"It's your turn now!"

A few years ago, I went to an art exhibition at the Ian Potter centre. The artist made all this art out of bits and pieces of stuff – pieces of corrugated iron that were on her farm, old road signs she had cut up and rearranged. 

The best thing about the exhibition was the feeling it elicited in me: a wave of inspiration that said, “Wow – I could do that!” Not in the sense of replicating what she had done, or a cynical, “Well that looked easy enough.” It was simultaneous admiration, coupled with a kind of creative nudge. The artwork said to me, “Go on – it’s your turn now!”

Lately I’ve had the same experience. I’ve felt a kind of creative inspiration – and not from going to an art gallery, or even seeing a musical performance. This ‘creative nudge’ has come from the life of Peter – my incredible brother who died from cancer a month ago today.

As I wrote in my eulogy at Pete’s funeral, if Jenny and Forest Gump were like peas and carrots, Pete and I were like lentils and steak sandwiches. It is hard to imagine two so completely different people. Throughout childhood Pete and I fought like crazy, and the divergent paths we took as we grew up pointed further to how differently God had created us. Pete found his straps in plumbing, earthmoving and farming, while I became a sort of urban-academic-religious-writer-community type person. “Behold I give you a study in diversity,” said our creator God.

After Peter died, I just wanted to sing. Somehow, something about Peter’s life had completely inspired me. It was as though, as he shone in his final days, he had turned to me and said, “Go on – it’s your turn now!" 

I didn’t want to try my hand at plumbing, or see how it felt to be operate a large piece of machinery. This was Peter’s art – the way that he breathed life into clay, in quite a literal sense. 

But I wanted to sing.

Peter was a work to behold because he was always 100 per cent, completely Pete. Honest, down-to-earth, a classic larrikin, who knew he was going to be an earthmover from the age of 3, and did it. I don’t think Pete ever tried to be someone else. He was his own thing, his own creation, his own kind of artist. 

I have entered into Peter’s art, and my inspiration now is to go and do likewise. Pete had his own set of brushes, and I have mine. I laugh. I dance. I write. I strum my guitar, and I play my flute. I am also honest. I am also passionate. I meander. I encourage. I trust. I get excited about new things, and I appreciate worn paths.

And I sing.

That’s me, that’s my art. It’s my response to the call, my answer to his challenge, “Go on, it’s your turn now.”

After the funeral, people stood in the pouring rain around the biggest pile of logs I have ever seen. One of our big Cyprus trees had fallen to the ground, just a month before we buried Peter in the ground. Pete’s mates cut the tree up with a chainsaw and brought in an excavator to gather up the logs and make a bonfire. Under a grey, quivering sky, Pete’s mate Tom emptied a can of petrol on the enormous pile, dragging a tail of fuel through the grass. My brother John set the tail alight, and the flame travelled through the grass until it reached the pile of wood. Whoosh! Up she went. Everybody clapped and cheered.

The skies opened and everybody got soaked. But behind us, arching over the property, was a perfect rainbow, unable to hold itself back from the grey. It glistened in the paddock, lit up by the wash of rain.

* * *

“So what you are saying,” said my mentor, Anne, as I cradled an empty mug, “is that you have found there are colours, in amongst the grey.”

Yes, that is what I have found. While life is sometimes in muted pastels, this time of death brings grey – and a brilliance of colour I’ve not encountered before. In these puddles, we dance a new dance, inspired by the art of one’s life that we had never noticed as so brilliant before.

“Go on,” he said. “It’s your turn now.”

Abortion, the Exodus & 'freedom'

The idea of liberation through a change of masters shows how misleading it is to summarize the exodus through the popular slogan, “Let My people go.” The full form of the challenge is actually sallah ‘et’ammi weya ‘abduni, “Let My people go that they may serve Me.” The emphasis, I think, falls on that last word: that they may serve Me and no one else. The point of the exodus is not freedom in the sense of self-determination, but service, the service of the loving, redeeming, and delivering God of Israel, rather than the state and its proud king. The paradox should not be overlooked that if you rid biblical theology of slavery altogether, you will miss one important basis for the biblical efforts to mitigate slavery.

-       Jon Levenson (1993) The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament and Historical Criticism, Westminster, John Knox, p 144.

When I had lunch with my Dad today and I was explaining what I was learning in class, I told him about this idea. Freedom, in the Bible, is never ‘freedom to do whatever you like’. In fact, I’m not sure that ‘freedom’ is even the right word, because the term does seem to imply self-determination. Rather, the idea expressed in the Bible – beginning with the exodus and carrying on like a thread through to Paul’s writings in the NT – is one of deliverance from the old master (whether it be slavery, blindness, sin), into the hands of the new master, who is YHWH or Jesus. Slavery is not abolished, but rather continues under a master whose book of law is life, not death.

