THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (1)

Andrew Neaum

My daughter Rachel in England sent me an email recently which she headed: “A Haiku that could have been written by you”

Somewhere at the heart

of the universe sounds the

    true mystic note: Me.

She was having a crack at that ego of mine. I love her for it. It needs cracking and often is, but it does mend itself with alacrity.

To the airport and Ivanhoe

Diana managed to evade the Chilean ash cloud on Wednesday, just as I did the Icelandic one last year. So as I write she is on her way to Toronto, there she will spend a week with family and friends before heading on to London. She has left me a freezer full of meals, a weeded garden, leaf-raked lawns and lots of expressions of love and affection.

After seeing her off I called on John and Kate Horder in Ivanhoe and had a lovely chat with them, my mobile phone pinging with messages from Diana as she waited to board her plane. John is stoically undergoing both radiotherapy and chemotherapy which have very far from pleasant side effects. His sense of humour remains active and infectious though, and his interest in the parish focussed and wise. It was his birthday and so I was able to leave a little gift and card and wish him well. He is an exceedingly good egg.

I was told last week of a funeral homily that I had delivered some years previously which had offended a relative of the deceased. That cracked my ego alright! My immediate reaction was regret, self-admonishment, chest-beating and a rueful acknowledgement of that tendency in myself to sail verbally too close to the wind. However, in my funeral homilies, over which I labour long, lovingly and hard, I usually manage to avoid giving offence, so I was surprised.

Fortunately I keep a copy of all my homilies and so revisited the one in question. I was reassured. It was one of my best. I would not want to retract a word of it, for it was complimentary, appropriately humourous, well argued, strong on faith and most felicitously expressed. The offended person I assume (possibly wrongly) to have been a hyper-sensitive ninny, one of those sorts who expect from mother Church the unctuous pap and comforting platitudes that undertakers are paid so well to deliver. I regard the homily so highly I am considering posting it on the net, with the name of the deceased person it celebrates tactfully disguised, of course.

Hilder Lidgard

The last time I saw Hilder Lidgaard was but a few days before her death. I called in on her at Acacia House after a Hospice Board Meeting that finished earlier than is usual. She was lying peacefully on one of those wonder-beds that can be electronically raised and lowered with such ease, and so she was but a few inches from the ground. I stretched out on the floor beside her and chatted about choirs, churches, her husband, her widely admired nursing prowess and so on. She could not respond verbally, but managed to do so with the slightest of little nods of the head whenever she was in strong agreement with any sentiment that I expressed. There re-mained the suspicion of a sparkle to her eyes.

A few years ago, when my daughter Rachel sang in the choir, Hilder was her very favourite chorister, she loved her and liked to sit beside her. It was all to do with Hilder’s sense of humour and fun, her love of music, her remarkable voice in one so aged, her lively interest in all that happened, and her “cheerful countenance”. May Hilder Lidgard rest in peace.

Anglican parish church choirs of the sort that both Hilder and I love so dearly are endangered species in Australia. All our efforts to “modernise” and “enculturate” our worship I can undertake only half-heartedly and merely from a sense of duty. I would really far prefer to embed us more firmly and surely in the 17th and 18th centuries! Unable to attend Hilder’s Funeral I played to myself, but in her honour, a setting of Evensong by my favourite Anglican composer, Orlando Gibbons (1583-1685).

Orlando Gibbons

All true Anglicans should be aware of Orlando Gibbons. Not least because he is responsible for several glorious hymn tunes, notably the ones we sing to the words: “Forth in thy name O Lord I go....” and: “O Thou who at the Eucharist didst pray...”

Gibbons was born in Cambridge and christened at Oxford the same year. Between 1596 and 1598 he sang in the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, where his brother Edward Gibbons, eldest of the four sons of William Gibbons, was master of the choristers. Orlando entered the university in 1598 and achieved the degree of Bachelor of Music in 1606. James I appointed him a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he served as an organist from about 1615 until his death. In 1623 he became senior organist at the Chapel Royal. He also held positions as keyboard player in the privy chamber of the court of Prince Charles (later King Charles I), and organist at Westminster Abbey. He died at age the age of 41 in Canterbury, of apoplexy of all things. It is the sort of end that I fear I might make. Shaking off my mortal coil in a fit of apoplectic rage! There is a monument to him in Canterbury Cathedral.

He is up there with the greatest of composers and his anthems are superb. However perhaps the most remarkable of his compositions is a fascinating montage of the advertising jingles of his day: “The Cryes of London”. Set for five voices and five viols, the composition makes use of the street cries and songs of the hawkers and vendors in the London of his time. Lovely to listen to, the words go as follows:

God give you good morrow my master, past three o’clock and a fair morning. New mussels, new lily white mussels. Hot codlings [cooking apples], hot. New cockles, new great cockles. New great sprats, new. New fresh herrings. New haddocks, new. Now thornbacks new. Hot apple pies, hot. Hot pippin pies, hot. Fine pomegranates, fine. Hot mutton pies hot. Ha’ ye any old bellows or trays to mend? Rosemary and bays, quick and gentle. Ripe chestnuts, ripe. Ripe smallnuts, ripe. White cabbage, white young cabbage, white. White turnips, white young turnips, white, parsnips, lettuce. Buy any ink, will you buy any ink, very fine writing ink, will you buy any ink? Ha’ ye any rats or mice to kill? I ha’ ripe peascods, ripe. Oysters, oysters, oysters, threepence a peck at Bridewell dock, new Wallfleet oysters. Oyez! If any man or woman can tell any tidings of a grey mare, with a long mane and a short tail, she halts down right before, and is stark lame behind, and was lost this thirtieth day of February. He that can tell any tidings of her, let him come to the Crier, and he shall have well for his hire. Ripe damsons, ripe fine damsons. Hard garlic, hard. Will ye buy any aqua vitae, mistress? I have ripe gooseberries, ripe. Buy a barrel of Samphire. What is’t ye lack? Fine wrought shirts or smocks. Perfumed waistcoats, fine bone lace or edgings, sweet gloves, silk garters, very fine silk garters, fine combs or glasses. Or a poking stick with a silver handle. Old doublets, ha’ye any old doublets? Ha’ ye any corns on your feet or toes? Fine potatoes, fine. Will ye buy any starch for a clear complexion, mistress? Poor naked bedlam, Tom’s a-cold, a small cut of thy bacon or a piece of thy sow’s side, good Bess. God Almighty bless thy wits. Quick [live] periwinckles, quick, quick, quick. Buy a new almanac. Buy a fine washing ball. Buy any small coal? Good gracious people, for the Lord’s sake, pity the poor women, we lie cold and comfortless night and day on the cold boards in the dark dungeon in great misery. Hot oat cakes. Lanthorn and candlelight, hang out maids for all night. And so we make an end.

Aubergines

We have just ripped out our aubergine plants and so have been eating the last of a good crop. I have invented a new and simple way of cooking them. I slice them almost a centimetre thick, make a pocket through the skin into each slice and insert thin slivers of garlic and tomato. I then lightly spray them with oil and grill both sides a handsome bronze. More than tolerable. I don’t bother with all the salting away of a bitterness that doesn’t exist.

Touché Chris, touché!

Most people appear to be unaware that Christopher Hitchens once did a demolition job on Mother Theresa, writing a book that questions everything she was and did, calling her among other things, “Hell’s Angel” and accusing her of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and of being a fanatic, a fundamentalist, a fraud and much worse. That after all is Hitchen’s style and some of what he says is doubtless partly true. All motives are mixed, mine certainly are. However I was delighted to read someone say of Hitchens himself: “.....it would be unfortunate if he were to be remembered not as the person who had fed the poor and comforted the dying, but the person who had given a good kicking to the woman who did. Touché Chris, touché!

In retreat

On Tuesday Gail and I go to Harrietville for the annual Priests’ Retreat. I notice that this year we have only one full day, for we return on Thursday. The Diocese is obviously cut-ting costs. Chris Shields will be taking the Wednesday Eucharist. One of my favourite poems is called “The Retreate”. It is by the seventeenth century priest and parson Henry Vaughan and looks back to a happy childhood with eloquent longing, assuming the Platonic notion of the preexistence of the human soul, and so of us arriving at birth trailing Wordsworthian “clouds of glory” which we lose as we grow up, it ends memorably thus:

                                                                   Some men a forward motion love,

                                                                   But I by backward steps would move

                                                                   And when this dust falls to the urn,

                                                                   In that state I came, return.

Wowserism

In a recent article entitled “Warm to Sin” I noted a comment about a colleague that I had made in conversation to Diana and recorded in my journal.......”he is only an anglo catholic in gloss, not the real thing, his relationship to sin is not warm enough to be a genuine anglo catholic”.

I have just read an excellent little article by Greg Melleuish in “The Australian” which makes, in passing, much the same point. He says “Wowsers (We Only Want Social Evils Remedied) are traditionally as Australian as meat pies and Holden cars. They were responsible for Australian institutions such as the six o’clock closing and the shutting of shops on Sundays..... wowserism has never really gone away and, like any great tradition, has bided its time waiting for new opportunities. It has simply changed its spots. Once it had a strong religious colouring; now it is taking on an increasingly secular tone.

Wowsers want to improve people and make them better. To do so they have to prevent them from engaging in activities that they find immoral: be it gambling, eating meat, drinking alcohol, smoking or consuming junk food. My father used to say that for such people if you were enjoying yourself there must be sin involved......

Melleuish goes on to talk of eugenics in relation to the desire to force improvement upon humanity in the spirit of wowserism and makes the point that in the past: it was not politics so much as religion that determined whether a government would seek to go down this road. Protestants generally did, Catholics did not. Fortunately, Australia had a significant Catholic minority.

It is an excellent, short article which, if you google his name and the word “wowser” will make itself available to you.

How I love the Christian Faith

How I love the Christian Faith! It is so beautiful, so life enhancing, so culturally profound and enriching. Why is it so hard to get the vacillating, wimpish, politically correct, lumpen intelligentsia of Shepparton, all those mugs who play their endless, hedonistic rounds of golf, revere and take as scripture only “The Age”, and who mouth the cliches of anti-faith so slavishly and ignorantly, to step out or their selfish, indecisive, stupid scepticism to take seriously the glorious, ancient, mysterious, compelling faith that gave rise to a poem like this, written all those years ago in the seventeenth century:

                                                                       To Christ on the Cross

                                                         I am not moved to love you, Lord, to gain

                                                         the heaven you have promised in return.

                                                         And God, what moves me never to complain

                                                         is not the fear of hell where sinners burn.

                                                         You move me, Lord. It moves me when I see

                                                         they mock you as you draw your dying breath.

                                                         I’m moved before your body’s injury.

                                                         I’m moved by what you suffered, by your death.

                                                         At length what moves me is your love, and thus,

                                                         if heaven were not real, I’d still love you;

                                                         if hell untrue, I’d fear you nonetheless.

                                                         You owe me nothing for loving you like this,

                                                         since if I did not hope for what I do,

                                                         I’d love you, Lord, with equal tenderness.

  Miguel de Guevara (1585-1646)

translated from the Spanish by Robert Schechter

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (2)

It is a dark, wet, windy Tuesday morning as I begin this diary column. I love bitter, blustery, wintry gloom. The oasis of warmth and light that is my study is accentuated and emphasised by what it keeps at bay. Outside are the cold, wet, leafless trees, “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang....”. But inside all is lightness and warmth as a Boccherini quintet plays delicately and melodically from my computer’s fine speakers, building up to a frenzy of glorious melody before returning to a quiet and simple delicacy to end “as it was in the beginning”. I love Boccherini, his music is ideal for dark and gloomy early mornings, there is something incurably optimistic about it.

Before settling with a cup of coffee to write, I ventured outside into the pitch dark and blustery wet to to have a look at the rain gauge. Nine millimetres so far, a life saver, the garden was beginning to look pinched.

