Fenced In, Fenced Out – An Australian Exile

 

 

 Thomas Merton, the American Catholic writer suggests that the only journey a human being takes is the inner journey, a journey paradoxically away from and into the world. It is a journey that can be found in exile, a journey into fullness of personhood and being and way from the superficiality of definitions, cultures and propaganda. It is only those who fully engage in this exile who discover themselves, discover others and discover the Other.

 

Our path as people is signposted by the steps we take, often timidly and stuttering, more often accidental and coincidental, towards the fullness of being. For Merton, striving towards being a full alive person involves the struggle of being disconnected and isolated from the custom and conventions of mass existence.

 

For a few moments today we are going to explore exile as the means to transcendence, as the necessary school from which we have the possibility, if we are brave enough, to transcend what we have been told about ourselves and to reimagine a new and ever changing identity, personally and culturally. In particular I will suggest this is vital for those of us who identify as Aboriginal and strive to find our place in a world where our existence has been defined for us by others.

 

Driving through south-western Victoria recently, I became aware, in a way I had not been before, of Australia as a fenced country. Ownership of the land is defined and marked out by fences, fences of all types, stone and rock, wood and wire, roads and rivers. It occurred to me that fences are not only physical but are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we came from, who shares our stories and who we will allow to do so now and in the future. Fences about where we place people in the geography of our country, the value we place upon them in our economy and the lingering presence of past definitions and practices.

 

Fences, in reality define who is a person, a subject in our national psyche, and who is an object, to be discarded and devalued, less than human.

 

Aboriginal people find themselves fenced in and fenced out by the definitions of others and, surprisingly, by using the same definitions as a means to protect and fence in their own sense of being, employing the very definitions of colour, behaviour and heritage the dominant powers have used over the last 200+ years.

 

I grew up in a town known for its violence against local tribes. Visiting the library, reading newspaper cuttings and letters from the mid 1880’s to the early 1920’s, I realised the steps taken by my family to hide my grandmothers’ heritage was a strategy deemed necessary for survival.

 

My grandfather made my Uncle promise to keep my grandmothers indigenous heritage hidden. No one in my family speaks of it; her background is shrouded in mystery. There is only a mother who registered the birth some time later in a different town. No father is mentioned. She had the name of the family she was left with when the small aboriginal community from which Jimmy and Joey Governor, part-aboriginal men who killed 9 people during a fourteen week rampage in 1900, the year prior to federation, and who inspired the book and movie “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith” came, were forcibly moved out west at the request of the white community. 

 

While it was our family secret, it wasn’t a secret to the locals. I grew up known as ‘Young Darkie’ or ‘Young Blackfella’; my friend, when angry, called me the son of a drunken bush black; another friends’ father told a group of classmates they could be friends with me but to remember where I came from. Bullying at school was never-ending.

 

My father lived in exile, caught between a world he knew and a world he never knew, growing more bitter and angry as the years went on. He acted out his violence through alcohol, directing it at anyone nearby, particularly his family and I as his eldest son. He was never able to reconcile within himself these two worlds even when he stopped drinking. It was bigger than him and his family. It was the internalised oppression of a people and country from which he was exiled.

 

These incidents are metaphors for the destruction of the primal spiritual essence of our people and symbolise the battle for the soul of our nation. Our people are suffering from the cumulative effect of internalised oppression giving rise to the situation we see in front of us. It will take imagination, humility and a drastic rethinking of our own lives and the way we find value and meaning in and for ourselves, and others before we will be able to reach out to those we continue to oppress. They, we, are living in exile.

 

Perhaps exile holds the key for the future. ‘Only when you are out of rhythm with the familiar do you begin to investigate and explore the possibilities. Exile is the place in which such an investigation not only can begin, but becomes necessary for both survival and renewal. It is the place where one is forced, as an individual and a community, to reflect on who or what is at the centre of one’s being.’ Both cultures are disconnected from their centre due to the violent history of our country, and in a very real sense, both black and white, are exiled from belonging. Homeless and exiled, the violence continues and can only find peace when we own such disconnection together.

 

My sense of exile has continued. A couple of months ago I went back to Mudgee and took the funeral of my mother’s best friend.

 

After the service, outside, a man came up to me and asked, ‘Your Blackfella’s young bloke, aren’t you? Your Young Blackfella!” Now this man had known me since I was born and nowhere in the conversation that followed was I referred to by name. Here I am, at 61 years of age, dressed in Anglican priests robes undertaking an English ritual, and I was still Young Blackfella with no name.

 

Exile is a place of fences, definitions and cultural stereotypes yet is, I suggest, the most powerful place to be. We have been, continue to be and, indeed have appropriated these fences for our own purposes in such a way that only a radical rethinking can move us beyond the stagnation within the politics of aboriginal identity we now experience.

