could do it. much of the success lay in making the process foolproof: i wrote questions or sentence starters to begin the process, and we changed them as the conversation went along if they didn’t sit quite right. the more structure we gave them, the better. after that, the writing took care of itself - the men just took to it like fish to water. and the psalms were much better to write than prayers - it felt like a much more honest process.

i’m going to go back in a month or so to do a few services based around music. i also have this idea for the women’s prison - writing some of the stories in the gospel from the perspectives of the women who are in them…