On Sorry day

Sorry, we really are...

Sermon for Anzac at St Helen's Bishopsgate, London

It is said of Alan Bond, the famous 80s business tycoon, that, with his yacht Australia II trailing by three races to one in the final of the America’s Cup, he reminded his team of Gallipoli and then said: ‘We had our backs to the wall there and we won that one...’

Bond’s mistake is forgiveable: it is certainly strange that Australians and New Zealanders choose to celebrate a military disaster. But I think it is a happy oddity. Anzac Day is a great day for a war remembrance because we are reminded by it of the moral ambiguity and futility of war. We not tempted by the memory of April 25th 1915 to indulge in a sickening triumphalism; neither is it a day that brings old resentments bubbling to the surface. This day tells us that it is hard to make sense of war, because war itself is a grim absurdity.

The generation that lost its young men in the trenches recognised this. As the task of memorialising the dead began, the sheer horror of what had occurred evidently sank in. There were heroes, but not many. How do you honour the deaths of those who were evaporated by heavy explosives, or who drowned in the mud? What honour was there in dying that way, or of lying falling on a piece of ground that would be lost to the enemy in a few months?

And so, the one Bible verse that is most frequently found on war memorials and graves is the one from John’s gospel – a saying of Jesus himself: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’. This almost makes sense: it speaks of sacrifice for others in a way that isn’t saying something about dying for love of my country, or the empire, nor for love of some great principle or cause, whatever that might be. We modern people in our ignorance and inexperience of the real world are now more hesitant to accept that these things are worth dying for in the first place. But, to die for your friends? – It’s a thought that resonates with antipodeans, because we know what counts is your friends – your mates. But can those whose intent it was to kill others really be given credit for the greatest of all loves? That was their calling as soldiers, after all. Can applying this verse to the fallen give their deaths meaning, or redeem something for us from the absurdity of war? I confess that I feel more than a little disquiet when I read these words on a memorial of war.

Whether it can or no, the memorial makers at least knew where the template for loving sacrifice of a life was to be found. They knew, in a way that we have perhaps forgotten, that Jesus’ death on the cross was the sacrifice of love par excellence. Jesus dies ‘for his friends’ – in their place and for their benefit. He dies for his friends because they are threatened by great enemies – evil, sin and death – and helpless to battle them alone. These enemies are more fierce and more insidious than Turks, or Germans, or Viet Cong or the Taliban. They have us in their grasp and won’t release us.

He was not a conscript, but a willing volunteer. He left the safety and comfort of his Father’s throneroom and faced down the things that threaten us with with utter disintegration, seeking the reconciliation of human beings with their God. He himself suffered the indignity and apparent futility of a cruel and violent death, offering his own body as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind. Yet this was not meaningless suffering. This was the greatest of loves: it was selfless, painful and costly. But it was not pointless: it was a death that defeated death. Death and sin were outflanked by this divine man’s death.

War continues: and it stands as evidence of the spiritual darkness that still besets all of us despite our potential for noble and valorous action. We should remember on Anzac Day that the most glorious things human beings do are found next to the most obscene. Courage and inventiveness lie side by side with incompetence and bloodthirstiness. Remembrance of war should never be a comfortable thing, if we are to be honest. It should never be romanticised. As the generations of those who actually witnessed the two world wars passes on, we may be tempted to forget how awful war was for them; and to remember not the real Gallipoli, but the Gallipoli that Mel Gibson was at. It’s a temptation we would do well to resist.

When we pause at a war memorial, however, and read the text ‘Greater love has no-one than this’ we have reason to feel something else, too: gratitude. Gratitude to those who served and died to protect others certainly, whatever we feel about war itself. But, moreso, we be can thankful to Jesus Christ who died to set us free from sin, evil and death: all the components that go to make up a war. The death of the soldier may or may not have been in vain; it certainly did not bring an end to hostility between human beings. But by using this verse, even wrongly, the survivors are bearing testimony both to the inescapable power of the evil which brings us down and also to a death which did make a real difference. The death of Jesus Christ signals the end of enmity – between God and humankind, and between human beings themselves. There is the possibility for us now, in accepting his offer of friendship, of experiencing for ourselves the greatest of loves – an offer we have only to receive.

“That inscrutable object of adulation”

A lecture I once gave... [the title comes from an essay by RS White “Don Bradman: That Inscrutable Object of Adulation” Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. Bruce Bennett and Dennis Haskell (Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, Nedlands, 1992), pp. 193 - 200.]