The daily round and common task

Because I go off this morning to the Priest’s Retreat in Harrietville I had to give away most of Monday, my day off, yesterday. I dealt first with some of the regular weekly tasks that I usually postpone until Tuesday. The preliminary work for this pew sheet, for example, putting in all the liturgical stuff and making sure that this week, unlike last, the psalm sung by the choir will be the same as the one in the pew sheet! The cartoons have to be selected and scanned and a joke searched out and chosen. Once this is accomplished I email my efforts to the parish office so that Heather, when she arrives on Wednesday, can add the rosters, timetables and notices as the week rolls on.

After this I selected and printed the music for Sunday. This is a time consuming but enjoyable task. I trolled through some of my many hymn books, playing promising looking melodies on my recorder. I discovered a new hymn with fairly ordinary words but a catchy tune for the 10.30 Eucharist, and so in my high-handed fashion fiddled with some of the words to make them more suitable for the baptisms this Sunday. I then scanned the music into the computer and on to the choir sheet and saved it as a PDF file to email to the two Christines.

It was then the turn of the service sheets and intercessions. They too were sorted out and are now, on this Tuesday morning, ready for use once Sunday’s notices and the lists of the sick and anniversaries of death are updated and added later in the week.

My last such chore was the most time-consuming of all. I labouriously put the 10.30am service into Power-Point mode to enable it to be projected on to the screen. This is a skill that I am slowly mastering, and will then, hopefully, pass on to Heather each week.

Ringing bulls at Undera

In mid morning I gathered together thurible, incense and holy water, and headed out to a farm near Undera. I had arranged to bless a little cottage that is being refurbished on the property and in which there was felt to be evil vibes. It is an old cottage in a lovely setting and I wouldn’t mind living there myself. I did the blessing assisted by the farmer’s wife and then we went over to the cattle yard and watched her husband and two other fellows put a ring into the nose of a young adult bull. This was fascinating, the beast clamped in a tight, strait-jacket of a stall while the job was done, and without too much bellowing. There were about sixty five fine looking beasts, all with new rings in their noses. Their destin-ation is Indonesia, for breeding not butchering and so they are not under a ban. I wonder what animal rights activists would make of the nose ringing though. The bull I watched seemed not overly distressed by the deed, like having a tooth out without anaesthetic.

The farmer runs a fascinating business flying live beasts over to various countries in Asia, for breeding purposes or to form dairy herds. I gather that traditionally the Chinese have not been great consumers of dairy products, but that their huge and burgeoning middle class is beginning to change in this regard, hence the need to develop a dairy industry. The bulls I observed are apparently selected from here there and everywhere in Australia, brought to Undera and then flown out, three to a crate and worth an estimated $10,000 each by the time they get there.

Italian meat balls

In the afternoon I did manage a little bit of time off to make some Italian meat balls from veal and pork mince. I had bought the mince in case I needed it to feed Elizabeth, Nathan and the girls who were over for the weekend because I had asked Elizabeth to play the piano at the 10.30 service, to give Audrey a break. However we ate other things and so on Monday, as if back in kinder, I happily spiced up, augmented and rolled out as if they were plasticine, lots of little balls and then cooked them in a rich vegetable and tomato mix. I tucked in to a great pile of them on noodles for dinner and they were delicious, though the vegie “sauce” was possibly a bit too worthy, full of beans and lentils as well as fresh vegetables.

I ended the day by going over to the hall to sample and judge the cooking skills of the Youth Group. Three teams produced three courses for a collection of judges to taste, weigh up and consider. Some of their efforts were excellent, others rather less so, but an enjoyable exercise. Mary Pearson does a wonderful job with the youngsters, as too does her back up team, which last Monday comprised Bev Condon and Dorothy Cook.

Iridescent bubbles of happiness

With Diana away, when I awake in the night I have reverted to listening to the BBC to take my mind off my own preoccupations and so encourage the return of sleep. On Tuesday morning I listened to an account of a woman sent with her sister, as little girls, to Australia for the duration of the war. Her story about the wrenching apart of a loving family for five long years was heart-breaking, the wretched lachrymae rerum, the tearfulness of things. My Brisbane brother rang up that night and we had a good chat about this and that, some of it to do with the lachrymae rerum.

When we are on our own the fun and cheerfulness of things is too easily swamped by their opposites. Optimism and humour spark best in the banter and repartee of good company. The best of friends or spouses burst the grim globules of gloom and sadness, effervescing the shrapnel into the iridescent bubbles of laughter and happiness.

Much ado about noting

I have been reading a tome so huge I wonder if I will ever find the time to finish it, but it is very, very good. It is called “A Secular Age” and is by Charles Taylor, a hugely erudite and impressive scholar. In it I came across this quotation from Bede Griffiths’ autobiography, a book I read years ago but have largely forgotten. Taylor uses the piece as an example of the experiences we all of us have, believers and non believers, of fullness, joy and fulfilment.....

One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.

Our retreat conductor (for I am now at Harrietville) is the sort that I relish, widely acquainted with, and thoroughly at home in the great heritage of literature, music and art that informs, enriches and illuminates our lives, faith and civilization. She commented in her first address that in Elizabethan English the word “nothing” was apparently pronounced as “noting” and so the phrase “Much ado about “nothing” could just as well be “Much ado about noting” which is a cue to what spiritual awareness is all about. Namely noticing what merely is, for what in reality and in more than fact, it really is, as happened with Bede Griffith in the passage quoted above.

My own personal and doubtless far too simplistic theory of art is that, if it is authentic, it draws aside or twitches for us the veil between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the human and the divine, in order to reveal the “otherness” of everything, the “otherness” in everything, reality as suffused with divinity. Hence the use of art, music and literature in my devotional life.

The monastery cat

She delighted me too by quoting a prayer of George Appleton’s which I used a fair bit once upon a time but had forgotten. Searching for the prayer in one of the many files on my computer I came across another by Appleton that is lovely and might well be useful at funerals:

O Christ, the little girl on her deathbed, the young man on his way to his grave, and Lazarus three days in the tomb, could all hear your voice. May each soul as it passes through death, hear your friendly voice, see the look of love in your eyes and the smile of welcome in your face, and be led by you to the Father of all souls. Amen.

She told us an amusing story about a monastery that was given a cat upon which the monks doted, but which was a little wayward and so disturbed the daily mass by jumping up where it shouldn’t and meowing inappropriately. They resolved the problem by tying it up before mass each day and so this became a little ritual necessary before mass was said for fifteen long years. Then the cat eventually died. Consternation! They found thereafter that they were unable to say mass at all, so necessary and essential to the rituals of the mass had become the tying up of the cat beforehand! The story illustrated the necessity of being able to let go of what is unnecessary or redundant in the spiritual life.

I found the Appleton prayer I was actually looking for in a scheme of prayers I once put together and published in this pew sheet during several Lents:

O Christ, my Lord, again and again I have said with Mary Magdalene,”They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him.” I have been desolate and alone. And thou hast found me again, and I know that what has died is not thou, my Lord, but only my idea of thee, the image which I have made to preserve what I have found, and to be my security. I shall make another image, O Lord, better than the last. That too must go, and all successive images, until I come to the blessed vision of thyself, O Christ, my Lord.

The retreat is now over, and I am home. Don’t for a minute imagine that the experience was all spiritual delight. The food was largely excellent, not least the full, cooked breakfasts and I slept long and well. It rained coldly and gently for pretty well the whole time we were there, but I did manage one good and longish walk, greeting sodden kangaroos in a cheerful fashion as well as currawongs and kookaburras.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (3)

My computerised daily journal dates from 1998. As of Monday night it consists of one million, two hundred and two thousand and four words, most of them inconsequential and of little interest to anyone except myself.

Reverential and admiring

I am glad, though, that I have developed and maintained the discipline of journalising my life. Not least because if ever I have cause to read past journal entries I reacquaint myself with the self I used to be. Fascinating of course because (as I never tire of confessing) my relationship with myself has always been reverential and admiring. The person I discover myself to have been in the past is less different from the self I now am than I am wont to suppose. I can see few signs of progress, or any improvement in goodness, spirituality and wisdom. I console myself by reflecting that goodness, spirituality and wisdom are blind to themselves, except in others!

I recently set about typing out some longhand journals from 1977, the early days in my first parish in Rhodesia. It brought back vividly to mind those happy times and reminded me of all sorts of people and events that I had nearly forgotten.

The very first journal I kept was when I went to England in my twenties to teach. This was a very significant period of my life, during which I turned myself back full face to God and eventually offered myself for ordination. Sadly I destroyed this first journal, deeming it too personal and revealing to risk anyone else ever getting hold of it. I regret destroying it enormously.

Jokes, cartoon and fun

Unless too pushed for time I really enjoy putting together this pew sheet. It is great fun searching out decent cartoons and jokes and assessing the risk factor in them. The recent assault upon the Christian faith by cocksure atheists has taught me that it is dangerous to allow the hypersensitivity of a few pew-sitters of simple faith to muffle blunt truth or to stifle debate, doubt and questioning. Most atheists attack and destroy a childish version of the Christian faith that no intelligent and thoughtful Christian espouses, but which you still often hear from pulpits and read in parish publications. Many of the clergy feel pressurised to avoid saying or writing any-thing that might disturb or challenge people of “simple” faith. To give in to this pressure is not only unwise, it is counter productive.

Many people send me jokes, but only a very few of them appear in the pew sheet. This is not usually because I do not like them or consider them too weak or disgusting, but rather because I know them and over the years have already used them, or versions of them. The cartoon on the front page of this week’s pew sheet, of a rabbit in a hospital bed with the sheet pulled over its face to indicate its death, and a rabbit doctor, saying to a rabbit nurse “He’s left his body to medical research and his feet to the lucky-charm factory,” might well be considered to verge on bad taste. To my mind it is very funny in its irony.

I came across a good aphorism the other day: “suspicion of others stems from self- knowledge.” Now there is a fine little sermon in miniature.

A new priest for Seymour

On Friday evening I went to Seymour for the induction to that parish of a new priest, Fr. Thevathasan Samuel Premarajah, known as Fr Prem. There was a full church and a good atmosphere. I travelled there with Michael Jones the Rector of Yarrawonga who picked up both me and Kim Benton the Rector of Numurkah. On the way back we stopped and had a Thai meal in Nagambie. There continues to develop among the clergy in the diocese a sense of collegiality and friendship, a tribute to the end of stormy diocesan weather and the arrival of a new and blessed episcopal era.

Nagambie always seems to me to be a lovely town, though once the bypass is finished I presume that we will rarely give ourselves the opportunity to contemplate that loveliness. Any sadness will be more than mitigated by a drop in the number of fines we garner for speeding through it at over fifty kilometres an hour.

Combined Eucharist July 31^st

It is customary in the Parochial District of Murchison and Rushworth to combine their two congregations for a single Parish Eucharist, followed by a meal, on fifth Sundays of the month. They have suggested that on the 31^st of July they combine with us all at St Augustine’s for the 10.30am Eucharist, with a “Bring and Share” meal to follow. This seems an excellent idea, and if St Luke’s Dookie and St Mary’s Katandra would like to join in the fun, so much the better! Note the date in your diaries, please.

“People Supporting People”

On Saturday “People Supporting People”, the local charitable organisation of which I am President, but which is inspired by and centred around the fascinating personality of Azem Elmez, held a great function to thank the very many people and organisations that support “People Supporting People”. As you would expect the food was bountiful and delicious, and the company excellent and varied. Before great meals such as this one, those of us who are believers feel compelled to offer a public Grace of some sort in gratitude to God for his goodness and bounty. How can one do this, however, if the company is made up of many faiths, diluted by a sprinkling of agnostics and spiced with a few thoroughgoing atheists? I did my best as follows:

A sort of Grace

“Gatherings like this one tonight bring together people of all sorts of faiths, races and backgrounds. We are a fair old slice of the whole world’s pullulating populace; of the, colourful, diverse, rag tag and bobtail mix that is humanity in general. This, of course is what “People Supporting People” is all about. The word ‘people’ is all inclusive. We are indiscriminate in support. We will assist anyone in need.

“As a Christian priest, if I was at a gathering of Christians, I would say before a meal like this a Christian grace. That is, I would thank the Triune God for his bounty and love, and ask his blessing upon our food, our fellowship and our endeavours.

