Gladiator

This is not really a religious post, but nobody really reads this blog so it is kind of an online diary in some ways of my journey through life. One of the scenes in the film Gladiator (with Russell Crowe) was early in his career at an outpost where various men have been conscripted to fight as gladiators. The one guy is a scribe - so obviously out of his depth and so scared out of his wits before combat that he literally wets himself. And yet put those same guys in an intellectual environment and the strapping Russell Crowe would have looked inept. It is the case of the square peg and round hole. Like my life. I was working tonite on my novel and I find myself wrestling with despair at the thought of going into my own Colosseum tomorrow to do duty and waste another day of my quickly diminishing life. I don't feel scared like the scribe, I feel nauseous at the utter waste of so many years of my own life. I have nothing but contempt for my own hitherto inability to break free from what Thoreau's described as this incessant prison of business. I must feed and nurture this hatred so that it spurs me into action to finish my degree and get on with the business of living and not just existing.

Christmas in Aus

I feel like an evangelical writing this, but here goes anyway. The evangelical Christians often use a verse from Proverbs 18:21 'There is life and death in the power of the tongue' and I am beginning to think they are on to something. Christmas is huge over here - everybody wishes everybody else Merry Christmas! Unbelievable? No it's true - I am serious. It is not like SA or the USA where there is a conscious attempt to sanitise Christmas of Christ and you get wished Happy Holidays - or the talking heads on radio or TV nod sagely about remembering the real meaning of Christmas - you know that meaning: friends and family and helping the poor? I mean hello? The true meaning is that we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. That is the real meaning. The name Jesus Christ almost jars today when spoken aloud as Christians are shamed into silence. One of the only ways nowadays, to identify the Christian greeting is when Christians make a point of wishing each other a Blessed Christmas to distinguish their greeting from the drunken spectacle that often accompanies slurred Merry Chrishmasses! at office parties or corporate marketing blurbs indistinguishable really from any other annual sale except in its sheer scale. That's why I like Aus. People here, by and large, have kept and honour it as a Christian Feast. It is refreshing and whatever their other faults, demonstrative of the respect that they have for their own heritage and faith history and not driven by the PC madness that only respects faiths other than Christianity - a habit that has been driven by an atheistic media and is actually getting a little bit old.

May you and those you love, have a very Blessed and Holy Christmas as we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world.

Wasting life

I travelled to and from Canberra today (about 7 hours of driving all in all) and had time to think. I was wondering about how much of my life I have wasted - I am 39 and have almost nothing to show for it. I kind of wondered aloud to God, if he really wanted us to worship him and spend time with him now because as long as we stayed on the straight and narrow mostly, wouldn't we have time enough when we are dead to do that? So why waste all this time in prayer instead of living life? I guess it struck me that would be the same as saying to my wife, I will see you tonite when we can spend time together so don't miss me and I won't miss you, but I do and she does. And so with God, I know it sounds odd to say so, but when I neglect prayer or Him, I miss Him and in whatever theological way it is possible, I believe He misses me. And much as I share my life and what is happening with Carmen so I want Him to share and be part of my life here. Even if there is no heaven, I am the richer for having known and loved Him and being loved by Him. I am scared of dying because as I have said before I battle in my faith with believing in heaven on an emotional level. But even so, my life has been full of love because I have and am loved by Him and I received that faith and the ability to know His love, in the first instance from the first humans that loved me, my mom and dad and it is the first and greatest gift that a child can receive. I once told my dad that Kirstin also knew that love from them and that she knows it still. But in large part, I was talking about my own experience of their love for me and my siblings that is in its own way an extension of the sacramental Divine love with which Christian marriage is infused. My wife was blessed with similar parents and we know the responsibility that we now share to honour that gift if and when we are gifted with children of our own:
So, fall asleep love, loved by me....for I know love, I am loved by thee. (Robert Browning)

Sacred and Profane

One of my hobby horses is the otherness of God and how important I believe it is to 'bump' into Him sometimes. Because I work in such a meaningless job, where the only reward is money and I consequently get to eat, I have always mentally kept the rest of my life quite separately compartmentalised in my mind from it. I realise that this is of course, not the way it is supposed to be.

Yesterday, I was at a client and as I was ratcheting the straps to secure a machine to the trailer in the deserted loading area with all the industrial plant equipment around me, I glanced across into the big warehouse a little distance away from me with its large roller doors. I could see the inside of the roof, and it was one of those industrial corrugated steel roofs that is interspersed with clear polycarbonate strips like skylights to let in natural light. I then raised my gaze and right above the roof was the clear, blue, wide open morning sky. What a contrast! The warehouse was not badly lit, but looked positively dingy compared to the sky above. For the first time in my life, I really felt that there may be some sort of connection between my normal drudgery and the happiness and peace I feel when I am away from work and contemplating God. This is an obvious and most basic Christian principle - that we are not supposed to live dualistic lives, but for so long, I really have known no other way. I have always rationalised that it was the only way I could cope with the meaningless futility of my daily work without going insane.

I believe that this simple experience was a nudge from God for me to open the skylights of my life - or rip the roof off and let God's grace not only help me to cope, but transform my work, or my understanding of it, as a way to serve Him. I realised in retrospect, that He prepared me for this moment a few weeks ago, when I came across some statistics, where I discovered that the second highest cause of accidental death after motor vehicle accidents was from slip and fall accidents -a problem which our machinery directly addresses. I suppose if nothing else, perhaps if a father gets to return safely home to his family or a young single mother working in a factory returns safely to her waiting baby and isn't paralysed from an accident because of my job, it has, if not given me a sense of meaning, at least helped someone. As the Caterpillar equipment slogan goes: Safely home. Every one. Every day.