'Every culture throws up its heroes: figures that take on iconic status for the culture and in some way embody the dreams and aspirations of the culture. In Australia we have several: Ned Kelly, Simpson and his donkey, Breaker Morant, Gough Whitlam, Dawn Fraser and others. Study of these figures is a short-hand way of analysing a culture. But that doesn't mean it is a simple matter...

And so I have chosen to give an hour to thinking about Don Bradman: partly at least because of my own passion for cricket and the availability of resources about him; but mostly because he is a remarkable figure, a person so dominant in his field that his achievements seem almost superhuman.

And yet Bradman remains an enigmatic figure: an idol of Australians who yet remained somewhat aloof; a tall poppy who managed himself with modesty; a man who to the end replied to hundreds of fan letters and yet was almost reclusive. It striking that Australians should so revere a man in so many ways unlike them. Why, we dare to ask? And what does Bradman symbolise for Australians?

The history of Australia as a unified entity is comparatively brief. Though to us it seems as if states rights are a fairly insignificant matter, in the nineteenth century the states could not even agree on a common railway gauge. While the various football codes and other sports were regionally aligned, cricket evolved as a uniquely national sport in a federated Australia. To this day, no other national sport captures the imagination of the nation in quite the same way; no other sport is so central to our cultural self-identity. Only swimming perhaps is a rival.
Cricket was first played in Australia in December 1803 by the officers of the ship Calcutta. Australian natives quickly took to the sport and were aided in the spread and growth of the game by the waves of fresh immigrants arriving from cricketing England. Cricket was a suitable game for our climate; and it finds a place in both rural and urban settings quite comfortably.
The first test match was played in Melbourne between Australia and England, before Australia had even become a nation. Much to everybody’s surprise, Australia won by 45 runs. Finally, the young upstart nation had found a way to compete against the home country: a way to shine in international company and particularly to gain the notice of the Home Country.

The Boy from Bowral
Donald George Bradman was born in Cootamundra in August 1908. He was the son of carpenter. In 1911 the family moved to Bowral, where the young Don grew up in a cricketing environment. As a young boy he entertained himself at home by hitting a golf ball against a cylindrical corrugated iron water tank. With this tricky game he honed his hand-eye co-ordination. In 1950 he wrote “I can understand how it must have developed the co-ordination of brain, eye and muscle which was to serve me so well in important matches later on.”
He does not ever seem to have been particularly religious, though he sang as a youngster in the church choir at Bowral...

The Bodyline Series
...
Bodyline was a watershed: here was a genuine cause for indignation against the colonial power. Australians revered the English and felt very much part of the British Empire: and yet the values that they felt essential to that Empire, embodied in the game of cricket, were here being treated with cynicism and contempt by the honoured representatives of England herself. The myth of glorious mother England was exposed as a fallacy; just as it would more seriously in the Second World War. And secretly perhaps Australians felt proud: proud that our Don Bradman was so good that the English had to sell out their values to try and defeat him.

The Invincibles
We pass over the great swathe of Bradman’s career that ran from 1933 to 1947, including the war years when no cricket was played and when Bradman’s health took a turn for the worse. It was in 1948 that he returned to England for the fourth and last time as a player and now as captain.

The tour was long anticipated: though the clouds of war had lifted, the English were still suffering the deprivations of food rationing and the various other effects of an arduous struggle. Bradman led an all-star Australian line-up unsurpassed for sheer all-round talent and maturity until perhaps the present day. The team remains the only team of any nation to have gone through England without losing a single game. Against Essex they were able to score 721 in a single day. And they won the tests 4 to nil.

Bradman’s last test was to be at the Oval in London. As walked to the wicket he was not aware that if he scored just four more runs he would be able to boast a test average of 100 (the next nearest player in the low 60s). The Englishman gave him three cheers. Then he settled over the bat. The bowler was Eric Hollies, a leg spinner from Warwickshire. The first ball Bradman played carefully. The second ball turned the other way, deceived Bradman and crashed in to the stumps. He had been bowled for a duck, and so his average remained at an incredible 99.94. Though he was so extraordinarily dominant in the game over twenty years, his last innings was a reminder that even Bradman was mortal.

So what do we make of this amazing figure in Australian social history? Bradman was no larrikin, no show pony – unlike many of our other sporting heroes. The Bradman museum website offers this conclusion:
Don Bradman has offered all Australians the same silver-lined story. The hope to achieve great heights from humble beginnings.



This is too simplistic in my view. The Bradman myth is far more complex.
He was a private, modest and direct man who was undemonstrative and reserved. He was not a drinker and enjoyed playing the piano to relax. He was not a womaniser or a gambler. In fact, he caused some dissension in the ranks of his team-mates because he was not seen to relish carousing.