“But I am not at a gathering of Christians, I am at a gathering of people of all sorts of faiths, races and backgrounds, a fair old slice, as I say, of the whole world’s pullulating populace, of the colourful, diverse, rag tag and bobtail mix that is humanity in general, and so what can I say gracefully as Grace to include every single one of us?

“Simply Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! The best of religious people in the world are characterised above all else, I think, by gratitude. All religion at its best and purest is a way of saying thank you to the author of being for the gift of being. The religious, if they are fair dinkum, are those who are grateful for their existence and express their gratitude in generosity, openness of heart, care, love, awe, reverence and worship. All worship, foundationally is the saying of thank you. Certainly Christianity is.

“But then too, surely, the best of non- religious people in the world are those who are grateful for being, are the opposite of whingers, are those filled with gratitude for their existence, and who express their thanks by generosity, openness of heart, care, love, and by secular forms of awe, reverence and worship. “Gratitude unites us then, gratitude, sweet gratitude. So thank you for being here. Thank you for People Supporting People. Thank you for good tucker and good fellowship; thank you for humane humanity, for generosity, concord, sacrifice, love; thank you for Australia, for diversity, for difference, for people of all sorts of faiths, races and backgrounds; thank you for the world’s pullulating populace, thank you, thank you, thank you, for the, colourful, diverse, rag tag and bobtail mix that is humanity in general. Thank you....thank you, thank you, thank you! Amen. Amen. Amen. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.”

The week’s greatest folly

I did a very foolish thing on the Saturday night that I went out to the People Supporting People do. Because the Football Club Rooms are so close I walked, but left by way of my garage. The side door to the garage from the Rectory garden can only be locked from the outside, which is most annoying, If you want the door locked when you go out, you have to walk all the way round from McKinney Street, lock it and then return to your car. To avoid this I have drilled a hole above the metal bar of the lock that turns with the handle as you open the door. Into that hole I place a screwdriver which prevents the lock from moving and allowing the door to open. Simple and ingenious, I like to think. It does mean, however, that you cannot open the door from outside, even with a key. There is only one battery-operated, main garage door opener and that is kept in the car.

Having secured the door in my ingenious fashion, I opened the main garage door by pressing the button on the wall, then pressed it again to close the door, skipping delicately beneath it without quite being guillotined, and so strolled on my way. The next day, on trying to access my car, I found myself locked out. It is a very secure garage, with a well barred window. I phoned the resourceful John Pleming who, good man that he is, said he would be right over. However, before he left I worked out a simple remedy. I would like to tell you what it is, but of course if thugs and thieves read Steven Hawkins, (see the latest copy of “Outreach”) they might aspire to read even greater and more interesting authors like the composer of this article and so discover how to get into my garage. So I am obliged to leave you in ignorance.

Season of mists

I had to go and visit someone in the psychiatric wing of the local hospital last week. It was on one of those still and very beautiful misty mornings and as is my wont these days, I made my way there on a bicycle. It was a beautiful ride, but the mist got thicker and thicker so that by the time I arrived I was amazed at how poor visibility had become. Mist so thick is unusual in this part of the world. It was only as I dismounted and de-helmeted myself that I realised that the mist had fogged up my glasses and so that I had been doubly mystified.

Diana has now deposited, at Australia House in London, her great labour of love, the huge file containing all the information, forms, statements, proofs, photographs and bumf required to achieve, possibly and ultimately, permanent residence status in Australia. Much lightened she has made her way go Bristol to visit friends and gardens.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (4)

With Islam resurgent and playing a growing part of our society it is important that we know something about it, especially in relation to Christianity. With this in view I have ordered a sample copy of a thirteen week Church Group Study Course on Islam in relation to Christianity. If it is as good as it sounds I will be offering a weekly evening session at the Rectory soon. Should enough people be interested we might also put one on in the daytime. There will soon be a list in the narthex for the names of those interested.

St Philip Larkin for Atheists

Every time I drive back from Melbourne to Shepparton I am reminded of Philip Larkin, a favourite poet. This is because on the Hume Highway, somewhere near Tallarook, there is a road sign for Dockery Road. One of Larkin’s best and most characteristically pessimistic poems is called “Dockery and Son”. It ends:

                                                         Life is first boredom, then fear.

                                                         Whether or not we use it, it goes,

                                                         And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

                                                         And age, and then the only end of age.

I love Larkin and consider him to be the perfect patron saint for atheists. An un-believer, he wrote one of the most despairing, depressed and unutterably bleak poems in our literature. It is called “Aubade” and ought to be read at the funerals of atheists, especially arrogant ones. It is brilliant, a superb depiction of terror and funk at the prospect of death and annihilation and of the hopelessness of existence without the Gospel. Mind you, it dismisses religion as any consolation at all, calling it memorably if unfairly: that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die.

The poem is ruthlessly honest. Few atheists would be fair dinkum enough to ask for it at their funeral just because of that. On such occasions, in my experience, they tend still to cling to the farcical notion that an individual life makes some sort of sense and has some sort of purpose, even when there is nothing to be viewed of it except the backward glance over the shoulder, no hope, no promise.

Apparently one of Larkin’s most favoured aphorisms was: “Life is so flat that you can see your own tombstone at the other end.”

Birthday partying

I went to a delightful birthday party on Sunday, for which I wrote a special Grace, though it was hardly a Grace, more a tribute to the birthday girl. God will forgive me, I am sure. It was rather different from my usual verse graces, more reminiscent of a W. S. Gilbert “patter song”, consisting largely of a long, polysyllabic, rhythmical catalogue of the birthday girl’s many virtues.

At the party I sat between two delightful ladies and enjoyed some animated con-versation. We touched for a while upon a great interest of mine, namely “nostalgia”. I wrote a sermon on the subject not long ago, noting that nostalgia was once known as the Mal du Suisse, because the infamously effective sixteenth and seventeenth century Swiss mercenary soldiers were particularly prone to an intense form of it. It was appar-ently so severe that it sometimes led to their death, the only remedy being to send them back home to the mountains, alp horns, cattle bells and edelweiss they pined for. The word nostalgia means literally “aching for home” or more generally “aching for the past”.

Music and nostalgia

Later that day I was typing away at a letter to Diana while listening to a magical piece of Mozart, one of his lovely, easy to listen to piano variations. I remarked upon this in my letter, going on to say that on reflection it was the theme itself, rather than the variations upon it, which seemed especially magical to me. The variations held my attention in part, simply by promising to redeliver the theme in its perfection, but they didn’t. All they offered were versions, reminders, snatches and hints. Which is a bit like nostalgia. The past is irrecoverable, the magic moment departs forever. To revisit it is never to recover it. Even when apparently unchanged on a revisitation, its context is very different, in that we view it from a different time and place and so our perspective has radically changed. Nostalgia is always therefore bitter sweet. Things can never be the same again, the aching never entirely goes away.

Nigh unto death

A part of growing old, it seems, is learning to accommodate yourself to decline not only physically and mentally in the self, but also in much of what we hold dear outside of the self. I love the Church, especially in its classic Anglican forms, but its decline, especially in Australia, appears inexorable. Then there are all sorts of traditional pursuits that are nigh unto death as well, not least of them Scottish Country Dancing. In days gone by there would surely have been an active group in a town of the size of Shepparton, but not nowadays, and many of the large groups in Melbourne have all but died. On Tuesday evening I headed all the way to Wodonga to participate in a resuscitated group in my old parish. I have to admit that this was less because I love Scottish Country Dancing than because I find it difficult to say “no” to heart-felt requests. It was fun to be back dancing at St John’s, a parish of which I was Rector in my prime, but it was a small and elderly band of dancers and the dickens of a long way to go. The survival of the group is in the balance. I got back by midnight.

Decline need not lead to despair, for which there is no room in sure faith. The decline of the Church in the only form that I find congenial should not worry me over much. That whatever is good, true, lovely and of God cannot die permanently, is part of what the doctrine of Resurrection is about. I have great faith that this is so.

The fact that the only successful forms of Anglicanism these days seem to me to be loud, unsubtle, banal and even ugly, is no cause for despair. Judaism, during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, became narrow, fanatical, xenophobic and lost any notion of Isaiah’s great vision of the nation and faith being a “light to the Gentiles”. However it was arguably the ugliness, narrowness of vision and xenophobia that helped Judaism to survive in difficult times, so enabling the great burst of light to the gentiles that occurred in Bethlehem a few centuries later. All will be well, all manner of things will be well. We simply hold on to all that is good, beautiful, lovely and loving and trust God and his goodness.

Traditionalists

On Wednesday mornings for Mattins and on Saturdays mornings for both Mattins and the Eucharist, John Price and myself are usually on our own. We therefore indulge ourselves with the old rite. We love it, not least for the escape it offers from the grammatical contortions that are necessary to accom-modate “inclusive language,” and for the sweet music and anachronisms of Coverdale’s translation of the psalms. Best of all, though, is a sense of solidarity with one’s parents, grandparents and ancestors in allowing their worship to chime more exactly with ours. The actual, worn Book of Common Prayer I use for Mattins is the one that my father’s eyes traversed for years and years and years before he died. Lovely. The Roman Catholics have a new translation of their missal. I have not looked at it except cursorily, but wholeheartedly approve of the change back to the old response to the versicle: “The Lord be with you”. It is now once more the sweet, traditional form “and with your spirit” instead of “and also with you”.

Roz at rest with us

We laid the ashes of Roz Dunlop to rest in the Memorial Garden on Thursday, the anniversary of her death. It is a simple little service but altogether lovely, especially for someone to whom St Augustine’s was a spiritual home. I love the whole idea of having the mortal remains of the faithful as part of the very fabric of the Church or gardens. When we are at Eucharist our loved ones are closer to us spiritually than at any other time, a truth easier to apprehend if their physical remains are with us too. Which reminds me of the lovely poem by John Betjemann called “House of Rest” which tells movingly of an old clergy widow and ends:

                                                                   Now when the bells for Eucharist

                                                                   Sound in the Market Square,

                                                                   With sunshine struggling through the mist

                                                                   And Sunday in the air,

                                                                   The veil between her and her dead

                                                                   Dissolves and shows them clear,

                                                                   The Consecration Prayer is said

                                                                   And all of them are near.

The can of worms

Trolling the newspapers on the Web early this morning, I noticed an advert for a program on Channel Ten called “Can of Worms”.

I never watch Channel Ten because I cannot abide adverts and so am unlikely ever to see the program advertised. The form of the advert in the newspaper on the Web was so vivid that my evasive eye simply could not escape it. It blinked, winked and beckoned me to say either “yes” or “no” to the question Is it wrong to tell your kids there is no God?

Not only do I avoid adverts as assiduously as possible, I also refuse to participate in polls. So I averted my eyes and instead went on to read all about carbon taxes and Julia Gillard. That soon drove me to get on with this pew sheet. Much of what we skim in the daily papers is tedious enough to make the dullest of sermons appear exhilarating.

Is it wrong to tell your children there is no God, though? Strictly speaking it surely is. No one, to my knowledge, has ever been able to come up with irrefutable proof of God’s non-existence, let alone of his existence. God, by definition, is outside of and beyond what we normally mean by “proof”. So to tell children unequivocally and without qualification either that he exists or does not exist is wrong. We can tell them that we personally are sure that he does or doesn’t exist, and why, but also, should they enquire, that in such matters “proof” is impossible and undesirable.

This was implicitly acknowledged by the Richard Dawkins sponsored atheists who decided to spread their “good news” by way of adverts on London Buses. All they could come up with was: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” A pretty feeble slogan, but not dishonest. The the weak word “probably” is debatable though.

Richard Dawkins said of this bus-slogan campaign (in his nasty and arrogant way): “....to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion.” This is such arrant nonsense that you cannot help but wonder about the sort of person Dawkins is. The medieval Christian philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His philosophy remains of huge interest and relevance to philosophy today. Moreover there are hugely significant and impressive twentieth and twenty first century Christian thinkers too. Karl Barth, Jurgen Moltmann and Rene Girard for a start. No wonder that a postgraduate philosophy friend of Rachel’s said to her once, “Dawkins makes me almost ashamed of being an atheist”.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (5)

Whenever I feel lethargic, disconsolate, aim-less and appear to be suffering from the sin of accidie (spiritual sloth; indifference, apathy; torpor), I find one of the best remedies is to click on to the web page of Rowan Williams. I am almost invariable strengthened and heartened by what I find there.

