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.

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

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...]

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

About six weeks ago, i came home from a meeting about just that topic to discover that i had new neighbours. they moved into an apartment upstairs and across from me that used to be home to some goths who were fabulous neighbours, but who were stalked by some fundamentalist christians who used to leave typed anonymous letters about hell and damnation in their letterbox. That’s a whole other post in itself…

So the new neighbours moved in - E and J, we’ll call them. They’re part of a transitional program which gets people off the streets and into apartments. The program offers caseworkers and support systems - it was lauded in the media this week, and i think it’s fabulous.

It was probably about three days in that the arguments started. There would be shouting and screaming, which would begin around 4 or 5 in the morning - every morning - and last for a couple of hours, normally until one of the caseworkers would arrive and sort things out. Their arguments could be heard down the end of the street. It was pretty awful. After a couple of weeks E and J wrote lovely letters and cards to each of us in the apartment block, apologising for their behaviour and talking about how hard it was to move into an apartment after being on the streets. It was a lovely gesture. I wrote one back saying that I hoped things would work out for them.

Last weekend it got uglier, the violence went to a whole new level. There was no shouting or screaming, just the sound of fist on flesh, which was chilling and sickening. The police responded really quickly - they know the address now - arriving just as i was leaving to go to Benalla to do worship up there. We had a quick conversation about what had happened during the morning and how this shouldn’t happen in ‘nice suburbs like this’. Then during the week one of the people who owns another apartment in the block was assaulted by E, so an order was made that E and J need to move out straight away.

Of course they do. It’s been unsafe and it’s been terrible. But i hate that while it’s worked out fine for me [as I always knew it would], that E and J can’t esape the hell they’re living in - whether it’s of their own or the world’s making. i hate that this gift of hope and a new start is in tatters for them. I hate that i feel so relieved; that i’m coming face to face with my own hypocrisy; that from 9 to 5 i’m advocating something that i can’t live in reality. I hate that i gave up thinking that he would stop hitting her, and that i hoped only for me to stop hearing.

‘Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation’. One of the police officers said this to me last Sunday, and the quote’s been rolling around my mind this week. My version of hell these last few weeks has been temporary, and i always had many options when i wanted to escape it. I know that for many this is not temporary, and it’s inescapable. I suspect there are people who have read this blog who have often wondered at my naivety, and some who are reading the stuff i’ve put together for advent, and the plans we’ve been describing for communal justice, and thinking that it just doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny of their reality. and they are right. There are some realities this can’t stand up to. I’m so sorry if things i’ve written have been simplistic about your reality, and offered judgement instead of compassion. There are some things for which no prayer or promise of hope can offer a solution. I only wish I had an alternative.