Perhaps his quite reservation was in fact a reminder of what a previous generation actually admired in a person: a steely resolve and a self-discipline, a resourcefulness and a dedication that was needed to survive in the midst of the Great Depression. He was not flashy or flighty: he was just very very good at batting.


Since his death in 2001, Bradman’s character has come under more scrutiny. Suggestions of some ruthlessness in his business dealings in South Australia as a stockbroker have been aired; also Bradman’s parsimony and conservatism as a cricket administrator has been criticised by a younger generation of players, now themselves esteemed commentators (Ian Chappell being chief among them).


Certainly it mattered as it always has that England be the vanquished. Bradman perhaps best represented our belief in ourselves as a new nation ready to throw off the shackles of colonial influence and go it alone with sheer resourcefulness, native talent and iron determination. The friendly environment of sport was a lot less awkward than a war of independence. But there was still something of the cheeky little brother in Australian's love of sticking it to the Poms. Perhaps, as Australia passes from adolesence into adulthood as a nation, figures like Bradman will seem less important.

Sorry. We really are...

Today a whole nation repented. I found this incredibly moving.

Here's the wording:

That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
We reflect on their past mistreatment.
We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.
We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.
And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.
For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.
We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.
A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.
A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.
A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.
A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.
A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

That's pretty good for Australia I think: a nation at times very much an adolescent among nations. It's pretty articulate, too.

But to hear a Prime Minister say the word 'sorry' in the House: wow.

Christian music for kids and the sovereignty of God

For one of my kids, the music of that great Aussie Christian entertainer Colin Buchanan has really started to catch on. And it is great stuff. We call it 'Calvinism for Kids!'

However, I notice that in the album I have anyhow ('Remember the Lord') he overwhelmingly emphasises the Sovereignty of God. So: 'My God is So Big'; 'Nothing Takes God By Surprise'; 'Old Black Crow' (about providence); 'And God Said'.

We are more than half way through the album before Jesus and the Gospel get a mention ('We all like sheep have gone astray'). But the direction of the theology is from God's sovereignty to God's grace: whereas, I would have thought to go the way around. We know of God's sovereignty, and his power in creation and his providential care from the cross outwards...

The possible problem of starting with Sovereignty is (and it is an old problem for some Calvinism): a tendency to make God seem remote and inscrutable, so that the statements about the love of God seem to strike a jarring note. Colin's terrific doctrine of creation means that he points to creation as evidence of God's power, but he tends to just assert God's love rather than give evidence of it in the same way. It's there, but it comes down the list.

Thoughts? Anyone else noticed?

NOTE: I think Colin is a special gift of God to Australian Christians and want it to be understood that I 100% support his work and I have purchased and play lots of his CDs. And will continue to do so.

Transportation as punishment

On 13th May 1787 11 ships loaded to the gunwales with a human cargo set sail from Portsmouth for Botany Bay, in the land of New South Wales discovered by Captain James Cook some seventeen years previously. The 1420 souls aboard – somewhat more than that arrived at the other end – were to begin a colony in the form of a prison under the governorship of Captain Arthur Phillip – a colony built by forced labour at the barrel of the gun and at the crack of the cat o’ nine tails. Their journey must have been as terrifying in prospect as it was remarkable in completion. What could a poorly educated horse thief or pickpocket have imagined lay before him across the sea?

Transportation provides a fascinating case study in the history and methods of criminal punishment. Its need arose out of changing social conditions in England in the 18th century – the increasing urbanisation and population growth in Britain owing to the industrial revolution resulted in a terrific displacement of persons and, naturally, in an increase in crimes against property in particular. Whereas localised crimes of a relatively minor nature could have been dealt with by temporary and economic measures such as the stocks in rural districts, the rapid growth of the anonymous city meant that the means of administering punishments in this way was far less manageable. A village miscreant could have been quickly isolated, condemned and shamed by a community familiar to him or her. In the streets of London, it was easier to slip in and out of the crowd unnoticed.

Transportation was not a new punishment in 1787. But Cook’s discovery of an apparently empty and vast island at the other end of the globe made it a more attractive solution to the perennial problem of punishment. Transportation was, it was argued, more humane than the noose. The prisons of the day were notoriously overcrowded and disease-ridden; and in fact the government had resorted to putting its prisoners in prison-hulks moored on the Thames. More space was needed in the jails. What is more transportation was a means of excreting the waste matter from the body of society for its general health: the community stood only to benefit from the disposal of its more annoying and troublesome members. This was opportunity to lance the boil. It had its deterrent effect, too: New South Wales was to the eighteenth century mind surely further away than the moon is to ours – it was a terrifying prospect. And, it could also be argued, transportation was a great opportunity for the rehabilitation of the convict: if he survived the journey and the beatings and did not starve and served out his seven- or fourteen-year sentence he could find himself presented with all the opportunities of a new life in a new country.