A remedy of accidie

Too few people appear to realise just what a gem of a Christian and human being we have in our Archbishop of Canterbury. Not only is he a pro-found and subtle thinker, he is also saintly, or so it seems to me, and deeply so. I love him, and for me to be able to say that of such a card-carrying leftie is a little miracle in its own right.

I have just read two items from his web page. The first is a short sermon on the Ascension, preached at a BBC broadcast Eucharist in St Martin’s in the Fields. The musical setting for the occasion was Haydn’s Nelson Mass. O would that I had been there. The sermon is a concise, crystal clear interpretation of the Ascension that makes such sweetly relevant and coherent sense of it, that it gladdens the heart.

The second item is a transcript of an interview with David Hare. It ranges hither and thither, granting a glimpse of the man for the attractive, and perceptive person that he so undoubtedly is.

Insufferable oafs

David Hare is an intelligent and sympathetic interviewer: “Williams often speaks in public in a regulation-issue churchy voice, so tone can tune out content. But this is a man, remember, who in 1985 was arrested during a protest outside the US air base at Lakenheath. What was his offence? He was singing psalms......”

“......Like Barack Obama, Williams seemed a good man dealt an impossible hand. If you had happened, at any point, to follow the unending rows about gay clergy and women bishops, then it was obvious that the archbishop had endured a great deal from some insufferable oafs in the higher reaches of Anglicanism who had always been ready to pretend that their lack of Christian kindness towards colleagues was somehow justified by faith. A friend of Williams had even described his period of office as a crucifixion. But even so, I had read enough of his distinctive theology to know how strongly he felt that Christianity should be an escape from self, not an indulgence of it. ‘Jesus,’ he had written, ‘is the human event that reverses the flow of human self-absorption.......’

The reluctant fairground boxer

“........It’s striking that throughout his eight years in charge, Williams has been touring as God’s fairground boxer, willing to go five rounds with all comers. Up steps AC Grayling (atheist philospher), next day Philip Pullman (atheist author). But his fondness for quoting Saint Ambrose – ‘It does not suit God to save his people by arguments’ – suggests how little store he sets by such encounters. ‘Oh, look, argument has the role of damage limitation. The number of people who acquire faith by argument is actually rather small. But if people are saying stupid things about the Christian faith, then it helps just to say, “Come on, that won’t work.” There is a miasma of assumptions: first, that you can’t have a scientific world view and a religious faith; second, that there is an insoluble problem about God and suffering in the world; and third, that all Christians are neurotic about sex. But the arguments have been recycled and refought more times than we’ve had hot dinners, and I do groan in spirit when I pick up another book about why you shouldn’t believe in God. Oh dear! Bertrand Russell in 1923! And while I think it’s necessary to go on rather wearily putting down markers saying, ‘”No, that’s not what Christian theology says” and, “No, that argument doesn’t make sense”, that’s the background noise. What changes people is the extraordinary sense that things come together. Is it Eliot or Yeats who talks about a poem coming together with an audible click? You think, yes, the world makes sense looked at like that.......’

Uncompromising on God

“......Williams speaks so gingerly about human beings, always unwilling to impute motive, that it’s shocking when you move on to theology and realise how uncompromising his version of God is. He rarely uses the word ‘faith’. He prefers the word ‘trust’ because, he says, ‘it sounds less like product placement’. In print, he goes out of his way to emphasise that God doesn’t need us. ‘We must get to grips with the idea that we don’t contribute anything to God, that God would be the same God if we had never been created. God is simply and eternally happy to be God.’ How on Earth can he possibly know such a thing? ‘My reason for saying that is to push back on what I see as a kind of sentimentality in theology. Our relationship with God is in many ways like an intimate human relationship, but it’s also deeply unlike. In no sense do I exist to solve God’s problems or to make God feel better.’ In other words, I say, you hate the psychiatrist/patient therapy model that so many people adopt when thinking of God? ‘Exactly. I know it’s counterintuitive, but it’s what the classical understanding of God is about. God’s act in creating the world is gratuitous, so everything comes to me as a gift. God simply wills that there shall be joy for something other than himself. That is the lifeblood of what I believe.’

“I say that’s all very well, but how then can he be so critical of self-absorption when he himself is a poet? Surely self-study is necessary to create art? ‘Ah, yes, two very different things. Self-absorption means thinking the most interesting thing in the world is myself. Self-scrutiny, on the other hand, is very deeply part of the Christian experience.’ So is his religion a relief, a way of escaping self? ‘Yes. We are able to lay down the heavy burden of self-justification. Put it this way, if I’m not absolutely paralysed by the question, “Am I right? Am I safe?” then there are more things I can ask of myself. I can afford to be wrong. In my middle 20s, I was an angst-ridden young man, with a lot of worries about whether I was doing enough suffering and whether I was compassionate enough. But the late, great Mother Mary Clare said to me, “You don’t have to suffer for the sins of the world, darling. It’s been done....”’

Methought I heard one calling Child

The interview ends with a comment on the great Anglican poet George Herbert: “Herbert’s very important to me. Herbert’s the man. Partly because of the absolute candour when he says, I’m going to let rip, I’m feeling I can’t stand God, I’ve had more than enough of Him. OK, let it run, get it out there. And then, just as the vehicle is careering towards the cliff edge, there’s a squeal of brakes. ‘Methought I heard one calling Child! / And I replied My Lord.’ I love that ending, because it means, ‘Sorry, yes, OK, I’m not feeling any happier, but there’s nowhere else to go.’ Herbert is not sweet.” Hare:”And you like that?” Williams: “Non-sweetness? I do.”

Kindled at last

Having stood shivering on the brink for months I have at last taken the jump and purchased a Kindle. As I write it is winging its way towards me. I hope that it will be all that I expect it to be.

A Kindle is an electronic book reader and an electronic book is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as an electronic version of a printed book. However, there are already books that exist without a printed equivalent, and now, in America, the sale of electronic books exceeds the sale of conventional, printed books.

E-books can be read on computers and i-pads, but they are too bulky and unsatisfactory for lengthy reads, as well as comparatively expensive. This is where e-book-readers like Kindle come in. Kindles are devices produced by the huge online book store called Amazon, and are the size of a small paperback, though slimmer. In their cheapest form they cost a little over a hundred dollars and come with free access to the internet to enable an owner to download in a matter of seconds, any book he wishes to buy. One Kindle holds 3,500 books. Best of all, thousands and thousands of books that are out of copyright can be downloaded for nothing. For example, the whole of Dickens, Trollope, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and so on.

Once I have organised myself I hope to be able to read Mattins and Evensong on Kindle, when away on holiday. The print size can be varied to suit a viewer and the screen is non-reflective, exceptionally clear and can be read even in sunlight. An owner can subscribe to newspapers and magazines if desired though the Kindle does not specialise in graphics, nor is it in colour. Most of the books I am likely to download will be free and the first book I intend actually buying is “A History of Christianity” by Diarmaid MacCulloch, a mighty tome that will cost me about half of the price of a printed version and with no postage either, of course.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (6)

Andrew Neaum

I feel envious of Diana experiencing an English summer. Mine there last year was glorious, I revelled in it. Especially long country walks in Dorset beneath trees so deeply foliaged that the shade itself seemed deep green and breathable, or through butter-cupped meadows and alongside hedgerows and river banks splashed with scarlet poppies. Then all of it ruminated over during lovely, lingering, sweetly interminable twilight evenings of beer and talk.

Dreaming of summer

Perhaps because the winters are so long, grey and dreary in Britain, the summers are all the more glorious. People enjoy them to the full, stripping their shirts off, as do lizards their skins, to bask and blister marmoreal bodies on the lawns of public parks whenever the sun appears for more than a minute or two. Everyone seems to go a little bonkers inebriated on sunshine and daylight. The long, long summer evenings, the sheer delight in and appreciation of the sun, the joyfully anticipated and easily arranged Continental holidays, the glee taken in barbecues that manage now and then actually to coincide with warm sunshine and the relish taken in picnics and al fresco dining are infectious and a joy to be a part of.

Our summers in Shepparton are lovely too and by winter’s end eagerly anticipated, but there is also a harshness to them, and the oven-like, north wind days, as well as the innumerable flies, detract from their glory as much if not more than the often too frequently cold and wet days of an English summer do.

Icumen in

It is altogether fitting that the oldest surviving piece of polyphonic music in the world should be an English celebration of summer. This is the famous “Sumer is icumen in”, written in the mid thirteenth century. It is a fairly complex round with a two part ostinato melody sung over and over again while the round itself is sung on top of it. The original is translated from the early English thus:

                                                                            Summer has arrived,

                                                                            Loudly sing, Cuckoo!

                                                                            The seed grows

                                                                            And the meadow blooms

                                                                             And the wood springs anew,

                                                                             Sing, Cuckoo!

                                                                             The ewe bleats after the lamb

                                                                             The cow lows after the calf.

                                                                             The bullock stirs, the stag farts,

                                                                             Merrily sing, Cuckoo!

                                                                             Cuckoo, cuckoo,

                                                                            well you sing, cuckoo;

                                                                             Don’t you ever stop now,

                                                                            Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.

                                                                             Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

The last two lines are the repeated ostinato. I am informed by a little research that although some translate the middle English “bucke uerteþ” as “the buck-goat turns”, the current critical consensus is that the line is “the stag farts”, apparently “a gesture of virility indicating the stag’s potential for creating new life, echoing the rebirth of Nature from the barren period of winter”. A somewhat po-faced and over-intellectualised reading of the word “fart”, it seems to me!

A skewed view of things

Because newspapers and news broadcasts feed on disaster and on what is extraordinary, we tend to get a skewed view of human existence. The more we listen to or watch the news the more skewed becomes that view and we forget just how good and tolerable the lives of so many of us are.

Whenever we hear of some appalling atrocity, hundreds murdered in a suicide bomb attack, or thousands crushed in an earthquake or drowned in a flood, or starving in a drought, we need to remind ourselves of the billions of folk not murdered, not crushed, not drowned not starving.

Even living in such peaceful and bountiful times as we do here in Australia, we can easily fall into deeper pessimism than ever our ancestors did who lived in times far more fraught with disease, disaster and danger than ours. We hear, watch and listen to far too unbalanced an account of the way things are.

Audi alteram partem

As well as Rowan Williams there is another impressive religious figure with a high profile in the United Kingdom, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. He is quoted in a recent Spectator as saying ‘We’re in an age of the breakdown of shared discourse, and when that happens, the loudest voice wins. So everyone learns to speak in a very loud voice — Richard Dawkins is just one product of it, but you find it is also in angry religious extremists. No one listens properly to the other side any more. But justice is.... Audi alteram partem, listening to the other side. You don’t get justice without listening to the other side.’

Mary Wakefield in her interview with him in The Spectator says that Sacks maintains that the increase in anti-semitism and the growth of intolerance in our society is a direct product of the decline of religion. That this does not mean that man cannot be moral without faith — but that without the practice of religion, ethics are subject to entropy. She then quotes his book “The Great Partnership”, where he puts it like this: “When the burden of law-abidingness falls on the state and its institutions, when people define right and wrong in terms of externalities — punishments and rewards — then society begins to erode. Like an orchestra without a conductor, they lose the habits that sustain the virtues that create the trust that preserves the institutions that shape and drive a moral order.” Excellent!

Lawrie Tinning remembered

Last week my round at the hospital was taken earlier in the week than usual, on Tuesday. There I was delighted to be reminded of Lawrie Tinning, because in the rehabilitation ward I met Val Simm from Tongala who is his sister. We had a lovely reminisce about that most amiable, gentle and quiet St Augustinian, who worked so hard and devotedly for us. May he rest in peace.

Hospital visits are usually very interesting to me. The week before last I met a man who years before had undergone a combined heart and lung transplant most successfully. Even more remarkable was that he met up periodically with the person to whom his own heart had been donated. It was his lungs that had failed, not his heart and so that had been passed on successfully to someone else.