 

Carson in her book on the Politics of Identity outlines the processes which have lead to the three proofs of identity for anyone wishing to be understood as aboriginal: the proof of self identifying, community acceptance and a provable history. In the devolution of power to communities from Governments this bureaucratic definition now is enforced by aboriginal communities for a range of reasons. It is not simply sufficient to know whom you are, you must prove it and you must prove it according to an imposed definition, a definition I would not be able to fulfil, nor would I bother to try.

 

This is exile. This is the place of no belonging. This is the place many of us find ourselves. Our choices of responses range from despair to anger to hope to transcendence. And it is our choice. We may be defined out of the existence by others, but we alone can define our existence for ourselves. Exile challenges us to rise above the fences that dot our lives and our history and to begin to live lives of transcendence.

 

As I have noted elsewhere: Exile can be both the end and the beginning. The end as it symbolises the loss of what we had; the beginning because it asks of us questions we would otherwise never have confronted. What is important? Who am I? What is my identity? Where do I belong? Where am at home? Is where I am now where I am to be forever or is this beginning of something different and new?

Exile has the power to unbalance, challenge, empower and transform… 

 

What is it for me? When I began to identify as an aboriginal person I sought to know about my country,  heritage and  culture as most people in my situation seem to do. I soon discovered society, white and black, reacted with a scepticism requiring proof, a proof I could not give beyond the statement, I am aboriginal. The first time I told my story was to a group of aboriginal and islander people at an Anglican conference. Half through my talk I became very ill and spent 10 minutes throwing up in the toilet. When I came back, one of the group commented, ‘You are free now, you will make our people proud.’ It was defining moment for me. I no longer needed to grasp at the proofs of identity or traditional aboriginal culture. I am sufficient as I am.

 

Like Thomas Merton, when he came face to face with the sleeping Buddhas at Polunaruwa I was able to explain, “I have found what I was (unknowingly) looking for.’ The sense of being without need to prove my existence, of belong to the two different societies I found myself in exile from.

 

Exile is the place we discover we are sufficient as we are. It is here we are offered capacity and resources to speak from our centre and to imagine a new place for our people and ourselves. It is important to remember exile is not just about indigenous people being exiled from country and the dominant culture but about indigenous and non-indigenous people who are exiled from their own culture and country by their own people. It is bigger than us and needs to be understood from that point of view.

• In exile we are able to ask the questions we have no need of if we are inside.
• In exile we are able to discard the simple answers to complex problems and remain alone with the questions.
• In exile we find ourselves letting go of definitions, culture and practices that are no longer useful in a world outside or beyond the fences.
• In exile we find ourselves in relationship with others whom we would have not met or discovered on the inside, our fences would have kept us a part.
• In exile we discover how little of what we thought was important actually is and we begin to connect to what remains – the essential unity with all creation and created beings.
• In exile we do not struggle and fight for existence, we recognise our existence as a gift and celebrate it in simply being who we are; we do not need to be recognised to be real. 

Exile is the separation of people from what makes them human, from what allows them to act as self-directing persons responsible for finding meaning and purpose in their way of life. Exile places people in an uneven relationship with others and with their land. They are no longer equals but are subservient, powerless and becalmed in a world that is foreign to them. This is a world in which they are told what is acceptable or unacceptable for them by others and these others include their own people as well as those of the dominant culture.

 

For indigenous people this happens on two levels. Indigenous culture restrains people to live and act out of a sense of tradition while western culture coerces people to leave behind traditional culture and become white. Both approaches produce exile. One use tradition as a means of control, dictating what is acceptable for a person who identifies as indigenous, the other uses consumerism and integration as the means to make good corporate citizens of people who otherwise maybe happy sitting down on their land.

 

Peoples' understanding of indigenous matters are coloured (no pun intended) by the duality of who is in and who is out in society, by what is acceptable for one group of people and not for another. Our society is defined by the idea of exile, the idea that one group of people has to be disinherited of country so another can inhabit it, and in so doing the former is regarded as less than human, not a person(s) but someone who is an object to be moved, helped, guided, restrained and told where they should live, what they should do and how they should behave.

 

There is a third way. Allow people to be persons able to make decisions for themselves about how they live, where they live and what they do, whether they buy into the western consumer myth, retain a more traditional way of being or live somewhere in between. Being a person is not about a being an individual but about not succumbing to the stereotype of the masses. Meaning, we are not to fall into line with the mass of individuals who are all doing the same thing.

 

The challenge here, as for aboriginal communities and those who define aboriginality at all levels, is that today many of us are different. We live outside of community, have not been initiated in culture and have no immediate kin. We no longer fit the definitions and don’t want to. We are proud of who we are, we remember our ancestors, we touch their stories, feel their presence but we no longer fit the places people want us to live in.

 

We have, or are in the process of, transcendence, rewriting our story in a new language, with a different culture and a new mob, who like us simply don’t fit the boxes others have made for us.