As our conversation continued on and we talked about this and that, Dad began to tell me about how he had got up in church the other Sunday, and encouraged individuals in the congregation to sign an open letter to the Victorian Premier. The letter urged the State government to overturn legislation that compels doctors to refer clients seeking an abortion to another doctor who can undertake the procedure, if the first doctor will not do it. Dad was virulently opposed to this legislation, because he believed it breached the principle of freedom of conscience. It is wrong to compel anyone to facilitate an abortion, he argued. People should have the right to refuse, if their conscience so dictates.

After lunch, it occurred to me that there was a connection between the conversation about the exodus story and the idea of ‘freedom’, and the question of ‘freedom of conscience’ in regards to abortion. I realised that neither the ‘pro-choice’ not the ‘pro-life’ camps really advocated ‘freedom’, though they both criticised the other for not doing so.

The pro-choice camp advocates freedom for women to choose to have an abortion, but an obligation on doctors to make sure women have access.

The pro-life camp urges freedom for doctors to choose not to facilitate an abortion, but an obligation on women to carry a child to full term.

Both positions advocate freedom – the first for the woman to be able to choose, the second for the doctor to be able to choose. But inherent in both is a pronounced lack of freedom, which both sides condemn the other for. In the first scenario, the doctor is obliged to refer a woman. In the second, the woman is obliged to have the baby.

And so it strikes me that to condemn either position because it lacks the element of ‘freedom’ is perhaps to miss the point. None of us live in a society of ultimate freedom. Classic liberal theory taught us that: there are obligations, as well as rights. In the language of the Bible, we could say that none of us have freedom; the most we have is the ability to choose our own master.

So who will be our master? The one who compels doctors to make sure women have access to abortions? Or the master that compels women to carry children to full term? We may find ‘liberation’ or ‘deliverance’ in one of these answers, but we will not find ‘freedom’, in any ultimate sense. For the biblical writers, that wasn’t the quest they were on.  

Special

When I was a child I was told that I was special.

Not special in a general sense – as in, unique in my own humanity – although that is also true. But special in the sense of particularly special. Of unique significance. More special, perhaps, than others.

Pity the child who grew up believing that. She is likely to grow up not with a healthy dose of self-esteem, but rather a tentatively perched sense of her own superiority. She does not feel whole and loved because of her humanness; but rather comes to find her wholeness and love-ability only to the extent that she is set apart from other humans. Ironically, the result of believing that one is particularly special is actually a deep insecurity – a fear of not being found to be all that special, after all. Maybe Mum and Dad got it wrong, and I’m just plain old ordinary. And of what worth would I be then?

It’s all a bit embarrassing really. And a bit pathetic – girl-told-she-was-special-now-battles-with-low-self-esteem. Wow, bring out the violins, and the Red Shield Appeal. Who knew that naval-gazing could end this tragically.

But seriously, this narrative about myself – which I have taken on and internalised as my own – has really shaped the person that I’ve become. The need to succeed, to prove myself – the fierce competitiveness with others and the super-sensitive-easily-threatened thing. The protectiveness of an image, and the pain when it is shattered. The roller-coaster ride of success and failure. The entitlement that I feel to ‘success’, and the pummelling to my self-worth that I experience in ‘failure’. And that constant feeling of expectation, bearing down always on my shoulders. 

Like it or not, though, this is my story, and I need to own it. My mentor asked me today how I can ‘grow out from’ this story. Not as in moving on from it, but rather moving out from it. ‘Specialness’ is a part of my identity: how do I think about this in a way that is helpful?

I pondered the question as I rode back home on my bike. And I thought about Jesus, who really was ‘special’, in the sense that he impacted powerfully on this world. Ok, so that’s a massive understatement, but you get the gist. But Jesus’ ‘specialness’ was not a result of him trying to be special, or trying to ‘succeed’ in any earthly sense of the notion of success. Rather, Jesus’ ‘specialness’ was a result of him living out his God-given vocation. It came from him being true to who he was…and that’s how he impacted the world.

So maybe the way I can ‘grow out from’ my narrative of ‘specialness’ is to realise that…you guessed it, I already am special! Special not because of what I have achieved, but because of who I am. Not because of what I may become, but because of how I was born. I have fulfilled the expectations – simply by being here. All I need to do is become more fully the person that I was created to be. 

And so there is no need to show the world that I am special. Because I already am. I already am. 