Visits to hospital are a reminder of how mixed the achievements of medicine are. I visit people who have had fairly routine operations and yet remain in hospital for ages because their wound has become infected, we cannot even ensure that this doesn’t happen. On the other hand I meet patients who have undergone the most amazing of operations with truly wonderful results.

Simple gifts

Each morning when I make my first, welcome cup of coffee, I think of Peter and Joy Ross Edwards. This is because while staying in their lovely unit in Caloundra last year I bought myself a single-cup coffee plunger which has been in daily use ever since.

To be a part of other people’s lives we need simply to give useful little gifts for daily use, and hey presto, our life is extended into the imagination and memory of others.

I am now enjoying reading “A History of Christianity” by Diarmaid MacCullough, using my Kindle, an electronic reader. I ordered, paid for and received the book in a mere 60 seconds. The Kindle has dictionaries inbuilt, and to receive an instant definition of any word you simply place a cursor in front of it. Pages are turned by pressing a button and passages can be highlighted or book-marked. There is much to learn, but so far so good, it is already easy reading.

We hear a lot of bad news these days about churchgoing, how congregations are ageing and in terminal decline. I have just read an article in the New Statesman by Rabbi Sacks, (mentioned above) and there is a bit of good news, Rabbi Sacks says:..... in his new book “American Grace”, Robert Putnam sets out the good news. A powerful store of social capital still exists. It is called religion: the churches, synagogues and other places of worship that still bring people together in shared belonging and mutual responsibility. The evidence shows that religious people defined by regular attendance at a place of worship actually do make better neighbours.

A survey carried out across the US between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers were more likely to give money to charity. They were also more likely to do voluntary work for a charity, give money to a homeless person, donate blood, help a neighbour with housework, allow another driver to cut in front of them, offer a seat to a stranger or help someone find a job.

For some minor acts of help, there was no difference between frequent and non- churchgoers. But there was no good deed that was more commonly practised by secular Americans than by their religious counterparts. Religious Americans are simply more likely to give of their time and money to others, both within and beyond their own communities.

Their altruism goes further than this. Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organisations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighbourhood and civic groups and professional associations. Within these organisations they are more likely to be officers or committee members. They play a bigger role in civic and political life, from local elections to town meetings to demonstrations. They are disproportionately represented among local activists for social and political reform. The margin of difference between them and the more secular is large.

Tested on attitudes, religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance turns out to be the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race. On the basis of self-reported life satisfaction, religious people are also happier than their non-religious counter-parts.....

Interestingly, each of these attributes is related not to people’s religious beliefs, but to the frequency with which they attend a place of worship. Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good. Putnam goes so far as to speculate that an atheist who went regularly to church (perhaps because of a spouse) would be more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than a believer who prays alone. There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (7)

Andrew Neaum

On Monday, my day off, I read at one sitting a little book about a very fine priest I used to work with and who ended up a bishop, poor fellow. It was a tribute to him, and so far less a biography than a hagiography. It certainly made him seem saintly, but neither nauseatingly or untruthfully so.

In the years that I worked closely with him, even to my sceptical and cynical eye, he appeared to be a truly remarkable, talented, godly, benignly and pleasingly eccentric, very English sort of person and priest.

The choice

On finishing the little book and reflecting upon it, I found myself wondering, in the absence of any critical appraisal of the book’s subject, whether he didn’t illustrate, just a little, the truth of the first two lines in Yeats’ brilliant little poem “The Choice”

                                                                   The intellect of man is forced to choose

                                                                   perfection of the life, or of the work....

In other words, did his priestly vocation (ie his “work”) consume him to the detriment or at the expense of his private and family vocation (ie his life)? Did his saintliness and success come at the cost of his humanity? How easy is it for the family of a saintly priest to tolerate that saintliness?

My reflections along these lines might well have been more self-justification of my own lack of saintliness than anything else of course. Certainly the priest I talk of was a far, far more accomplished, prayerful and devoted priest than I am, or have ever been. In reading the book there were moments when I was moved to tears, which says a lot for the man and his story, because it was a fairly pedestrianly written tribute.

The Yeats poem refers more to the choice between life and work for an artist than for anyone else. But in the case of a priest the choice is all the more interesting for being in fact not a matter of choice at all. We all of us expect in our clergy life and work to be one, to be all of a piece. You cannot be a profoundly effective, successful and good priest, unless you are a profoundly effective, successful and good human being, socially and familially. It is not a matter of choice, the one cannot be complete without the other.

For the artist it might well be that...

                                                                   The intellect of man is forced to choose

                                                                   perfection of the life, or of the work....

We almost expect artists to be “bohemian”, that is, randy, sex-sodden, selfish swine. If they are not, can they be the real thing? Are they not “bourgeois” pretenders?

For the priest not so. Holiness is also wholiness. Perfection of life and of work need to be yoked. Pity me! Pity us!

A busy week

I might have had a good day off, but since then I have been too busy to diarise and so I conclude this weekly column with an article I wrote some years ago, one that is based upon another wonderful poem.....

Loss of Faith

One of the greatest and most moving of nineteenth century poems is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”.

It is set in Dover, and Arnold is staying at an inn with his bride. They are on the way to honeymoon in Europe. He stands looking out of a window over Dover Beach and the English Channel on a lovely evening....

                                                                   The sea is calm to-night.

                                                                   The tide is full, the moon lies fair

                                                                   Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light

                                                                   Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

                                                                   Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

                                                                   Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

                                                                   Only, from the long line of spray

                                                                   Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d sand,

                                                                   Listen! you hear the grating roar

                                                                   Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

                                                                   At their return, up the high strand,

                                                                   Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

                                                                   With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

                                                                   The eternal note of sadness in.

He goes on to reflect upon what Sophocles made of the same sad sound of waves on the beach of the Ægean Sea many centuries before, and then pens the most famous of the poem’s lines.....

                                                                  The Sea of Faith

                                                                   Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

                                                                   Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

                                                                   But now I only hear

                                                                   Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

                                                                   Retreating, to the breath

                                                                   Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

                                                                   And naked shingles of the world.........

The poem is suffused with sadness, regret and unease at the ebbing of Christian Faith among the intelligentsia of his day, including himself.

How far removed from Arnold’s sensitive regret and unease at Faith’s retreat, is the response shown today to its continuing decline by so many gurus in the media. Faith is widely decried, diminished and despised. Its demise is predicted and anticipated with relish. The influence of the Christian Faith upon our civilization is portrayed as largely inimical, and it is not infrequently argued that loss of faith will improve the world enormously.

Behind much of the apparent fervour and glee displayed in publicising the Church’s failures, behind much of the hounding of a Governor General who happened to be a bishop, behind much of the chronicling of sexually wayward priests and of the absurdities of fanaticism and fundamentalism, lies an ignorant hatred of the Christian Faith that is disturbing, and annoying as well as very often stupid.

Our civilization arises largely out of the Christian faith. Christianity has provided not only most of its foundation stones, but also much of its cement. The continuing decline in Faith will have and indeed is having incalculable consequences.

To replace as role models the extravagantly self-sacrificing Saints of old with the extravagantly self-indulgent pop stars of today, is bound to have enormous and almost certainly regrettable consequences. To swap sacrificing Love’s great symbol the Cross for the logo of MacDonald’s or Nike likewise. A retreat from the awe and reverence associated with traditional worship of God into navel gazing, self obsession and narcissism could well be as dangerous as it is deplorable. Even today’s widespread concern for the environment often seems to be based less upon its God given beauty and intrinsic worth, than upon a carefully orchestrated fear for our future. This reveals it to be as essentially selfish (and so no less absurd) as primitive Faith’s use of the fear of hell and damnation to frighten people into goodness!

The catalogue of reasons for regretting Faith’s decline rather than rejoicing at it could be extended for pages. I resist the temptation in order to point to an irony that arises out of Arnold’s great poem.

The only answer that Arnold in his poem finds to the sadness that arises within him at the Sea of Faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...”, is human love.....

                                                                   Ah, love, let us be true

                                                                   To one another! for the world, which seems

                                                                   To lie before us like a land of dreams,

                                                                   So various, so beautiful, so new,

                                                                   Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

                                                                   Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

                                                                   And we are here as on a darkling plain

                                                                   Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

                                                                   Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Well, human love might indeed in Arnold’s day have still seemed to provide some sort of consolation and realistic substitute for love of God, but only because the Christian view of married love as lifelong, exclusive, faithful and sacrificial was still largely aspired to if not always adhered to. Now, however, the retreating tide of faith has washed that view of marriage and human love away.

Wherein then lies any consolation in the brave new liberal world of our faithless intelligentsia? Nowhere. So stand firm in the faith!

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (8)

How very early are the promises of spring in this part of the world.

Blackbirds, ravens and owls

On returning from the church to the rectory on Wednesday morning, while it was still dark, having let Geoff in to say his prayers and have a cup of tea, I heard the first blackbird song of the season. This is always a great joy to me, because not only is it a very lovely song, it also brings the England of my childhood back to me.

The two great ravens that have nested for the last couple of years in the large gum tree on the front lawn have also been swaggering and lumbering about for several weeks, preparing for their brood. On the same Wednesday that I heard the first blackbird song I also observed a barn owl, disturbed from its roost in the little fountain garden on the south side of the church. Pursued by the ravens it flew insouciantly and silently into one of the Maude Street plane trees, disdainful of the ravens. Then it turned its pale, wide face to me, didn’t like what if saw, and glided off.

I like the thought of owls about the church. Perhaps because they symbolically emphasise the ancient wisdom of which our church is the guardian. I have heard and seen boobook owls about the church before, but never a barn owl.

Myles Coverdale

Wednesday and Saturday mornings are good for another reason. We say Morning Prayer from the old 1662 Book of Common Prayer and I particularly love its version of the psalms. They come from the very first complete English version of the Bible, which was produced by Myles Coverdale (1488 – 1569). To me their music is incomparable.

In Psalm 59 there is talk of the wicked grinning like a dog and running about through the city. They.... run here and there for meat : and grudge if they be not satisfied. It is a memorable and apt simile because dogs at rest, with their mouths open and their great pink tongues resting on their teeth, do indeed look as if they are grinning a mirthless grin; and sometimes, like the wicked, they do appear to grudge if they be not satisfied.

Dogs in the ancient world

Certainly the sorts of dogs that the Israelites kept would have. There is very little reason to suppose that the ancient Jews kept dogs as pets in the sense of having warm relation-ships with them, of the sort that I have with my cantankerous Pippin. The Egyptians did though. Hundreds of carefully mummified dogs have been discovered in the tombs of Egypt.

In the bible references to dogs are all uncomplimentary, and the word dog, like the word bitch to us, is a term of contempt and abuse, reserved usually for enemies, the wicked and particularly for the gentiles.

There were house-dogs in ancient Israel, it seems, but even so, all references to them in the bible lead us to suppose that dogs, by and large, were scavengers, pi-dogs, waiting to eat, for example, the dead body of Jezebel, thrown in all her finery from an upstairs window.

Psalm 68 puts us graphically in the picture by praying that the King’s foot: ............. may be dipped in the blood of his enemies and that the tongue of his dogs may be red through the same.

Jesus and dogs

It is startling that Jesus in the Gospels is reported as applying the term “dog” to people in his conversation with a Canaanite woman in distress. It is not fair, he says to her, to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs, that is, to the Gentiles.

Although he is depicted as being open to and accepting of the Gentiles in his healings and in his parables, be they the Samaritans, Roman Centurions or whoever, he none-theless did appear to see his mission, as exclusively to the Jews. So much so that in talking to this non-Jewish woman, he picks up the dismissive Jewish phrase for Gentiles in current usage, “dogs”.

We have no way of knowing with what nuance, inflection or tone he invested the insulting words. Judging from his sympathetic attitude to non-Jews, such as to the Roman Centurion, and from his teaching in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, it is not unreasonable to suppose that his tone in this case would have been such as to render it acceptable and non-insulting. Perhaps it was said with obvious irony, eyebrows raised, as if to say: “Fancy you, of all people, asking help of a hated Jew, knowing, as you must, how we Jews regard you as dogs.... Is it fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs...”