 

Let me finish:

Received a letter addressed to me. Signed but no return address. The writer asked why I, as a Wiradjuri man (adding if I am a Wiradjuri man) was living and working in Glen Iris and not amongst my own people in Redfern. Now I am not sure how many Wiradjuri live in Redfern, or if there are in fact any at all, and I am not sure why it is the expectation of the writer that I be there for them, but apparently living and working in a perceived wealthy white community brings my identity and my commitment to indigenous people into question.

 

This is not an attempt at validating my place in the world. I will work in the communities I decide to work in and I will bring my indigenous sensibilities to that place. That is the freedom all people should have. To live and work where they want to, even indigenous people.

 

Apparently by living and working in this place I am not being a strong leader or an example to indigenous people. I would have thought it is exactly what I am doing. Showing that it is possible to succeed in modern Australia and educating the communities in which we work and live about indigenous culture and history.

 

Thomas Merton reminds us that if we love (treat others as equal) only those who agree to live in the way we wish then we do not love them for being who they are but only for the reflection of ourselves we see in them. This third way requires we love others, allow them to be, authentically themselves and not how we wish them to be. This applies equally to those in their own communities as well as those in the dominant cultures who wish to set the boundaries of what is acceptable or not, of who is in and who is out.

 

To answer my anonymous correspondent, indigenous people are capable of deciding where they live, how they live and how to model their deep and powerful indigenous sense of self and the innate sensibilities that go with it. They can do this in remote communities, in urban housing estates, in wealthy suburbs or in parliament house. There are no limitations if we allow each other to be true to the real self. THANK YOU.

The Baptism of Jesus

Luke 3:21-22

 

Question: have you ever had the experience of listening to great music or looking at a painting and discovering you are no longer listening or looking at something out there, separate from you, but somehow, in some way you have become one with the sound, the image and the performer? So much so that for a brief moment whom you thought you were has become lost to you and you are completely enfolded within the experience. You are the music, the painting, the performer and they are you. There is no distinction. This is no longer about you are as a solitary human being, you are subsumed into the totality of being.

 

Todays Gospel reading introduces humanity to such an experience, not as the sole possession of Jesus, a special interaction between Jesus and God, but the very reality of our own existence.

 

William Loader suggests that "In a world of above and below, above and below meet in Jesus." I suggest not as the sole possession of Jesus but as the exemplar of an experience that is normative for you and I. Some see Jesus' baptism as the public connecting of God and Jesus, as a way of saying clearly who Jesus is and therefore setting him apart from the rest of humanity.

 

It is interesting that Luke situates the experience with the following words, ‘²¹Now when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised..’ This was not a private experience. It happened as the culmination of the baptism of all present. In some mystical way all present are therefore gathered up in the generosity of God who gives herself fully to Jesus. By association through presence and act all there are included in the proclamation God makes to Jesus.

 

How can this be? Jesus is Gods' son. They are human beings who came for repentance. We are ordinary human beings and therefore can not, by definition, be included in these words.

 

The truth is this: Jesus is God born into human form, material, physical, real and touchable, not in any way unlike us. Gods statement, ‘“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” could be rephrased as ‘You are my person, my fully alive human being, with who I am well pleased’.

 

What Jesus experiences at his baptism, he experiences on behalf and clearly articulates what has happened to all who has been baptised – God has generously flowed out of the Godhead into humanity in such a way that the two have become one – God has become, or is,  the ground of being for every human being. Meister Eckhart, the 14^th century mystic and teacher tells us that, 'You should know that God must act and pour Himself into the moment He finds you ready.' [German sermon 4, trans M.O’C. Walshe]

 

Edward Markquart, suggests that this happens at our baptism. He writes: "In our baptism, similar things happen to us as happened to Jesus when he was baptised: 1) The Spirit of God comes into us and remains in us. 2) We are declared to be a child of God. 3) We hear that God is well pleased with us."

 

Thomas Merton, in his book The New Man, picks up this theme as follows:

For now I had entered into the everlasting movement of that gravitation which is the very life and spirit of God: God's own gravitation towards the depths of his own infinite nature, his goodness without end. And God, that center who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me.

 

The mystical insight found with in the baptism of Jesus is this: we are more than our physicality and what we believe gives us concrete being and identity. We are more than the space and time in which we live. And we are often so preoccupied, attached to what we believe identifies us, our troubles, concerns, possessions, relationships and more, that we live a life time without actualising the gift God pours into every human being.

 

Jesus is the example of what is possible when we do. Jesus detaches himself from the concerns of this world and becomes one with the concerns of God, of love, right up to and including obedience unto death. This is the unity of God and person living life to its fullness, with neither holding anything back.

 

Merton writes, “We exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany.” Essential Writings, Cunningham) Yet we are unaware of this possibility for most of our existence, swallowed up by the sensuality of life and the propaganda of consumerism and worldly concerns, we sideline this experience as only belonging remarkable people, of which Jesus is the most remarkable.