Everard Digges La Touche

My predecessor as a lecturer at Moore College, Everard Digges La Touche, Church of Ireland clergyman and author of a brilliant work of Christology, saw WWI as a holy war against German liberal Protestantism. He joined up to fight against it...

The report of his service is here. I quote an excerpt from it:

"At the outbreak of war in 1914, he tried first to join as a chaplain, then in the ranks of the 2nd. Battalion, Australian Inf. In November 1914, he was rejected because of his severe varicose veins, so he immediately went away and had an operation. This meant that he was too late to join the 2nd. Battalion, but as soon as he was well he joined the 13th and rose to Sergeant. You might wonder why this clergyman, who was not in A1 physical condition, and with the responsibility of his wife, Eve, and two young sons, was prepared to go off and fight, but one of his men summed him up, saying "he convinced us of the righteousness of our cause and likened this present struggle for liberty to a Holy Crusade, so when we finally sang "Onward Christian Soldiers", we meant it".

He was commissioned as a 2nd. Lt. in the 2nd. Battalion when an officer was needed to take reinforcements from Alexandria to Gallipoli, for the August attack. On the morning of the 6th, August 1915, he landed his men at Anzac Cove. As a Reinforcement Officer he could then have chosen to go back to Alexandria, but the official historian says that he begged leave to join the attack at Lone Pine. At 5.30, he went over the parapet with the first rush, only to fall, mortally wounded within a few seconds. He managed to roll down the slope of the spur and crawl back into the Australian lines, dying "among his own people" as Charles Bean the Australian war historian described it.”

They don't make 'em like they used to!

Helen Garner – Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

[For non-Australian readers: Helen Garner is one the best contemporary Australian writers.]

Joe Cinque is dead.

It was his girlfriend, Anu Singh, a pretty and bright law student at ANU who injected him first with Rohypnol (the “date-rape” drug) and then an overdose of heroin; and did nothing during the several hours it took him to die. Her confused and desperate call to the ambulance was too little, too late.

It was a bizarre killing: made even more so by the revelations that Singh had held a dinner party in the days before at which she had made no secret of her intent to carry out a murder-suicide. But then, our newspapers are full of bizarre killings. So what drove Helen Garner to write about this case?

Garner can’t quite explain it. As she tells it, she happened across the story at a moment of personal crisis for her:

… I had recently been forced to acknowledge that I was a woman at the end of my tether. I was fifty-five. My third marriage had just collapsed in a welter of desolation. I was living alone in Sydney, in a rented flat, on the fifth floor of a building on the top of a hill. I had no job, and lacked the heart to look for one. I knew I had to get out of my own head, to find some work to do. (p.13)

Garner admits that her interest in the crime was at least at first because she wanted to look at a woman tried with murder. Feeling pain, anger and humiliation, she wanted to know “if anything made them different from me”. (p.25) There is no illusion of mere objectivity in Garner’s non-fiction: that of an absent, disinterested observer. Garner is as much a character in the narrative as Anu Singh and Joe Cinque’s mother. And it is the rawness of Garner’s hurt spirit that gives her the ability to record so sensitively the pain, bewilderment and grief of others.

The narrative of the book begins in the court case against Anu Singh. Garner is able to reflect on her own petty snap judgments and bitchiness as she finds herself intuitively disliking Anu Singh. But her intuitions haven’t let her down: though she is unable to interview the young woman and her accomplice, she speaks to acquaintances, to her father and combs over the court documents.
Singh does not come over well (unsurprisingly): she is obsessive and manipulative, on Garner’s account; she shirks the responsibility of her actions by pleading psychiatric illness. Her father, a Dr Singh, appears likewise appallingly self-centred and greedy, oblivious to the real pain in Cinque’s family. Under cross-examination Dr Singh, asked about his religious beliefs and those of his daughter, replies “She is too young to have any beliefs.” (p.29) The reader is left to infer that such beliefs may have saved Anu from herself. The psychiatric evidence seems unable to explain the “simple wickedness” at the heart of the story.

Garner finds herself dismayed by the short sentence handed out to Singh. And so the focus of her story turns to Joe’s mother, Maria. Striking up a real friendship with Maria and her family, she finds that justice system as not mollified their grief and anger. Through these interviews, Garner finds her self compelled to keep on with the project of the book because something remains deeply unsatisfied and unsatisfying in the story. Joe Cinque’s blood is, we might say, crying out from the ground.