Certainly the woman appeared to take no offense, for she grasped Jesus’ metaphor and wittily elaborated it: Ah yes sir, but even dogs can eat the scraps which fall from their master’s table, and Jesus is amazed at the faith and acceptance of this Gentile,

Universalism versus exclusivity

Jesus did, for the most part, confine his teaching to the Jews. So much so, that after his Resurrection and Ascension, the Church’s first big internal argument was over whether or not his Gospel should continue to be preached only to Jews, or to everyone.

Universalism won, probably as much on the strength of Jesus’ willingness to drop scraps of healing, sympathy and acceptance from his Jewish table to the gentiles, as from the very strong advocacy of St Paul. So the Gentiles were welcomed in, and invited to dine at the Christian altar. They were not expected to subsist on mere scraps dropped from that table. From the time of the Emperor Constantine, Western society as a whole, has sat round the Lord’s table, and has fed on the bread of Christ.

Christ and his values have nourished our civilization. The candles on the altar have lightened our history, and bread from the altar has sustained our culture.

Falling away

Since the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the gradual and then swifter parting and distancing of our culture from Christianity, crumbs from the altar none-theless have continued falling down through the centuries and humankind has picked and chosen and gobbled selectively. We continue to do so even now, in the twenty first century, a century in which affluence and materialism have contributed to a massive retreat from Christendom and faith.

The vast majority in our society is not of the faith at all, is not of Christ, but rather, like the Samaritans and Gentiles of days gone by, is composed of dogs picking and choosing randomly from the scraps falling from the master’s table. It is small consolation that in the evening of their lives they often return, grin like a dog ...running here and there for meat (in the form of a good funeral) and grudge if they be not satisfied.

Muslims are right

There was an interesting article in the ‘Spectator’ some time ago that was headed: Muslims are right about Britain. It pointed out just how vile, decadent and far from Christian grace our Western societies have fallen: The alienation felt by young blacks and Asians is not a result of any intolerance shown towards them, but of the endless tolerance of those who would allow everything and stand up for nothing. It is the excesses permitted by a culture.... that have produced a generation that feels rootless and hopeless. The young crave noble purposes as children need discipline; neither get much of them in modern Britain and the void is filled by disrespect, fecklessness, mindless nihilism or, worse, wicked militancy....

.....Safely gated, the liberal elite .....Voyeuristically feed the masses with “Big Brother” and legislate to allow 24-hour drunkenness. In answer to the desperate call for much needed restraint, we hear from those with power only the shrill cry for ever more unbridled liberty.

The candles on the altar have blown out, darkness closes in. Even the crumbs of bread, the mere scraps, have all but stopped falling. Look around our church, all those empty spaces. Where are our children? Where are all those adults who twenty years ago were here? They’ve dribbled away into a sort of gutless, mindless, petulant hedonism, they haven’t even had the guts to stop believing, they’ve just dribbled idly and spinelessly away, blind to and uncaring of their part in what promises to be a disaster.

A weasel word

After a funeral some weeks ago I was momentarily flattered when a woman said to me, “What a truly wonderful homily you preached.....I am an Anglican who doesn’t practice, you almost persuaded me to come back.....” But that word “almost’ is a weasel word on the lips of a hundred rodents, or rather, in the context of this column, a hundred dogs who have similarly deserted Christendom’s sinking ship over the past twenty years.

They will deserve Sharia law when it is triumphant, and compared to the selfish, sentimental slushiness of their own faux morality, they might even find it bracing.

As for me, as for us, we’ll hold on to the Gospel of love, of dutiful, sacrificing, beautiful, tough love.... and, unfailingly present at the altar every week, we’ll reach out for more than a crumb, more than a scrap, we’ll reach out for Love incarnate and so continue to fight the good fight of faith.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (9)

Andrew Neaum

A busy week in prospect makes for a fragile day off. My study desk calls me from more restful pursuits to tackle looming tasks well ahead of time so that they don’t get on top of me. I need Diana back home to declare my desk out of bounds.

Second hand roast

I did manage a happy hour or two in the kitchen on Monday morning. So absorbed was I that I forgot to take my car to be serviced. One of my current enthusiasms is concocting little meat balls in a variety of flavours, and cooking them in a rich sauce. With Elizabeth, Nathan and the girls over for the weekend, primarily for Elizabeth to play the organ on Sunday, we had enjoyed a roast leg of lamb. This meant that there were its remains to do something creative with. I decided to attempt the almost impossible, and turn it into something that didn’t declare itself to be inadequately disguised second-hand roast meat, no favourite of mine.

When we were children our parents served up the remains of Sunday’s roast in all sorts of time-honoured ways that never, ever really disguised the fact that it remained what we children called “dead meat”, with its unmistakable and less than lovely taste. The week’s first serving was usually cold slices of Sunday joint with hot vegetables, not at all favoured by us children. The heated vegies made the meat sweat, but didn’t resurrect it to anything like the joys of the fresh roasted delights of Sunday.

The next day the meat might well be minced and very modestly spiced to make stuffed tomatoes. These were not too bad and infinitely preferable to stuffed marrow, the blandest of insipid meals, always served with a horrible white sauce and with the second-hand, cold-meat flavour still very evident.

The following day, if the joint had been large, there might well be cottage pie, which in my youth was never ever made with fresh mince, but always with the Sunday joint. Again the second-hand flavour of the meat was very noticeable, though liberal dashes of Worcester sauce did help disguise it. An alternative which was possibly worst of all, was what my mother considered a delicious curry. Little cubes of hard Sunday joint floating in a yellow gruel, along with bloated raisons and pieces of onion. The banality of this was ameliorated slightly by it being always served up with slices of banana, a mixture of raw diced tomato and onion, desiccated coconut and pulverised peanuts.

My mother was a very fine cook. It was just second, third and fourth hand Sunday joint that defeated her.

It is little wonder then that one of my great culinary goals, a sort of cooking holy grail, has been to discover how to disguise the distinctive taste of cold roast. Minced and made into small meat balls with an equal amount of good quality sausage meat, plus coriander, parsley, a little lemon zest and a couple of chillies is just the ticket. This, when cooked in a rich pulse and tomato sauce is splendid. I ate well on Monday night and have five double meals frozen in the fridge for future busy weeks such as this one.

Funerals and “poverty”

The middle of Monday was taken up by a funeral. Although all the preparation for this one had been done the week before, funerals are always a little draining. This is not least because I am obsessive about not being platitudinous and so actually try to say something worth listening to in my homilies. I then wonder if I haven’t said something unappreciated, because a lot of people desire the platitudinous and conventional, especially at such times.

In the afternoon my study desk caught and held me, though not for church work. I tackled my tax return, discovering that with the crashed share market my savings and superannuation have diminished by thousands and thousands of dollars. Ho hum! The Rectory might have to be my retirement home after all. I will not use my losses as an excuse not to raise my giving in response to the Stewardship Campaign. Anyone who tries that ploy on me will get a coldly withering and contemptuous stare!

The census and the Post Office

I filled in my census form on line. This was beautifully easy and satisfying. The only down side was that I wanted to put a dozen ticks next to “Anglican”, but online this was impossible.

I took a large envelope to post at the Post Office on Tuesday and on discovering that I was five cents short of the sum necessary for its posting, the Post Officer let me off, instead of requiring me to break into a note! I was impressed. It seemed a tiny example of someone understanding in a secular context that the Sabbath is made for man, rather than man for the Sabbath.

Inclusive language

I have to confess that I dislike much inclusive language. Especially in hymns. Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, changed by the tin-eared editors of our hymn book to Dear Father Lord of humankind annoys me beyond telling. One of my favourite hymns, with the superb descant we sang a couple of weeks ago, is Holy Holy Holy. So unbearable is our new hymn book’s version I have to put the old one in the pew sheet for us to sing. The new one encourages me to contemplate suicide.

In writing articles these days you are expected to violate basic rules of grammar to avoid giving offence to the hypersensitive or the ideologues! We are expected to use third person plural personal pronouns such as “they,” “their,” or “them,” to refer back to an indefinite singular antecedent like “everybody”. For example: “Everybody should be aware of their [rather than his] right to do whatever......”

Language should be allowed to change and develop organically rather than be forced to by ideology. In saying this I expose myself as a hopeless fuddy duddy and would probably be denied a degree if studying at university, because inclusive language is de rigeur in such institutions these days.

The plea to change the definition of marriage to include homosexuals is a similar case of ideology forcing language to change. I have nothing against homosexual partnerships enjoying equal rights with heterosexual partnerships, indeed I would encourage this and be happy to bless such partnerships, but marriage, by definition, is between a man and a woman. Heterosexuals have copyright on the word.

My opposition will have no effect. The ideologues will win the day and so whenever in discussion or writing there is a need to discriminate between what are two very different sorts of relationship, we will have to resort of circumlocution or the invention of a new word. Grrrrr! From ideologues and fanatics, good Lord deliver us.

The return

All appears well with Diana’s visa applications. We gather that the major one, which is to become a permanent resident, is likely to be issued (with all its provisos and its “temporary” preliminaries) in late November. She will return to Australia on the 26th of August on a different, three month visitors’ visa, which should last a few days beyond the November date. Because she can only receive the major visa outside of the country we plan a short holiday in New Zealand for late November. Hopefully all will synchronise.

London’s burning

How fragile our society seems. The share market collapse and the riots in London, remind us how easily things can fall apart. As I write this, early on Tuesday morning, the little round we used to sing as school children comes to mind:

                                                                   London’s burning, London’s burning

                                                                   Look yonder, look yonder,

                                                                   Fire, fire. Fire, fire.

                                                                   Pour on water, pour on water.

Deracinated yobbos are not confined to distant parts of the world. They are every-where. Believers in the sweet reasonableness of human nature, like the “new atheists”, who appear convinced that we need to cleanse humankind (inclusive word out of courtesy to those for whom it is important) of all religion and superstition, need to look carefully at such arsonists, looters and wreckers.

It is not religion or superstition that motivate the mobs. We are told that it is deprivation, well yes, in part perhaps, but it is also because “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” and needs redemption.

My favourite Dickens novel is Barnaby Rudge, a fascinating read which is really a historical novel about the Gordon Riots of 1780. During this riot the rioters daubed the slogan “His Majesty King Mob” on the walls of Newgate prison, after gutting the building. I fear that this is one monarch who never dies.

Beauty

My granddaughters were with me this weekend. Beautiful beyond words. R S Thomas, curmudgeon and Anglican priest does his beautiful and elusive best though:

                                                                            Children’s Song

                                                                   We live in our own world,

                                                                   A world that is too small

                                                                   For you to stoop and enter

                                                                   Even on hands and knees,

                                                                   The adult subterfuge.

                                                                   And though you probe and pry

                                                                   With analytic eye,

                                                                   And eavesdrop all our talk

                                                                   With an amused look,

                                                                   You cannot find the centre

                                                                   Where we dance, where we play,

                                                                   Where life is still asleep

                                                                   Under the closed flower,

                                                                   Under the smooth shell

                                                                   Of eggs in the cupped nest

                                                                   That mock the faded blue

                                                                   Of your remoter heaven.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (10)

Andrew Neaum

I rather like the idea of composing my own funeral oration. I wonder how truthful I would dare to be.

Autobiography is usually less truthful and revealing than biography. This is because self-regard and pride tend towards a selectivity with the facts and truths about one’s personality and life that preclude any pretence to dispassionate truth. A funeral oration written by oneself is likely to suffer from the same faults.

In the case of funeral orations and eulogies, left to the bereaved however love, grief and sometimes guilt tend to result in far too close an adherence to the principle de mortuis nihil nisi bonum (speak no ill of the dead) and so the person eulogised is often all but unrecognisable for who they really were.

I like to think that even in my self-love I would be far harder and more truthful about myself than anyone who loved me half as much.

One of my many favourite, excellent, but relatively minor poets is a fellow called John Heath-Stubbs. He died in 2006 and for much of his life was totally blind. In his comparative youth he wrote an Epitaph on himself which I love. It begins as follows:

                                                                   Mr Heath-Stubbs as you must understand

                                                                   Came of a gentleman’s family out of Staffordshire

                                                                   Of as good blood as any in England

                                                                   But he was wall-eyed and his legs too spare.

