Belated Christmas Reflections

Heaven on earth, we need it now...This season of peace, joy and good will is starting to grate on me, slowly decaying my sense of sugar-coated inevitability. As I was cutting up fruit for Christmas lunch on the morning of the 25th, I was watching SKY News which was screening a lengthy report on the continuing work Medecine Sans Frontiers is doing in Southern Sudan, a region wracked by starvation and insidious religious violence. As infant children cried out in hunger, my sharp stainless steel knife sliced through mangoes and rockmelons, while a little girl was being treated for serious injuries sustained after being knocked down by a car, while the sick and starving walk for hours and days in suffocating heat I wash my sticky fingers and wipe the bench down, scraping watermelon seeds into my hand and throwing them into the bin.

Sitting in Church next to my mother later that morning, I asked myself where He is in all of this, is there really any balance in such horrifying contradictions? Is it fair that while I cut up fruit others starve? There is this seed of hope inside me, this instinctive knowledge that he is food for the hungry, that the currents of his love run strong and pure around the weak but I find it so hard to overcome my anger, my thinly veiled bitterness at the self-centred tilt of churchianity, the inability to comprehend that he has asked us to be his hands and his heart.

We sit in our pews or plush chairs saying the Old Testament points to Jesus, the New Testament points to Jesus then proceed to ignore him completely, preferring to listen to that which does not challenge us directly, sculpting his words into a more acceptable form. Where is our covenant with the poor? Why do we let them wallow in such squalid conditions, feebly explaining away our inaction, forgetting what John Donne said about none of us being an island. We only diminish our own souls when we let another needlessly slip from life.

Fragmented

Days like this I am reminded of just what a brittle and fragile clay pot I am. When the thorn in my side embeds itself deeper, sends down strong roots into my soul, when I don't even have the words to describe the pain of withdrawal, of my weakness and utter need for it and my inability to let it go. Where is the mortar that makes these fragments whole, Where is the light that shines out of all of this?

(Days like this, I don't know what to do with myself
All day - and all night
I wander the halls along the walls and under my breath
I say to myself 'I need fuel - to take flight')

Do This in Remembrance of Me

This post is inspired in part by Heather's post on going back to REAL church for the first time in a long time, and partly by the visit this weekend of one of my close friends from the CILB, with whom I shared this experience.

A month ago I went to Sydney to attend a friend's exhibition and spend a frenetic weekend catching up with friends and former flatmates. On the Sunday evening I ended up going to church with three of my good friends from my CILB. The only catch was, we were not going to our 'regular' church, but to another building, another denomination a few suburbs away - they were finding their current church experience was progressively stagnating, and I have to admit, having them say that made me feel a whole lot less crazy about what I went through last year.

Though I have an inkling I was just not made to function to my fullest potential within the institution, the service we attended filled me with hope at the fact that there are churches out there whose hearts are truly seeking God and community in a real way. Worship was stripped of its adornments and was so real, more so than anything I had experienced in a long time, teaching was solid and spirit-filled, and afterwards we were welcomed by people who were truly interested in what was said and what we had to say. Nobody seemed to be going through the motions, and we almost skipped back to the car!

Later on I remembered the last supper, how Jesus had gathered his friends together for what was, essentially, a meal: the breaking of bread and drinking of wine, how he had said do this in remembrance of me. So as we sat eating KFC and watched traffic fly past us, laughing and reflecting and sharing, I remembered him and thanked him for this crazy, diverse, honest group of girls, glad that he has let them be my church.

Keeping it Real

If you're at all interested in music, or interested in how international man of hype Kanye West is keeping it real in his new record, this little blurb says all I want to say about it.

Why Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak is worth Listening to

Simple lessons

Living in the country, I am priveliged to share my surroundings with an myriad of different animals. To be more precise, I'd actually say it's a rather motley bunch of native and introduced species, those who reside here for agricultural purposes, and others, who like myself, have found themselves here mostly by chance and instinct. Most of the time they will be the only living things I interact with.

One of my favourites is the small Blue-Toungued Lizard who seems to migrate through the large cool concrete corridor that borders the courtyard, but seems to favour mostly the kitchen for the fruit I leave there for him.

Most of the time, our interaction consists primarily of me entering the kitchen, and him scuttling away frantically. But sometimes, if I am lucky, I will come to the kitchen and find him un-selfconsciously sunning himself in the random patches of sunlight that dot the wooden floor, neck up, eyes (presumably) closed and completely unaware of my presence. This morning he sat by the fridge watcing me curiously as I made a cup of tea. We appraised each other, I said hello.

I sometimes wonder about this flight instinct that animals have, and wonder if it is present in me a lot of the time, especially in the way I relate to God. As my little lizard friend scuttles beneath the fridge I try to reassure him that I am not a malevolent creature looking to eat him for dinner, to no avail. Whether or not it's an entirely reasonable assumption, I can just see God taking delight in my un-selfconscious experience of Him and then trying to reassure me as I run for cover when I suddenly become aware that He is present, ducking and weaving in the hope of avoiding what? Intimacy? Pain? Fear of rejection, retribution?