 

The baptism of Jesus is the one-ing of God and man and the recognition that all is well with such an endeavour. For us, the people who share in Jesus baptism, Eckhart writes: 

‘People think God has only become a human being there – in his historical incarnation (at his birth) – but that is not so; for God is here – in this very place – just as much incarnate as in a human being long ago. And this is why God has become a human: that he might give birth to you as his only begotten son/daughter, and as no less.’

 

This is the epiphany in the baptism, the moment when Jesus recognises and is filled with the identity of God and holds this experience out to all who share his baptism. We do not know how many others were there with Jesus, yet , mystically, they were all included in and shared in Jesus awakening to his or humanities oneness with God. This gift is given to us all and as we achieve detachment from space and time we begin to live the eternal life which is ours already.

 

I will allow Merton to close our meditation on Jesus Baptism in the following words:

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing.  It is only given.  But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” 

Haggai Sophia - Holy Wisdom

Proverbs 1:20-21

²⁰Wisdom cries out in the street;

in the squares she raises her voice.

 ²¹At the busiest corner she cries out;

at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

 

 

 

Wisdom is a woman. Her name is Haggia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom” and the Book of Proverbs tells her story this way:

 

Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded,

before the oldest of his works.

From everlasting I was firmly set,

from the beginning, before earth came into being,

The deep was not, when I was born,

there were no springs to gush with water.

Before the mountains were settled,

before the hills, I came to birth;

before he made the earth, the countryside

or the first grains of the world’s dust.

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there,

when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,

when he thickened the clouds above,

when he fixed fast the springs of the deep,

when he assigned the sea its boundaries

—and the waters will not invade the shore—

when he laid down the foundations of the earth,

I was by his side, a master craftsman,

delighting him day after day,

ever at play in his presence,

at play everywhere in his world,

delighting to be with the sons and daughters of the human race.

 

Where have heard this before? The prologue to John’s Gospel draws a comparison between Jesus who was there at the beginning and Wisdom. John asserts that Jesus is the wisdom of God. In Jesus is the perfect presence of the feminine and the masculine, the coming together of creation and redemption in one earthly being. In a masculine and patriarchal society this seems to us to be nothing more than an oddity. God is and has been for the western mind a masculine figure, a king, warrior, a father. Rarely if ever do we think seriously about God, Jesus, the Spirit in wisdom terms, and even rarer still, in feminine terms.

 

Yet Matthew Fox writes: “Sophia or Wisdom has often been presented as a minor figure in Jewish theology.  However, a serious look at the Hebrew Scriptures reveals that “there is more material on Sophia in the Hebrew Scriptures than there is about almost any other figure.  Only God (under various titles), Job, Moses, and David are treated in more depth.”  There is more written about Sophia than about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, Isaiah, Sarah, Miriam, Adam, or Noah.  But we do not know her.  Sophia, who stands taller than any of them, is ignored.”

 

In New Testament terms the feminine is reduced to bit parts, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, the unnamed women in the Gospel stories, the women who supported Paul, but again rarely in a primary role. The exception of course is Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptiser and Mary the mother of Jesus. Whoever Mary was she was very unlikely to have been the perfect women we have become to see. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the nomenclature virgin referred more to how she engaged with her understanding of God and what was happening to her at her centre (le point vierge), the capacity and wisdom to see God at work at a difficult time in her life – pregnant and unwed but betrothed.

 

As civilisations and the jewish experience as an example moved away from a reliance on on the land and sort to distance itself from the fertility Gods, often feminine as the feminine is responsible for birthing all things, society became masculine, an imposed order from above not a birthed order from below. In the New Testament church the role of the feminine was usurped by that of the masculine and remained that way until the middle ages. At this time a renewal began, empowering women to regain visibility and recognition, although their writings and pronouncements were often masculine in form, as they had to be if they were to read.

 

Two of such women were Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich. For Hildegard of Bingen, Wisdom (Sapientia in Latin) is present in God from all eternity. She is God's bride and the means through which all created things are brought forth. She gives life energy or "greening" power to all things. She mediates between the transcendent divine and creation, sustaining all things, She is manifest in all human sciences, as well as in the revelatory and redeeming knowledge of God. She is incarnate as Christ through Mary's virginal womb, and she continues to speak through the teachers of the church. She is manifest finally in the redeemed people of God as Mother Church.

 

For Julian of Norwich, Wisdom is identified with Christ, the second person of the Trinity. She is the one through whom we are created naturally and recreated spiritually. "Thus Jesus Christ who does good against evil is our very Mother, We have our being of him, where every ground of motherhood begins, with all the sweet keeping of love that endlessly follows. As truly as God is our Father so truly is God our Mother" ("Revelations of Divine Love," chapter 59).