                                                                   His elbows and finger-joints could bend more ways than one

                                                                   And in frosty weather would creak audibly

                                                                   As to delight his friends he would give demonstration

                                                                   Which he might have done in public for a small fee.

My favourite stanza, often quoted because it is as applicable to me as a university student as to him, goes:

                                                                   Orthodox in beliefs as following the English Church

                                                                   Barring some heresies he would have for recreation

                                                                   Yet too often left these sound principles (as I am told) in the lurch

                                                                   Being troubled with idleness, lechery, pride and dissipation.

The final stanza:

                                                                   Now having outlived his friends and most of his reputation

                                                                   He is content to take his rest under these stones and grass

                                                                   Not expecting but hoping that the Resurrection

                                                                   Will not catch him unawares whenever it takes place.

Planning a funeral

These observations and reflections result from leading a discussion on “planning a funeral” for our “Grief Support Group”a couple of weeks ago. There was a good crowd present to share a meal as well as ideas, and it was altogether a good and enjoyable evening, a pleasing mixture of humour, honesty and genuine feeling.

Right at the beginning someone suggested that it is far preferable at a funeral to celebrate the life of a deceased loved one than to mourn his demise. I do not entirely agree.

Grief needs to be acknowledged not ignored. Merely to celebrate a life now past, done for and finished with, can be evasive, a cop out, a cowardly refusal to face the devastating reality and totality of loss. I cannot bear histrionics, choked blubbering and emotional incontinence, but satisfying funerals tell the whole story not just part of it.

To make my point I read a splendid, tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless honest verse by Roger McGough. It comes from his latest collection: That Awkward Age.

                                                                                  I Am Not Sleeping

                                                                            I don’t want any of that

                                                                            “We’re gathered here today

                                                                            to celebrate his life, not mourn his passing.”

                                                                            Oh yes you are. Get one thing straight,

                                                                            you’re not here to celebrate

                                                                            but to mourn until it hurts.

                                                                            I want wailing and gnashing of teeth.

                                                                            I want sobs, and I want them

                                                                            uncontrollable. I want women

                                                                            flinging themselves on the coffin

                                                                            and I want them inconsolable.

                                                                            Don’t dwell on my past but on your future.

                                                                            For what you see is what you’ll be

                                                                            and sooner than you think.

                                                                            So get weeping. Fill yourselves with dread.

                                                                            For I am not sleeping. I am dead.

The Wager

A recent funeral was of a splendid and lovely old fellow who for many years had been an S P bookie. This form of book-making was of course illegal and associated with corruption and crime. Judging from the character of the man I buried, however, there was a side to the activity that had less to do with crime and corruption than with that attractive, laid-back, anti-the-authorities side of the Australian character we know as larrikinism.

To bury such a fellow enabled me, with some delight, to link gambling to theology in my little homily which ended as follows:

“In the eighteenth century there lived a remarkable French mathematician, physicist and philosopher called Blaise Pascal. Among many, many achievements he anticipated in his mathematical speculations the computer, but he is also famous for a simple argument for believing in God which has fascinated philosophers down through the ages.

“I mention this because Dave (the deceased) was a bookie, a man well versed in betting, wagering and gambling, and Pascal’s famous argument is called “The Wager”

“It has been simply put as follows: God is, or God is not. So a Game is being played where either heads or tails will turn up.

“According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions. You have to wager. It is not optional.

“So, says Pascal, let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. So wager, without hesitation, that He is.

“It is a bit more complicated than that, actually, but my point is to honour a good bookie at his funeral with a religious, philosophical, theological bet.... not to expound an argument. So that will do.

“And I will end with another wager. I bet all of you, a hundred to one, that Dave will pass through the mythical Pearly Gates with ease....

“Rest in Peace, old fellow, and rise in Glory. Amen.”

Coincidences

I was telling Diana on the phone about Pascal’s Wager, and the very next day, she later informed me, while listening to the radio, she heard it expounded, much as I had expounded it, in a conversation between two radio jocks. How gratifying to realise that the BBC is behind me, not ahead of me. How coincidental too.

Last Sunday was Diana’s birthday. After Dookie and Katandra services I made my way to Benalla where not only did we raise a glass in her honour, over an excellent evening meal, but we also celebrated the birthday of the family cat (and its twin who resides next door) with afternoon tea. Neighbours and friends joined us, and a single-candled cake (eggless and satisfyingly tacky because little Susan has a minor allergy to eggs) was brought ceremoniously in for the candle to be lit, blown out, relit and blown out until every little child present had had a go.

Here, however, lies another strange coincidence. Not only does the family cat share a birthday with Diana, it is also, quite by chance called Artemis. Artemis, you will of course be aware, was not only one of the most venerated of all ancient Greece’s deities, but her Roman equivalent is Diana!

There is a passage in the Acts of the Apostles that fascinated me as a child. Chapter nineteen tells of St Paul’s time in Ephesus and how a riot was initiated by the local silversmiths, alarmed at St Paul’s success in turning people away from idols and so damaging their trade in silver shrines to Diana. The mob, we are told, shouted frenziedly over and over again, for three hours: Great is Diana of the Ephesians. Modern translations, to my nostalgia fuelled chagrin, change this to Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. I appear to be soft on Diana.

Rest in Peace Pippin

Pippin the Rectory dog is no more. On Sunday morning she very suddenly became groggy on her feet, refused to eat and started moping. On Monday afternoon the vet discovered a cancer in her bladder and so she was sent off gently and permanently to sleep. What a gap she leaves after being so much a part of the family for fourteen years. Rachel was still at primary school when she arrived as an irresistible puppy. Her greatest achievement, certainly in her own eyes, was catching a wild rabbit after a frenzied chase in a paddock alongside the Murray river. In our eyes it was simply being who she was.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (11)

Andrew Neaum

Last Monday I managed to shake myself free from my study to spend most of the day in the garden. In the evening, however, I sneaked back to my desk. My purpose was to visit that happy no mans land between work and play, privileged territory in the life of a parish priest for whom vocation and recreation so frequently merge.

F X Mozart

I went looking on the internet for music that might be suitable for the choir. There is an excellent site called "ChoralWiki" which offers a great variety of free sheet music that has simply to be downloaded. I search for melodic music in two parts that is not too elaborate or difficult, but which will challenge as well as delight us. One of my discoveries was a little piece for two soprano parts by one of Mozart's two sons, a person of whom I was only dimly aware, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (1791–1844).

He was born in Vienna only five months before his father's tragically early death and received an excellent musical education from three composers dear to my heart, Antonio Salieri (much maligned in the film Amadeus), Johann Nepomuk Hummel (of whose fine music I have several disks) and Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (whom I love beyond telling because he wrote several delightful, if unlikely, concertos for Jewish Harp).

Like his father, Franz Xaver Mozart started to compose at an early age. He became a professional musician, but enjoyed only moderate success, both as a teacher and a performer. Unlike his father, he was apparently introverted and given to self- deprecation. He constantly underrated his talent and feared that whatever he produced would be unfavourably compared with what his father had done. He never married, nor did he have any children.

What really interested me, however, was just how large the shadow of his father loomed over him. Etched upon his tombstone is an inscription that is both moving and telling. I sent it off to my daughter Rachel in an email as follows.......

Dear Ray,

Should you ever be puzzling over what sort of epitaph you might prepare for yourself, you might take as your blue print that of Mozart's son: "May the name of his father be his epitaph, as his veneration for him was the essence of his life."

Love, Me (as I know you do!)

She was so delighted with it that she posted it, just as I sent it, on Facebook!

The patron saint of tanners

Wednesday last week was St Bartholomew's Day and so I couldn't resurrect an old sermon to preach to the good folk who come to the 10.00am Eucharist. This was because among my nine hundred and fifty sermons on file there is not a single one devoted to St Bart.

This being so I did a bit of very speedy research and produced a work of startling unoriginality. Except that is for one thing.

The New Testament is not very forthcoming about St Bartholomew. He is listed in all three Synoptic Gospels (i.e. in St Matthew, St Mark and St Luke) and his name there is linked to St Philip.

In St John's Gospel there is no St Bartholomew at all, but there is St Nathaniel who is also linked to St Philip and so it is assumed that they are one and the same person. There is also a little snippet or two of information about Nathaniel. He is described as initially being sceptical about the Messiah coming from a place like Nazareth, and so commenting, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?", but he accepts Philip's invitation to meet Jesus and Jesus immediately characterizes him as "a man in whom there is no guile." Nathanael, in turn, acknowledges Jesus as "the Son of God" and "the King of Israel". He also reappears at the end of St John's gospel as one of the disciples to whom Jesus appeared at the Sea of Galilee after the Resurrection.

All of which is interesting enough and sufficient to inspire a sermon of startling unoriginality. However early Church traditions and legends supply more interesting material.

For example, it is claimed that St Bartholomew was martyred by being skinned alive and then beheaded. As a consequence he is often depicted in art with a large knife, holding his own skin. Little wonder then that he is the patron saint of tanners!

All of which means that instead of the accompaniment of a piano for our offertory hymn last Wednesday we should have used a digeridoo and sung:

                                                                            Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred,

                                                                            tan me hide when I'm dead.

                                                                            So we tanned his hide when he died Clyde,

                                                                            And that's it hanging on the shed......

Ozzification

The trouble with the lovely little piece of music I have discovered by F X Mozart is that it is in German, and although it starts with a familiar piece of scripture which means that I can translate it, loses me thereafter. To suggest that our choir sings German is too much. We try a bit of Latin now and then, always so well ozzified you would never recognise it as such, and in our lovely setting of the Reproaches we try to get our tongues around a little Greek, again well ozzified. German would be a step too far.

Some time ago I took a secular drinking song with German words that was composed by Salieri and replaced them with my own. This is a far more difficult task than you might imagine. They say, for example, that Handel (being a German by birth) is far inferior as a setter of English texts than is Henry Purcell, a native Englishman, because the latter skilfully unites the natural rhythms of English to music more delicately and perfectly than Handel. There is far more to the task than simply assigning syllables to notes! I was able to perform the task with my Salieri drinking song because the text I used consisted of only one word: Alleluia!

At Diana's suggestion I am considering sending the F X Mozart piece to the fine musician who composed the Recessional for our wedding (a contrapuntal dialogue between Rule Britannia and Waltzing Matilda), whose wife is German speaking. She would be well able to translate the words and he could then fit the words to the music for me admirably I am sure. All for a bottle of the best Australian red. We shall see.

Patti Matthews

From September the Reverend Patti Matthews from Euroa will be coming up to work for our parish one day a week, on Thursdays. This is an example of parochial cooperation and mutual support that should be a sign of hope for our whole diocese and a possible model for the future.

Euroa is having what we trust is only temporary difficulty in paying for full time priestly ministry. We in Shepparton, with the extending and deepening of our parish life that comes from linking up to Murchison and Rushworth, are finding ourselves stretched to the very limit ministry wise, especially if one of the two of our stipendiary clergy is on leave.

By Patti coming to Shepparton to do mostly nursing home and hospital duties, (which carry little if any homework) she will assist us where we sorely need assistance and we will provide much needed cash for her own parish. The cost to our parish is more or less met by an impost upon Murchison and Rushworth to which they have readily acquiesced. Patti is a delightful and accomplished priest and so is yet another priestly presence to add to what is already a very talented team of full time and honorary clergy.

The arrangement with Euroa will be reviewed at the end of the year to assess how well it is working.

The flip side

It is all very well to herald and celebrate approaching spring's first blackbird song or daffodil, but I have just heard the drone of the first blow fly (duly hunted down and messily squashed) and already there are cabbage white butterflies laying their crisp little eggs on the leaves of my turnips and cabbage, grrr!

When people are bed-ridden and approaching their end I sometimes suggest to them that they remember walks they used to make when children. From home to school, perhaps, so as to stroll them again in their imagination, remembering particular puddles, trees and whatever. To do so can bring all sorts of blessings and graces and is a way out of the boredom that so easily immobilises immobility.