Towards the end of the book, Garner seeks out the judge in the case, Justice Ken Crispin. This is a telling conversation. Crispin, an active Christian, is convincing in word and person, and does not resile from the moral difficulties of the case. He admits that Madhavi Rao, Singh’s friend, failed in her duty of care to Joe Cinque – knowing what was happening but doing little to intervene - but that the law does not make this criminal.

But deep questions remain. As Garner puts it:

I listened to him without arguing. But I was thinking, Where does all the woundedness, the hatred go? What becomes of the desire for vengeance, for a settling of the score? (p.318)

But though she suspects how the Christian Crispin might answer - that this is the province of the Almighty – she holds the question back because “we weren’t in a church. We were in the Supreme Court, the temple of reason.” (p.320) I think this was a pity: while I respect Helen Garner’s amazing courage in her quest, I think that this bracketing of religious discussion out of the public forum leaves a vacuum that Garner struggles to fill. I suspect that she herself knows this.

What she discovers is that human justice struggles at the point of atonement. As Justice Crispin says, very rarely in the sentencing process is satisfaction achieved. So we cry out again and again with Garner, where does it go? Where, O God, does it go?

At the sentencing of Anu Singh, Joe Cinque’s parents had made a speech to the waiting media in front of the court saying that they hoped that somebody would kill one of the judge’s children so that he would understand. What they didn’t know at this stage is that this judge had indeed lost a child. He knew something of their griefs; he was not unlike them in their suffering.
In the end, Garner offers the book to the Cinque’s as their “consolation” – a word evoking the momentous declaration of Isaiah 40:1. And what is their consolation? The book remembers Joe, and defends him. In the end Anu Singh and her calamitous behaviour fade: and what Garner leaves us with is a celebration of the life of this ordinary, dearly loved boy.

A picture of Sydney every day

This is a lovely site for the homesick!

Samuel Marsden - The Flogging Parson

I have long desired to explain to my non-Australian readers the derivation of the name 'The Blogging Parson'. Byron Smith suggested it to me first in an off-hand comment, and I just couldn't resist it as a blog-name.

It recalls the Rev Samuel Marsden, the second Chaplain to the colony of New South Wales, who has gone down in history as 'The Flogging Parson'. He acted as magistrate as well as Chaplain: and, according to the Irish (and Catholic) convicts, he inflicted more severe punishments on the misbehaving convicts than even other magistrates in the colony. He was not a popular figure - regarded as intolerant and argumentative even by his peers. The mythology of Marsden the monster was given further impetus by Australia's most famous (and now notorious) historian, Manning Clark, a child of the manse himself and an atheist. Clark's personal resentment of Christianity fairly oozes from his pages...

Of course, the truth is more complicated: in amongst this undoubted severity was also a great love for humankind and desire to see the gospel of grace preached. His life was in fact marked by many remarkable good works as well as the flaws. A Yorkshireman by birth, Marsden arrived in the colony in 1794 with his wife Elisabeth and their newborn daughter. He had had an early association with William Wilberforce, the anti-slave reformer. He was an extremely able - and eventually wealthy - man, and succeeded in shipping wool from Australia to England, and was reputedly the first to introduce sheep to NZ. But more importantly, he was also the first to bring the gospel to NZ, largely at his own expense. He was particularly fond of the Maori people. Interestingly he is remembered far more fondly in NZ than in Australia, where his name is used for schools and streets. You would never see that in Australia.

Let's not excuse the flaws: though I would have to say that it should be remembered that the colony of NSW was a prison camp in an alien environment, and that fear of convict mutiny must have been a daily companion, especially when the Irish rebels - ideological prisoners and not just petty thieves like the others - were sent in large numbers. But his determination to witness for Christ to the end of the earth - literally! - ought to be remembered and honoured, too.

Is Shakespeare an Australian Author?

I had a lovely and lively discussion about this with an English English student who wanted to defend his nation's proprietorial rights to the bard. Surely geographical location counts for something, he said; surely he is more English than anything else?

But as an Australian, my culture and language are unthinkable without Billy the Shake. My education was saturated with Shakespeare; his influence was tremendous on the politics and culture of my country. After all, nations are not places, but ideas. We have every right - even a duty - to study him as one of our own. Shakespeare, we might say, came out on the First Fleet.

I think Shakespeare is more Australian than French: though he knew the French and the Italians, and no doubt he has had enormous influence there and even in Russia. But something is carried in the language itself that means it is not even deliberate for us to own him. He is part of our cultural DNA.