 

This resurgence of wisdom as the feminine principle has been championed by such as Matthew Fox and Thomas Merton and women theologians such as Joan Chittister, Mary Radford Reuther and more. Merton, an unlikely proponent as he was male and part of a male only order, Trappist monks. Yet he wrote a powerful prose poem entitled Haggai Sophia in honour of wisdom. Women played an enormous part in his dreams and were understood by him to be the prophetic wisdom of God. 

 

In his poem he writes the following (I wish I had time to read it all - it is wonderful):

 

'The feminine principle in the world is the inexhaustible source of creative realizations of the Father's glory. She is His manifestation in radiant splendor! But she remains unseen, glimpsed only by a few. Sometimes there are none who know her at all.’

 

He continues: 'Sophia in ourselves is the mercy of God in us. She is the tenderness with which the infinitely mysterious power of pardon turns the darkness of our sins into the light of grace. She is the inexhaustible fountain of kindness, and would almost seem to be, in herself, all mercy. So she does in us a greater work than that of Creation: the work of new being in grace, the work of pardon, the work of transformation from brightness to brightness. She is in us the yielding and tender counterpart of the power, justice and creative dynamism of the Father.’

 

Is there ever been a time when there was a greater need for ‘this tender counterpart of power, justice and creative dynamism’ to be reimagined and lived? The masculine sense of imposed power and right dominate resulting in unjust systems, cruelty and unending war. It is sad that this sense of feminine is often missing, not just in the males who are in power, but by females who take on the masculine traits that lead to momentary success.

 

Wisdom as the feminine principle is not gender specific. Women have no more of it than men for God evenly distributes it to all. It is to be found in all of creation and is experienced by those who, like Mary and Jesus, are in touch with God at their centre, poor and empty of the ego self, present to the poor and the marginalised and uninhibited by culture, tradition and entitlement.

 

Proverbs 1:20-23, which we read today starts: “²⁰Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. ²¹At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:” and no-one is listening. It is time we started. Amen

Jesus, Merton & Non-Violence - A Palm Sunday Reflection

(Mark 15:9-47)

James Hillman, a archetypal psychologist, wrote a book called ‘The Terrible Love of War’, exploring humanity’s simultaneous attraction and aversion to war. The chapters of his book have the following titles: ‘War is Normal’, ‘War is Inhuman’, ‘War is Sublime’ and ‘Religion is War’. He also suggests that peace is just an interlude between war, and can never be a lasting event, for to have peace there has to be a victory, someone has to lose. For peace to remain this has to reoccur over and over again.

As much as we are reviled by some of his premise, the longer I live the more I recognise the element of truth that sits under his ideas. Human beings are violent creatures. The world is a violent place. Watch the National geographic daily footage of animals eating other animals, floods, cyclones and more. The nightly news and the daily headlines scream violence.

I have seen my share of violence. Domestic violence in the house I grew up in, bullying at school, working the drug scene in the 70’s, as a prison chaplain to maximum security prisons and in my work with families and young people.

For 3 months I was posted to Broken Hill as a cadet Salvation Army officer and left on my own for a number of weeks as the officer in charge went on leave. In that time I stood on verandas restraining angry husbands as their wives and children hurriedly grabbed clothes and belongings and fled to a shelter. I remember begging a lady to leave her husband who used to abuse her every day. She said ‘where can I go out here?’ The perpetrator was in his 70’s.

In Brisbane I helped develop a community garden with a Sudanese man whose wife was the only member of her family to survive a massacre in her village.

I stood in the morgue at Mt Isa and saw an aboriginal man who suffered a death we hear little of in the city, but one that is not unusual out there. He had been run over by a road train while sleeping on the road. No-one stopped.

In the Navy we worked with numerous young men and women traumatised by the violence they experienced in the campaign to turn back the boat people. Like most veterans they suffered not only physical violence but a psychological violence which never leaves.

War and violence litter our world with blood. And we seem to need blood to give reason for the loss of innocence and the innocent. Our reverence for Gallipoli as the time when Australia came of age is tied directly to the blood of young Australians.

The Easter story is another story of blood and rightly or wrongly we focus on the death of Jesus as somehow being necessary to set us free from the failings of our own personal humanity. The story of Jesus’ death has been appropriated as a way to set us free from sin and the devil.

On Palm Sunday we are confronted with an option that stands against violence, war and blood, and if taken seriously, it will give us a new understanding of Jesus’ death. It is the option of non-violence. Jesus’s bases his life on the non-violent response to the violence of others, of nature, of political ideology and to those who oppress the people of the land he grew up in.

Palm Sunday ushers in the final confrontation between the way of power and blood, and the way of non-violence. On Palm Sunday we have Jesus riding into the city surrounded by his friends and others. He is seated on a young donkey, a colt. The people sing songs of exultation and lay down their robes and palm branches, the symbols of peace, on the road before him.