It is as if God needs me to learn this lesson and He was determined that I learn it, because if I ever end up in some sort of full time ministry one day, it is something I will need to know, so that my spirituality is centred on and rooted in God, but grounded in reality and not a separate attachment or escape. It is not only beneficial and even imperative that in the 'ugliest' or most tedious parts of my life as well as the happiest and most joyful are integrated into my spirituality so that in Him I can truly 'live and move and have my being' (Acts 17:28), but nothing less than a call to authentic holiness.

I know this is no new great profound idea here - just me finally hearing what I should have a long time ago.

Organic untidiness

Today's date had no particular significance, but Kirstin's memory was so strong and I felt the grief so acutely that I wondered briefly if I would be overwhelmed by it. I don't know if it is ironic or a contradiction or whatever, but although I have never seriously doubted the existence of God, I have often battled with faith in the afterlife for myself. You could argue I suppose that the possibility of doubt is a necesssary element for the existence of faith... I don't know?

When I was down in Canberra, I wondered what my uneasiness at the city was and perhaps on one level, the city was too perfect, too ordered and thereby not beautiful. Canberra is a planned city. Planned by human beings and ordered to a tee, but it somehow lacks the beauty of a Cape Town or a Sydney. Man's constructs are always somehow poor imitations of God's. So a neat patio shade is cooler than the direct sun, but not as cool as the shade of the 'messy' tree with its random leaves that allow for a breeze. While we try in our vanity to construct a perfect social world that tolerates and promotes all evils in the name of human freedom, we end up with a legal system that teaches tolerance of and independance from each other. It is a system that seperates us by destroying our accountability to each other and thereby undermines the morality that connects us. It promotes indifference to the actions of the other and contradicts the very foundation of love which is care for the other. Legislation is a poor substitute for morality. When our spirit / soul, however you choose to define it, recognises a pattern that underlies a seemingly unrelated conflagaration, it is that, that suddenly resonates within us. Art, like creation, may be deliberate and ordered when it is being created, but the order is intrinsic not extrinsic and its very nature that defies intellectual / quantification or description, somehow communicates meaningfully and deeply with our humanity. Even though our life experience and backgrounds may be completely different, this is testament to our shared human nature. The randomness and spontanaiety within which beauty is most often found, is an unexpected that delights the soul. It is the difference between contrived intellectual constructs and Creation. The one reveals nothing about either the builder or the observer. The second reveals both the Creator and the one who encounters Him.

Indifference or hate vs love?

Amidst our search for a parish to settle down for the next year, Carmen and I are trying to balance our need for spiritual care and nourishment with the desire to minister in some way and join the parish that we could most be of benefit to. Apart from that little 'admin'task, I am struck by how Godless this place seems to be. Not evil as I would view some parts of Europe. But Godless in their indifference. That theory to which I have always subscribed on an intellectual level: that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, will be tested for me here in reality. My gut reaction and this is only a knee jerk reaction, is that perhaps I was wrong. When people are indifferent, at least they can be won over by an event / example of a person's life that shows them or puts into relief the emptiness of their lives. Whereaas hatred on the other hand, creates a wall or more accurately blinds people to truth and hardens the heart. I don't know? It seems such a huge effort is needed to first break down that wall before inner conversion can begin. I don't know if I can choose yet which is the lesser of 2 evils? I only know that God's presence seems to burn more starkly in relief against evil than negelectful indifference. Indifference somehow seems more hopeless in its 'passionlessness.' Not sure?

Preaching

Society today really does not like been reminded of when they are doing evil, like shipping off jobs to third world countries so that they can exploit them unseen to maximise profits, killing babies or old people. They say Christians, or the Church when they criticise these evil deeds and the evil people that do them are being judgemental. But it is the duty of the leadership of our Church to do so and our task as well in the exercise of our ministry even as laity and we share in the work entrusted to the ministerial priesthood and those entrusted to their care. Perhaps one of the the best models of this ministry that I have seen is in Psalm 50. I runs around 10 paragraphs and 8 of those lays out the necessary ongoing conversion and correct order of the Christian sinner's ministry and then in 2 paragraphs demonstrates that although this process is always ongoing, our own sinfulness as ministers should not paralyse us to confront the evil and evil doers in the world. This is because we are not presenting ourselves as the model for the way our world should be, but God. This imago Dei is fundamental to both the Old and New Testaments: We are called to love because we have been loved first. I think it is a beautiful and rich model for the priesthood, diaconate and even lay ministries. I have not included the whole psalm here, but the core verses to give the gist:

Have mercy on me, God in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offence.
O wash me more and more from my guilt
and cleanse me from my sin.

My offences truly I know them;
my sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone have I sinned;
what is evil in your sight I have done.

Indeed you love truth in the heart;
then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom.
O purify me then I shall be clean;
O wash me I shall be whiter then snow.

A pure heart create for me, O God,
put a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
nor deprive me of your holy spirit.

Give me again the joy of your help;
with a spirit of fervour sustain me,
that I may teach transgressors your ways
and sinners may return to you.

O rescue me, God my helper,
and my tongue shall ring out your goodness.
O lord, open my lips
and my mouth shall declare your praise.