Of course, putting the boot on the other foot, we might say that the England that was Shakespeare's - the 'sceptred isle' - is no more, and has not been for centuries. That notion has long gone. He was not English as we think of English now...

Les Murray's Collected Poems

[Yes, English readers: there are Australian poets who write about subjects other than sport...]

It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)

I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.

I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.

…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)

When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)

He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:

In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment

With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)

This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).

Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:

Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)

He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."

It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:

Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)

Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.

Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:

In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)

Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).

There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.

Brief Sydney Lives

OK, sorry to alienate my non-OZ readers (again), but here's an idea for a book I will never write (another one).

Its title is Brief Sydney Lives. It follows in the tradition of a book from the 17th century called Aubrey's Brief Lives. The idea is to write a brief - 500 words - pen portrait of the colourful characters from Sydney's history; and to write them with extreme prejudice and a great deal of wit and zest. The selections are to be eccentric, the writing one-eyed and biased. That is to say, this is not wikipedia we are writing now!

Who would qualify? Well, the key thing is they have to be a SYDNEY person. So, former PM Gough Whitlam in my opinion would not qualify, because his chief impact was on a national level. Likewise, Don Bradman, our most famous cricketer, who spent most of his career in South Australia would not qualify. But Victor Trumper would...

So would:

Roger Rogerson
Bea Miles
Arthur Stace
John Macarthur
Elizabeth Macarthur
William Bligh
Patrick White
Brett Whiteley
Harry Seidler
Michael Hutchence
Geoffrey Edelsten
Kerry Packer
Bob Gould
Samuel Marsden
Sallie-Ann Huckstepp
Robert Askin

Who else?

Martyr of the Month - Charles Godden

I cite the following from a Moore Theological College newsletter.
Recently, the Sydney Synod (rather gracelessly in my view) refused an opportunity to recognise Godden as a martyr on the grounds that he was not called upon to give up his faith!


OUR FORGOTTEN MARTYR
Remembering the death of Charles Christopher Godden
BY JOHN HARRIS
On 16th October, 1906, on a lonely jungle track high on the slopes of the brooding
volcano that is the island of Ambae, Charles Godden met his violent death, Moore
College’s first and only Martyr.

An orphaned country boy, Charles was converted at confirmation classes in Euroa,
Victoria. He immediately offered for the ministry. At 19, he entered Perry Hall,
Nathaniel Jones’s little college in Bendigo. In 1897, when Jones was appointed
Principal of Moore College, he brought Charles with him. He was ordained by the
Archbishop of Sydney in 1899 and appointed to St Michael’s Surry Hills.

A year later, the Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, spoke at St Michael’s of islanders
‘crying out for someone to teach them the gospel’. Charles instantly offered for
missionary service. He wrote prophetically, ‘There have already been six martyrs … I
shall therefore have the opportunity of glorifying God by my devotedness to the lost
sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking.’

After training on Norfolk Island, he was appointed to Ambae, part of the New
Hebrides but now the independent nation of Vanuatu. He reached the isolated little
Lolowai mission on the coast in April 1901 during the last days of ‘blackbirding’, the
infamous Queensland labour trade. Just 24 years old, he was the only missionary,
visiting coastal people by boat and venturing inland to jungle villages. He gained a
reputation for his enthusiasm for teaching the Bible, his medical skill, his efforts to
begin schooling for children and his devotion to the discipling of new converts.
In December 1905, Charles returned to marry Eva Dearin at St Michael’s Surry Hills.
His best man was David Knox, Broughton Knox’s father. Charles spent some of his
leave drafting an Ambae translation of Mark’s Gospel. In April 1906, the couple
arrived at Lolowai mission amidst a crowd of islanders with welcoming flowers.
In October a Christian family from a jungle village asked him to come to baptise new
converts. Lolowai people warned him not to go. Alameamea, a ‘blackbirded’ labourer
returned after being jailed and tortured in Queensland, had threatened to kill the first
white man to tread on his land. Charles, however, considered it his duty. He left
Lolowai on Monday 15th October, travelling down the coast by boat and walking up
steep jungle tracks.

After the baptisms, while walking back down, Alameamea shot him with a musket.
His companions fled. He fell to the ground and his assailant rushed out, striking him
in the neck with an axe. His friends returned, tearing up clothes to bind his wounds.
Carrying him down the mountain, they rowed him home along the coast. Just as
they reached Lolowai, Charles died of his wounds. His final words were: ‘Let there
be no fighting because of me. Let there be peace.’

His grave is at Lolowai. A stone cross in the jungle marks the place of his
martyrdom. A simple monument at a little church high up the volcano contains the
stones on which his blood fell. He has two memorials in Australia, one in St John’s
Euroa and another in the Moore College Chapel.