At the same time, Marcus Borg and other scholars suggest, there was a procession of a different quality going on on the other side of time. It was a show of military might and power by the Roman occupiers. Men on horses dressed in all their glory showing off the might of the Empire, the might which had and continued to subdue the locals. Ruthless and bloody.

Jesus’ procession mimicked what was probably an annual event at Passover and said loudly and clearly, violence is not the answer. There is another power and it is the power of compassion and acceptance, of love and respect, of hope and freedom. Its way was not to confront power with power, as many had hoped. Jesus reminds us, and those watching, that the act of violence only brings about more violence, as the Zealot’s and others were to find out a little further down the line.

Jesus journey from the last supper, through the garden of Gethsemane and through the Jewish and Roman legal systems and onto his death on the cross, exemplifies Jesus commitment to non-violence.

 What does this non-violence look like:

•  Thomas Merton, Catholic Monk and writer, writes:

“Christian non-violence is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of man. It is not out for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for the healing and reconciliation of man with himself, man the person and man the human family.”(Faith and Violence, 15) This is the story of the cross. Jesus was not attempting to convert humanity but to heal its wounds by exemplifying the non-violent option. His death said loudly and clearly, enough is enough. Violence has no part in the resurrection we are to live.

•  Merton goes on to suggest:

“ A test of our sincerity in the practice of non-violence is this: are we willing to learn something from the adversary?...” (24) Dialogue and engagement, not acts of defensive or aggressive violence are to be our performative response, although it does not rule out the possibility of the need to protect oneself, it does suggest that this is an option of last resort. 

•  Merton finally suggests, in line with what we see occurring in the face of Jesus’ committed resistance to the brutality of the political and religious world:

“Nonviolence is not for power but for truth. It is not pragmatic but prophetic. It is not aimed at immediate political results, but at the manifestation of fundamental and crucially important truth. Nonviolence is not the language of efficacy but of kairos. It does not say ‘We shall overcome’, so much as to say ‘This is the day of the Lord, and whatever may happen to us, He shall overcome.’ (Nonviolent Alternative, 75)

So what does have to say to us in a world that can, and has been, violent to others and us? How do we practice non-violence in our daily lives? How do we learn from those who appear to be against us? Where do we find the courage to wait on God throughout a difficult time and resist the urge to fight back? How do we ignore the mantra we hear everyday, if you don’t look after yourself, nobody else will, implying we have to fight for what we want? How do we change our mindset from competitive to collaborative, allowing us to work with instead of defeating others?

These are difficult questions for each of us to grapple with. There is no simple answer. We are called to do what as Jesus did – to trust the process and the one who is in charge of the process, allowing ourselves the luxury of hope and confidence, not in a successful resolution but in an outcome based on integrity and truth.

We know Jesus struggled a number of times through his life with the possibility of an unjust and painful death, the apparent failure of his mission. Instead of fighting to win he maintained the integrity of non-violence, showing us that there is another way. He gives us no blueprint to follow. Just an example lived out in dialogue with the same tensions we face everyday. His example simply says, ‘Remain faithful, God will overcome.’ AMEN

Merton and Teachers.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” 
― Thomas Merton

Merton said little about education and teaching, and this is not one of the things he said.  He was speaking to those involved in the peace movement in the '60's and he was warning against disappointment because our goals and targets for change never seem to be reached. Yet I suggest it could apply to teachers.

Teachers strive to be transformational and often the transformation they seek is delayed, to put it mildly.  How do you remain motivated, involved and focussed when the class in front of you is slipping into inertia, on the road to amnesia and a journey around some distant planet no scientist has yet discovered?

Merton suggests letting go of the destination and remembering why you are a teacher, why it is right to be teacher and why teachers are necessary.To let go of the idea of making a difference and to develop a relationship with the individuals, not the class and not the curriculum outcome.

He affirms what all good teachers know but need to be reminded of every now and then, that 'it is the reality of the personal relationship that saves everything', and in the case of teachers, everyone including the teacher herself.

It is interesting to note that he says we are to have that relationship with specific persons, not everyone. How does that work?  I suggest that in every class there are leaders, significant influencers whose 'buy-in' is required to move the whole class. Students who wield influence, are early adopters, who lead by achievement, it is these students we are to identify and to develop the particular relationship aimed at helping them achieve their goals, whether that be learning, prestige, success and/or the need for a relationship with teacher, students or parents.

Is this easy? No but perhaps it is the difference between burning out and remaining what you already are, a great teacher.

What's Happening To Our World?

If ever we were sure that the world we live in will always be the same, 2011 has provided some interesting insights to challenge us.

Devestating climatic activities, flood across most of our country, cyclones and fires in WA and similar events across the world pose the question: how do we cope with change?

People power uprisings for political change right across the Arab world including such places as Libya where the thought of such being possible was previously unheard of, poses the same question: how will we cope with a world that will be a very different one than that which we lived up until the end of 2010?