Night-time swim

Through black water

orbs of light

float my way:

silent dancers

in a muted liquid ball.

I squint my eyes

and jump back

at black garish grass:

in this place

even eyelashes become terrain

for sea monsters.

I turn onto my back

and look up at a dim Southern Cross.

Another garden of light

so far away

from this watery world. 

The Little White Chapel

On the road to Whittlesea, where I grew up, there was an old weatherboard church. At one point, perhaps a hundred years ago, it was in its prime – a country parish, built by the hands of the local parishioners, standing stout and proud in paddocks of sheep and cows. A community centre, where people met on a Sunday in freshly pressed clothes, to worship their God and eat scones and jam afterwards.

Those days were long gone, and as I travelled by on the school bus, I could see that this old church building was brown and faded, covered in barely a few slithers of crumbling paint. 

When I drove past recently, I noticed that this old church has been spruced up considerably, and now stands bright white within a much smaller paddock (for suburbia is encroaching). The small church now sports a freshly painted white picket fence…and a new sign. The sign doesn’t say, “South Morang Methodist Church – all welcome”, or even something more modern like, “Golden Valley Community Church – Coffee, Friends, God”.

Rather, the sign out the front simply says, “The Little White Chapel”.

The name is self-consciously simple and crisp, like the building itself. It speaks of daisy chains and dresses with sashes, of hard-working men and dusty roads.

This lick of white paint and this new sign out the front is a resurrection – of sorts. But my first reaction is irritation, even anger. What seems to be resurrected here is not a church, but an aesthetic. The church itself is no more; it has been emptied out, its soul put out for hard rubbish. The chipped teacups have disappeared and the hymnbooks were bought for a bargain by a second-hand book dealer. The new buyers wondered why there were tiny shot glasses in the cupboards, and they laid them down along with the old faded sign, in a pile on the side of the road. 

They polished the pews and sanded the floor – evening out the floorboards that were dark and shiny in the aisles from hundreds of pairs of feet. There was no need for the archaic pulpit in the corner, so they dismantled that, but they left the wooden platform. It was an ideal place for a bride, a groom and a celebrant to stand. 

So now this small dusty church has been done up as a wedding venue – and why not, if the building was in disuse? Better than tearing it down, and filling the valuable land with a big, beige housing development. Garden beds that grew weeds now brim with jostling jonquils in the spring, and swell with the scent of lavender in the summer. The lawn around the chapel is freshly mowed, and it looks lovely again.

I’m not mad at the new owners. I guess I’m just mad at this culture, in which little country churches are irrelevant, and are valued only because they are quaint. Little ‘chapels’ like these are now nice places to get married – for people who have always dreamt of a church wedding but don’t have any religion to speak of.

Oh, maybe it was a horrible church, made up of craggy inward-looking people who gnawed on dry biscuits after the service and complained a lot about young people these days. Maybe this church really was irrelevant – moored only to the past, and blind to the new families moving into the newly subdivided paddocks. Maybe this church needed to die.

Maybe this church lost its soul long ago, before that faded sign was taken down, and a new one was put up in its place.

I long for churches that are wedded deeply to their past – but at the same time are fully immersed in the present world, and have their doors open and arms reaching out to the people who live around them. Churches that value the ancient smell that wafts forth when you open the communion cupboard. Churches that wouldn’t dream of building a concrete box somewhere up the road, to hold worship in a place where you can get the lighting exactly right for the band. I long for churches that have guitars alongside organs, and teenagers sitting next to the people who have seen this place grow and change over 60 years.

I am now wondering whether the renaming of this church, and of its resurrection back to its aesthetic glory days, reflects a kind of longing as well. A longing from a place within our modern culture, that knows it has lost something, but can’t quite put its finger on what that might be.

There is something in many of our hearts that leaps at the sight of a white church in a paddock, or a daisy chain, or a dress with a sash, or the sight of a man in dirty boots. Our smile upon a quaint chapel seems shadow, but the roots go much deeper than that. The white chapel signifies something deeply humane; a soul-level comfort. Something to do with land and community and family and connection. Something that we crave.

And maybe we are all craving the same thing.

Me - I long for churches that are anchored in their history and have their doors open to the people around. I get sad when I see these churches shut up, and angry when I see them exploited for their quaintness factor.

And other people - they long for places that are similarly rooted in history, yet fulfil their present desire for connection and community. Their hearts leap when they see a quaint church, for it reminds them of what they want but do not have.

So we are left with a Little White Chapel – both a reminder of what we have lost, and a sign pointing towards what we might one day have.

I’m not sure whether to smile or weep.