He was the first Australian missionary to die in Melanesia and one of the first
evangelicals to be martyred as a missionary anywhere in the world.

Now, bring on the Urn

Well it is vitally important that I post my analysis of the upcoming Ashes series in Australia. I have had a good look at some of the English team and so I feel uniquely placed. I have copped English smugness for too long!

This English team is very strong because they major on important things, like batting and fast bowling. Most of the batsmen are in form and know the way to three figures. Kevin Peterson could on any given day do anything: he is like Gilchrist in this regard. Because he is attacking, he can change a game really quickly. Strauss is very consistent and tough to get out. Alastair Cook makes a solid number three (though he may open if Trescothick doesn't get his head back together). Collingwood is solid and even Bell has scored runs - though I think he is the new Darrell Cullinan when it comes to Shane Warne.

In the bowling, Hoggard, Harmison and Flintoff have some real meanness and consistency about them - though I don't think they will find the reverse swing they got in England. And now they have Panesar, who is a left arm bowler who can take wickets (unlike the world's most boring bowler Ashley Giles - what were they thinking by making him a test player?). Panesar is also fun to watch. They have dropped Geraint Jones which was a great move for the team because now at least some catches will go in.

When they lost this year against Sri Lanka, and failed to beat Pakistan on a couple of occassions, it was because they got spooked by top class spin and dropped heaps of catches. And their fast bowlers seemed to lose interest, or the support bowlers bowled rubbish. The biggest problem of course for England is injuries. If Flintoff plays more than three tests I will eat my hat. Seriously. He is a great player, but they squander him on one day cricket and other money spinners, and he eventually breaks down. Sure as eggs. Likewise if Harmison goes the whole season I will be very surprised.

The Aussie problem will be picking the right team. McGrath is a concern: a champ of old, but is he really the same as he was? He is my age, for heaven's sake! Can Gilchrist get his batting mojo back? Will Hayden look like he is in good need of a counselling session again? Will Langer get injured in a bizarre way? Will Lee give away six runs an over for the whole season? Will they be strong enough not to pick Michael Clarke just because he is a glamour boy? The Aussie selection process was too rigid and sentimental and not based on form- - exposed in the last Ashes.

It could come down to catching you know: I notice both teams have been butter-fingered of late. England can make even Sri Lanka look good by dropping easy catches.

So: Aussies to win, 2-1. The English'll win in Melbourne, as they always do, and they have a chance in Perth. But the Australians will take Brisbane. Adelaide will be a draw as always. Sydney to the Australians.

I'd love to hear your predictions!

Constantinianism, anyone?

Oliver O'Donovan is often accused of 'Constantinianism', especially by the likes of Stanley Hauerwas and his followers. In fact, at a recent conference I am lead to believe that this accusation was given quite an airing - though not in his presence! What I think they mean is that he does see some positive place for state-craft, and a requirement for the church to be at least attuned to it, or in conversation with it, especially when providence delivers a repentant 'king'. What were the Christians supposed to do come the Edict of Milan 315 AD? Say to Constantine, 'thanks, but no thanks'? Does the church really insist that the state return to its former persecuting ways and undo its gesture of repentance? I suppose it is easier to live with a hostile state because we all know where we stand!

Of course, the Constantinian arrangement has produced some rather rotten fruit: medieval papalism on the one hand, and Erastianism on the other. One makes the church into a (parallel?) secular power (the pope having armies for example) to which kings must give allegiance; the other makes the church merely the puppet of the state (as with the German Christians in the 1930s). Strangely, in both cases there is an exchange of evangelical authority for the instruments of earthly rule. In the case of papalism, a misapplication of the doctrine of the keys from Matthew 16 is brought forward: 'binding' and 'loosing' become acts of judgment and punishment in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities. The context of Peter's declaration of Jesus as Messiah is eclipsed...

Today in the West (at least in the US and Australia - Christians in the UK seem politically toothless) a resurgence in the political power on offer to Christian groups appears as a temptation for them to forget their primary task of preaching the gospel and instead pursue what are actually secular ends by secular means. The terrible danger is that we think we are building the kingdom of heaven by engineering a 'Christian' government. But that does not necessarily mean that the repentant politician or the political party which wants to know what Christians would like to see should be left swinging in the wind.

Martyrdom, as ever, provides an interesting point of divergence between the two views. O'Donovan sees martyrdom as a possibility latent in the Christian experience but at times not a necessary path to pursue, when the ruler appears to be genuine in his/her desire to submit to the authority of God. Hauerwas would ask at this point 'why isn't anybody killing us?' and seek to emphasis the points of divergence to such a degree as to produce a violent reaction against the church... While I am attracted to Hauerwas' radicalism, I am also disturbed by it!