For us in the West the questions strike at our world view, our understanding of what is right and wrong, of where the foundations for our beliefs and practice are found. As the world becomes more multi-cultural through immigration, the arrival of refugees and the ease of travel, new ideas, beliefs and practices will live alongside, and at some tome, in some places, overshadow that which we took for granted.

Things like our religion, our belief system, our values and our way of life will, and if we are honest, have been challenged by these changes. This is inevitable, it is apart of living in an ever changing world. Yet, it is not that it is happening that matters most, as Tom Waits sings, "You can't hold back time", what matters most is how we respond to it.

Do we respond by emphasising our differences and walling up our fortresses to keep the changes out or do we embrace the challenge to be open to diversity, to listen to voices different to ours, to engage in dialogue with others looking for similarities and the space-in-between where we share our humanity?

It begins with us. Thomas Merton suggested that there will be no world peace unless each of us is at peace with ourselves and share that peace with another. It begins with us and fear is our enemy. We over come fear by facing it though engagement and dialogue, firstly within ourselves and the in the world.

What Does It Mean To Be A Priest?

"Life consists in learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one’s own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." Thomas Merton from "Living and Loving"

Some one asked what it meant for me to be a priest and how did I validate that experience in my daily life? Well, the words of Merton encapsulate it for me, but let me tell you what happened to me today to be it in perspective.

I had decided that my haircut no longer fitted my military expectations so I went to the barbers. Unfortunately my normal barber was busy, and as I only had limited time I couldn't wait, so I went in search of another barber.

Around the corner I found one and took a seat. The young man was cutting the hair of an elderly man with dementia and was doing so with great care and love. I noticed the young man had an unconventional hair cut and I wondered about who he was and what he was thinking.

It soon came my turn and I plopped down into the chair. He looked me up and down (red checked clergy shirt and red Squires boots)and commented: "You must raise some eyebrows with the way your dressed for a priest?' I laughed and said "Sometimes". The conversation continued and I discovered he was ex-Army so I shared about my role with Navy.

What started out as general conversation moved quickly into listening deeply as this young man talked about his experiences, how he lost friends in aircraft accidents on flights he was scheduled to go on but was pulled from at the last minute, the trauma he experienced and how he copes with the sleepless nights. 'I sleep with one eye open", he said. He also said, "I am working through it all, and working on forgiving and forgetting."

Having heard what he said, I commented that experiences like that can be worked through but they will never be forgotten. The conversation went on as I got my $10 haircut.

As I left I shook his hand and looked deeply into his eyes and we both said 'God bless you' at exactly the same time.

God took a freewheeling moment in my life and my availability allowed a special God encounter to occur for both of us. Priestly stuff happens when you are most yourself, present to the moment, fully alive as a human being and open to the movement of the Spirit. Being fully alive as a human being and as a priest means that all ordinary moments are priestly moments.

There are no ordinary moments. All moments are invested with the divine and as a priest I live for those ordinary moments.

Living in the Space-In-Between

Phillip Adams writing on Kerry Packer in The Australian October last year provides us with an insight into the powerful and wealthy man he became. In his article, Adams shares some of the conflict and difficulties Kerry suffered at the hands of his father and how the need to succeed and to be successful was a burden. Adams finishes the article as follows, and I quote, “ At the beginning of our odd friendship, after the first of our conversations that would go on until two or three in the morning, Kerry would talk about black holes. “That’s what I’ve got inside me. A black hole,” he said.”

Last week some of us watched the apology of the richest and the most powerful sportsman in history who has been humbled by a similar black hole. Tiger Woods said, “"I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.”

The black hole is merciless and swallows up the rich and the famous as well as the ordinary schoolboy or girl who thinks the rules do not apply to him or her. Despite all the opportunity we have before us, no matter how successful we are, we often find selves bemoaning our place in the world and looking for ways to fill that black hole. It never goes away.

In the 15th Chapter of Genesis we discover one of the most successful, most powerful and most wealthy of men, Abram, having to deal with his own personal black hole, one that if you follow this career never goes away. He never quite got over his fears and his doubts and his life is littered with bad decisions. Here we meet him after he has had a very successful time. In chapter 13 Abram & Lot had divided the land between them, with Lot taking the best parcel, described in ways similar to the Garden of Eden; Abram get’s a somewhat lesser although a quite extensive lot, simply “the land of the Canaanites”.

In chapter 14 Abram rescues Lot, defeats Chedorlaomer, among others with the result that the warlord King of Sodom offers him the riches of his conquest. He takes nothing – he does not use this as the opportunity to secure his future, for him his future can only be secured by “the Lord Most High”.

Very grand and full of faith. Yet…. Here in the beginning of chapter 15 he is anxious, he’s not as happy and relaxed as one who makes the claims he does may be expected to be. God is aware, and says to him, ‘Do not be afraid, I am your protector, you will get your reward’.