But these moments of curiosity, where flight is not the primary instinct give me hope. Through familiarity comes trust, and just as this morning, where the lizard and myself shared a brief moment of curiosity, so too am I growing less and less fearful of approaching my Father.


(Also, it must seem like I have a God complex or something, but I don't, I really don't! Maybe I'm just so selfish that the only way He can show me new things is from my inner experience.)

Contradiction

I am going to be honest. There are more than a few passages in the Bible that I have trouble with, that leave me scratching my head thinking Surely God, surely you don't mean that? But the one that has been more difficult for me than anything else, that I have turned over and over in my mind and that has troubled my heart for a long time is Exodus 20:12: Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

I was born into an extremely dysfunctional household, one where abuse was constant and the tension was palpable. I am the second youngest child of my father's third marriage, only girl amongst a pack of rough and tumble boys, born 11 years after my next eldest brother due to the fact that my mother did not want to bring another child into such a volatile environment.

The abuse I experienced was in a small part physical, but was mostly emotional. My father, a chronic alcoholic, possessed an unpredictable temperament, and when he'd spent his nights at the pub, none of us was sure whether the happy or violent drunk would greet us at the back door. But it was not merely his alcoholism that was to blame, his violent temper, or the threat of it, was used in the way a toddler throws a tantrum to get their own way, and if we dared question him we were guaranteed sore limbs soon after.

So where was my mother in all this? At the time she was our rock, holding everything together, or at least trying to. She was gentle but firm, and instilled in us a great sense of justice and fairness - which I think made life at home even more difficult for me to understand. Even as the years went on, and separations and reunions continued much to my dismay (I must have been the only child who would have been happy to see my parents divorced), I continued to view my mother as a heroine. Recently though, I have begun to question my mother's spiritual decision to stay with my father, especially as it put us, as young children, directly in harm's way. Knowing what I know now, I realise I am back at square one with no idea where I stand.

So this is what it comes down to: it has taken me up until only six months ago, to realise that both my parents have failed me in major ways. Now I know that we are all going to fail as parents on some levels, and as human beings we can never be perfect, but are some failures avoidable?

This is what I want to ask, and keep wrestling and struggling and getting myself into trouble about: if, as a parent, you perpetrate abuses of that responsibility (physical, violent, sexual, negligence), do you void your right to be honoured by your children? I don't struggle with honouring my mother, as much as I do my father. How do I reconcile honour with someone who has made my childhood a place I'm never likely to revisit with much fondness?



*NB. My father passed away almost 10 years ago. How I've reacted to that is a whole other story, or maybe not.

Charity > see Love

Please read this article first:
Harvey: charity not so sweet

This article makes me mad enough to want to gather together my disjointed thoughts on the subject of charity (so I apologise if this little rant is a bit on the inarticulate side). Thankfully this is not an attitude shared by all in Australia’s corporate community, but it is more than a little disheartening, and perhaps more than a little ire-raising that such negative attitudes towards the poor are still present within society. I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising, considering the undeniable lean towards a meritocratic society that has taken place within Australia during the last 10-15 years.

At its roots, a Meritocracy is full of lofty and socially beneficial ideas, however, in his book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton examines how this seemingly egalitarian system becomes distorted into attitudes that are more akin to Social Darwinism. The distortion begins when one assumes everyone has started on a level playing field: that no-one has been abused in childhood or born into poverty, that students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds have the same access to quality education as those in wealthy areas, that a parent’s illness or death will not place extra stress and responsibility on an individual – the list has endless possibilities. Therefore, in a meritocracy, it is assumed that the talented rise to the top and the ‘losers’ remain on the bottom, seemingly where they belong. In the end it is just another way to marginalise the poor, but now because of the idea of a level playing field, they can be acceptably regarded as morally corrupt, they are no longer human beings worth helping, but a useless drain on society. Sadly, this attitude has also pervaded some areas of the institutionalised church.

Mr. Harvey said he believes in “developing people to their potential,” what I want to know is how is feeding and clothing a human being reduced to their lowest not developing their potential? I find it impossible to fathom how helping someone who cannot help themselves is not edifying to them, and does not fill them with hope and a sense of their potential and innate value as a human being who in turn feels they have something of worth to contribute to society. Are we not all valuable to society purely by being alive? Just because theirs may be the lowest rung of the ladder does not make it any less important. Are they to be deprived of the chance to climb it simply because they have fallen off?

Why must we always expect something in return? The idea of charity is that it’s not a transaction where goods or behaviours or lifestyles can be purchased in exchange for a hefty sum. In fact, I was curious to learn that the word charity derives its meaning from the Latin word caritas, which meant, among other thing, ‘Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem’. How can we truly offer charity - as we now know it – if we cannot hold in esteem the lives of those whom we wish to help? Charity is more than money, it’s not even really about money, charity is an attitude, a way of life, and if it is not grounded in love we are wasting our time.

I like the way one of my search results at Bible Gateway seems to sum it up: Charity>see Love.