If Christian schools were really Christian, would anyone want to send their kids there?

I have been asked to write an article about the 'values' education debate in Australia and other Western countries.

It seems, conservative minded liberal politicians are looking enviously over the school railings at Christian/church schools and their popularity/success and wondering why it is that it is so hard to replicate in a state-run system. Left-wing liberals of course jump to the defence of the secular schools by saying, 'no, they do teach a set of common values: tolerance for example. And, um, tolerance. And compassion, perhaps.'

Two observations: the first is that the conservatives have sensed rightly that a secular vision of the state which tries its utmost for the neutrality of all public spaces is unlike to be able to find a vision of the good that can sustain a coherent education system. However: it is pretty hypocritical of them to be harping on this, since it was the economic rationalist version of liberalism that tended to promote a greed is good ethos in any case. If 'values' have disappeared, can conservative liberals really blame radical liberals?

But on the other side (second), the left has it right, too - at least they acknowledge that no neutrality is really possible. So, secular liberalism has to find a persuasive vision of the good to go with its vision of the right. However, they are always going to struggle to do this, since the crucial component of their whole understanding of human life is personal liberty from another's vision of the good.

All the while, the state seems to be looking at the church's schools and saying 'I'll have what they're having' - it seems that we know how to train children to become the members of society that others want to become.

But this is a moment of great danger for the churches and their schools. Because we will always have to ask (and I fear we don't have the courage to) - are our 'values' really Christian, or are they just blandly middle class? Are we just perpetuating the idea that Christian discipleship = a fairly acquisitive politically quiet and socially invisible suburban lifestyle? Are we enjoying providing our culture with exactly what it wants as a market and not actually promoting Christian discipleship?

If Christian schools were really Christian, would anyone (other than Christians) want to send their kids there? I think we should at least ask that question!

Is Australia a Christian Society?

TS Eliot wrote this rather odd book (did he write any other kind?) called 'The Idea of A Christian Society' just before WWII. He saw that English society could choose to become entirely secular (which it has) or actually try to become a 'Christian' society in some way. He meant this in that the society's faith would shape its rhythms of daily, weekly and annual life and its laws and its practices. Sunday rest, for example, would probably be evidence of a 'Christian' society...

The thesis of the book has added and surprising relevance given the current challenge of Islamic theocracy.

In Australia things are of course different. In one sense we have always been secular in psyche. In another sense, you could say that our secularism is a very Christianised secularism, and that the 'mainstream' churches still have a greater hold than they do in Canada, Europe and Britain and even the US. What ever vision of the good remains in Oz in any unified sense is a baptised one. It is the prodigal child of a Christian one. "Compassion" for example, a commonly cited virtue by secular Australians - yet I heard Prof Edwin Judge once argue that compassion was unthinkable without Christianity. Compassion, generosity, forbearance and humility have been taught to us from Christian sources.

The ongoing popularity of faith schools is intriguing too: there is a general recognition from the general public that you can't educate merely out of a sense of 'right' only - you must have some sense of the good, and the neutral secular space can't offer it without becoming what it can't be. Secularism cannot deliver a compelling vision of the good that we are happy to hand on to our children.... [This despite the terrible memories that many people seem to have of Church education!]

Which doesn't really answer the question - but suggests that Australia is still only a generation away from the Christian society it may have once been.

Ashes to ashes...

Well, we face the unhappy prospect of arriving in the UK the day after Australia loses the Ashes for the first time in 17 years... or to face the massive disappointment of the Poms if they don't win... oh well.

I am reading: NT Wright's book on Scripture. It is very good indeed: because he recognises that theology and biblical studies need to be friends. So little theology is done with any bible in view at all. That's one of the reasons I am going to work with Oliver O'Donovan, because he conspicuously DOES use the Scriptures in doing theology. I guess the trouble is, that using the bible in theology involves being a non-specialist somewhere. I'll admit it, my Hebrew ain't great... Collaboration is perhaps the answer.

A paper for the NSW Ecumenical Council Theological Reflection Panel:

PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View
by Rev M.P. Jensen

One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.
Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.
Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read. (I was however intrigued to see that the new IPOD technology is being used by church members to listen to recordings of weekly messages downloaded from the church’s website.)
I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”
But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.
All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his recent book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.
However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:
23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim (katagge,llw) to you.
These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.
In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)
God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim (evxaggei,lhte) the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.
The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that
the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. (The Book of Homilies)
At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.
The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)