Abram seems to be like most of us. We can rise to the big occasions, deal with that extraordinary challenge, find some where in ourselves the necessary resources of wisdom, skill and faith to deal with the big stuff but become unstuck by the little.

For Abram it’s that he and Sarah still have no natural heir. It has been some time since God had promised that, Abram and Sarah have tried a number of stunts to help God get the job done and it hasn’t happened. So Abram is anxious – unsure about whether God can do that thing – he can do big things but can he do that thing?

God shows him the stars and says don’t worry your descendents will be as plentiful as the stars. Abram shrugs his shoulders, he’s not convinced.

How often do we do so in our own lives? We don’t have trouble with God sorting out or helping us through tragedy, difficulties or the unexpected stuff – but what about the day-to-day stuff? Some how we don’t think so, for to allow God to handle the minutiae is for us losing control over the things we think we ought to control.

The rather nonchalant comment that Abram indeed does believe the Lord in verse 6 is a little to simple, a little to easy. We know his track record, he does believe, but we also know that he stills struggles in the midst of his belief.

He sits some where in between, balancing his faith with his doubt, his fears with his assurance, his confidence with his anxiety. A priest I know often asks the question: What is the opposite of faith? (PAUSE & REPEAT) The answer is not doubt it is certainty. Certainty takes faith completely out of the question for we now no longer need to believe for we know.

God seems very comfortable with this perceived duality for it is not a duality at all. Faith and doubt are twins and sit comfortably together. Without one you do not have the other and neither will defeat the other but will simply provide the nourishment to stay with the questions in our life.

Thomas Merton in "Thoughts in Solitude" comments:
“Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison."

In verse 6 God honors that living with the questions in that “the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”. God understood his desire and accepted his questions as being the right way to live. He said to Abram and he says to us through the life and words of Jesus that he accepts us with all our contradictions as being the people he calls us to be.

Perhaps the challenges is best expressed in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, in his book “Letters to a Young Poet”: ““Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

Abram did and so can we. AMEN
Genesis 15:1-6

Thomas Merton - Who Was He?

As some of you know I just returned from the 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA and the usual response when I say this is a blank look translated as "Who?"

I could say that he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask "so, who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago, before I was introduced to him. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and began working at St Clements Anglican Church Stafford in Brisbane Australia. Somewhere in a conversation somebody suggested I might be interested in reading Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I found Nouwen first and found him easy to read and very accessible.

I had some difficulty finding something on Thomas Merton, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous as there are over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, which probably qualifies him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start.

I picked up the first of his journals (there are 7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I found in there was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was real life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century in which I was born and lived in for some 45 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive (met several at the conference who were previously just names in Merton’s books), he has been spared the ignominy of being written as a perfect saint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry with it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. He was very human yet obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

It is his humanity and his spiritual journey that appealed to me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait it seems) into the Trappist life, which was followed by a period of a deepening of his own personal awareness through contemplation and solitude and then, beginning in the 1950's and continuing until his death, a period of engagement with the world outside the monastery walls including social justice, anti-war, ecumenism, interfaith dialogue and his enthusiasm for Zen (much of his letter writing occurred in this period and included his dialogue with leaders and influential writers across a range of causes, religions and spiritualities).

William H Shannon, in his excellent publication An Introduction – Thomas Merton, recognises the qualities I discovered (and it seems many others do everyday as his popularity in both secular and religious bookshops, reading lists and universities has not decreased) and denotes them as ‘Merton’s themes’. While they are overt themes Merton dealt with in his writing they also identify the underlying quality of Thomas the person reflected in his writing, focus and appeal. Those themes are: his humanness, his ability to articulate the human condition, reverence for people, bursting the bonds of cultural limitation and spiritual director for the masses

For me these themes are the marks of the clown, the essence of the Holy Fool in Christian tradition and Merton, in all that he did and said, is situated within that tradition. The simple act of leaving a promising writing and academic career and the ‘good life’ (Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander 279) to disappear into the desert of the Monastic life follows in the steps of the Desert Fathers, the Russian yurodive and other Christian mystics who’s foolishness challenged the society they left behind.

His forays into writing and becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that see him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with other religions at a time when ecumenism was not even a word of currency could be seen, and was by some at the time, as foolishness. His dialogue with Eastern and other religions and spiritualities was completely unconventional, particularly for a Trappist monk and hermit, and his involvement in the civil rights, peace and anti-war movements and his passion for non-violence set him apart. He reports that "I am told by a higher superior: 'It is not your place to write about nuclear war:that is for the bishops'". (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander 296)

So how do we answer the question, ‘Who is Thomas Merton”? He is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense and showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion we have inhabited to fit in.

Merton never fitted in and challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.

‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.” Thomas Merton (Echoing Silence 183)