There are some lovely walks in Shepparton. Possibly the most beautiful to me is the one I make on so many early mornings from the priests' vestry in St Augustine's, down the dark, narrow, arched ambulatory to the glittering oasis that is the Lady Chapel to celebrate Mass. It is a little walk to be savoured, relished, and etched deeply in one's imagination for future happy recall. It brings with it deeply appreciated hints and suggestions of cloisters, monks and medievalism, and the glittering, candle-flickering Lady-Chapel of the exotic Eastern Church, Constantinople, Byzantium.

Why bother?

Why do I bother to write this diary column? Firstly because I enjoy doing so. Secondly because in a parish with a variety of congregations in different locations, it is a way of having a word with everyone even, when I am not present on Sundays. Thirdly because I myself enjoy the diary columns I regularly read in The Spectator. There is something satisfying and perhaps even important about taking what is largely inconsequential or fleeting and granting it significance, meaning and consequence, simply by drawing attention to it.

This, in a sense, is what prayer is about. Daily life is usually far too busy to ruminate much over all the commonplace encounters, occurrences and events that make it up. To set apart a time to be quiet in order to do just that, to ruminate, remember and notice what is ordinary allows us to discover and detect meaning, significance, goodness, pattern, purpose and God. It also enables us to respond with genuine penitence, praise, gratitude, intercession and action.

This week's column has pulled from the oblivion that is my fading memory, a Monday spent in the garden, an encounter with F.X Mozart and his rather sad though moving epitaph, my daughter Rachel, Jewish Harp concertos, the patron saint of tanners, Rolf Harris, Purcell, Handel, Patti Matthews, blow flies, cabbage white butterflies and much else. Simply to single them out is to honour them, invest them with significance, and to be grateful for so much to be found in so little. Deo gratias.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (12)

Last Sunday was our wedding anniversary. We celebrated it the night before with a succulent, though amusingly minuscule, rack of lamb. On the actual day, after peaceful services at Dookie and Katandra, we ate a picnic lunch on heavily lichened, granite boulders atop a hill that overlooked glorious countryside, a patchwork of golden canola and livid-green wheat paddocks. The sun was warm, the breeze cool and a flock of sheep baaed peacefully, apparently unaware or possibly just astonishingly forgiving of the previous evening’s rack of lamb.

After a short snooze lullabied by sheep song, we walked the Warbies, encountering on our way out and again on our way back, a large, ferocious looking goanna, and Diana was introduced to one of those fascinating hugger mugger clusters of spitfires on a small gum tree. They appeared to be spitting something rather more noxious than fire.

We then headed to Benalla for a splendid meal with Peter, Elizabeth, Nathan, Meg and Susan.

From then on it was all downhill. A week with two funerals as well as a whole day extracted for meetings in Wangaratta collected yet another funeral. It is hardly appropriate to complain though, it is, after all, what I am called to and paid for.

Matters monetary

What a pleasure to receive a condolence note from the Vet upon the death of Pippin. The pleasure was diluted somewhat by the enclosure with it of a bill for $320.

How delightful as well to chinwag with and open my mouth to the dentist for five minutes at a cost of $52 and with the promise of more action and many, many more dollars to come in a few week’s time. Interestingly, however, is that the charge of the dentist has not inflated too hugely over the years. $50 for five minutes is $10 a minute and 16 cents a second. About fifteen years ago it was 10 cents a second. This I know this because I celebrated it in a piece of aggrieved light verse as follows:

                                                                                      Ten Cents a Second! Flaming Hell!

                                                                                      With barefaced gall and practised ease,

                                                                                      My dentist, for his expertise,

                                                                                      At my last visit charged per second,

                                                                                      (I’ve worked it out, it’scarefully reckoned)

                                                                                      Ten cents!And with a smile as well.

                                                                                      Ten cents a second! Flaming hell!

                                                                                      So just a minute’s idle chat,

                                                                                      To laugh with me at this and that

                                                                                      Or sixty seconds idle patter

                                                                                      Or sixty seconds worth of chatter

                                                                                      Mean I’ve bid goodbye, farewell

                                                                                      To six good dollars! Flaming hell!

                                                                                      Meddling in an orifice

                                                                                      Shouldn’t cost as much as this,

                                                                                      For filling teeth and fitting dentures

                                                                                      Is hardly one of life’s great ventures!

                                                                                      Can scarcely cause a head to swell.

                                                                                      Ten cents a second! Flaming hell!

Viva boredom

A novel way of commending churchgoing to the reluctant could well be to talk up the value of boredom. Children these days are hugely intolerant of boredom. One of their greatest putdowns is to say “boring!” with the first syllable attenuated and given exaggerated emphasis. When not being ferried by car (because there could well be a paedophile behind every tree) to school, or ballet, or football, or music lessons, or tennis, or parties, or the cinema, they are glued to a mobile phone, games console or computer screen.

How unusual then, how novel, salutary and altogether beneficial must be a trip to church to be bored witless for an hour or more! It encourages the growth and development of the imagination. I have spent hours and hours of hours of my life in church. Many of those hours, I have to confess, bored me, but not witless or to tears, rather to the development of my imagination and a rich inner life!

I remember with great pleasure during one sermon on Tristan da Cunha, my brother and myself as little boys licking our black prayer books to make them shiny. We learned that it not only blackened our tongues and tasted not unpleasingly acrid, but that is also, eventually, bubbled and faded the prayer books to a most useful unsightliness which rendered them unattractive to the thousands of thieves so prone to and desirous of stealing Books of Common Prayer.

The greater the number of children in church, the more imperative it is that the priest be boring! All this bending over backwards to be stimulating, innovative, attractive, and relevant is to the detriment of little ones. Viva boredom!

The bell of Ararat

When I first arrived in Australia, about twenty six years or so ago, I spent three months as an assistant priest in the parish of which four years later I became Rector, Ararat. On my first morning I made my way over to church to say mattins and to celebrate the Eucharist with my Rector and a local retired priest. Before going in to church I automatically went over to the bell gantry and gave the big church bell thirty three good rings.

This was something I did with such meticulous regularity on the Island of St Helena that many islanders maintained they used to get up in the morning to the bell’s ring. I liked to think that those hard working souls who, as the author of Ecclesiasticus says, maintain the fabric of the world, and whose prayer is the handiwork of their craft, were reminded by the bell’s daily ring that their parish priest was offering verbal prayer and the Eucharist on their behalf and for their welfare.

Only once did I fail to ring the bell on time. That was on the morning that my St Helenian daughter Elizabeth was born. As good an excuse as a married priest could ever find for dereliction of duty.

On my second morning in the Australian parish of Ararat, as on the first morning, I again gave the bell thirty three good rings. Just as I finished, the door of a nearby house burst open and the raucous voice of a local harridan, a female equivalent of Barry Mackenzie, ripped the air apart and poured appalling abuse and calumny upon my head for so disturbing the peace! My Rector refused to let me call the harridan’s bluff and so Ararat, sadly, never grew accustomed to being woken by the tolling of a Matin Chime.

Bells of Shepparton, Swindon & Oxford

Shepparton is more civilized. Every morning at a quarter to eight, our sonorous bell, fittingly the most pleasing sounding bell in all of Shepparton, just as our church is the most pleasing building, rings out thirty three dongs, one for each of Jesus of Nazareth’s years of life.

I love bells. So did that most attractive of Anglicans, John Betjeman. His blank-verse autobiographical poem is entitled Summoned By Bells. I too have been summoned to worship many times by glorious peals of bells in lovely English country towns and villages. Diana is an accomplished bell ringer and like all such finds well hung belfries irresistible. Bells peal throughout Betjeman’s verse, one of his poems is called: On Hearing the Full Peal of Ten Bells from Christ Church, Swindon, Wilts., an admirable mouthful of a title for a poem. It is bettered by that of another of his splendid verses: Church of England Thoughts Occasioned by Hearing the Bells of Magdalene Tower from the Botanic Gardens, Oxford on St Mary Magdalene’s Day, which really is a mouthful, here are a few lines........

                                                                                      ....A multiplicity of bells,

                                                                                      A changing cadence, rich and deep

                                                                                      Swung from those pinnacles on high

                                                                                      To fill the trees and flood the sky

                                                                                      And rock the sailing clouds to sleep.

                                                                                      A Church of England sound, it tells

                                                                                      Of “moderate” worship, God and State,

                                                                                      Where matins congregations go

                                                                                      Conservative and good and slow

                                                                                      To elevations of the plate.

                                                                                      And loud through resin-scented chines

                                                                                      And purple rhododendrons roll’d,

                                                                                      I hear the bells for Eucharist

                                                                                      From churches blue with incense mist

                                                                                      Where reredoses twinkle gold....

A bell in Grahamstown

The bell of my theological college chapel was an awkward brute with a mind of its own. All students were required to take on, in turn, a weekly stint of chapel-bell ringing. To ring the Angelus properly on that College bell, without unwanted extra little pips and pings, required great skill and was a matter of some pride to all the anglo-catholic students. Those of a more protestant persuasion used to delight to make a hash of it!

One student in particular took too great a pride in his efforts though. He had some excuse because he’d developed the art of ringing the angelus on that awkward bell flawlessly. So much so that a prankster climbed the chapel’s roof and tied fishing line to the clapper. The Angelus began: dong, dong, dong.... The first nine rings were meticulously, crisply rung, there followed the customary devotional, reverential, though proud silence, and then suddenly a frenzied, d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.dong, on and on and on as the fishing line was pulled and jerked and pulled! How we, and I hope the angels, laughed.

I once repaired the rope attached to the clapper of the bell on St Helena with the help of a large jubilee clip, and some judicious drilling. A difficult job of which I boasted to Edwy, a bass in the choir and the ringer of the five minute bell. At Evensong the following Sunday, Edwy rang for only three minutes of the requisite five. He then appeared with blood trickling from the bridge of his nose and a reproachful look. My proudly boasted jubilee clip had detached itself and conked him one! Thus, perhaps, my laughter at the sabotaged pride of an Angelus rung many years previously was appropriately avenged!

An African bell

People were summoned to worship in the mission station churches of my youth, in Africa, not by a tolling bell but by the clang of a piece of railway line dangling from a tree branch being banged with a large bolt. This was not a memorably musical sound, but simply to recall it for this little diary column fills me with nostalgia. Not so much for the noise itself, I think, as for the vibrant African worship it promised. So perhaps means have not quite become ends and my love of bells might well be part and parcel of my love and worship of the one true and living God to whom be all honour, praise and glory.

The good Fitz

The amount of quiet, effective work done by Heather Fitzgerald in the parish is astonishing and inspiring. She does it all with quiet grace. As the Stewardship Campaign she has largely coordinated and run, with good help from Dorothy Cook, draws to its close she needs to be acknowledged for the star that she is. A famous sonnet by Keats begins: Bright star, were I as steadfast as thou art...... Indeed.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (13)

Andrew Neaum

It was good to welcome Gail back from her holiday, relaxed, well-shorn and with a set of snazzy wheels. Although delighted to have her back, to my shame I did not welcome her publically last Sunday, and so because she was out at Dookie some of you were unaware of her return. Herewith, then, a belated public welcome back to Gail, already immersed as she is in the maelstrom of parochial activity! Her return enables Diana and myself to go away this weekend, God bless her indeed.

We will be on the road a fair bit, enabling Diana to acquaint herself with more of the best of Australia. Snowy weather permitting we head over the mountains to Malua Bay, south of Bateman's Bay, where my son Peter is house-sitting. This weekend off is also enabled by the arrival in the district of Barry Slatter and his wife. Barry is a priest living and working in England but who with his wife has a property near Katandra. They come out most years for a visit and so the folk at Katandra and Dookie benefit from a different and most amiable priestly presence. Welcome to them too, and many thanks.

Asparagus and love bites

Possibly the most appreciated sign of spring's arrival is a bundle of asparagus spears left hanging on my door knob. The first of many to follow. Lorraine Noonan keeps me well supplied for as long as the season lasts. God bless her.

Asparagus is the most splendid of vegetables. Nowhere in the world have I glutted myself so shamelessly upon it as here in Australia. Until arriving in this fair land I had only experienced the mushy, tinned variety. It was another generous parishioner, Alice Knight of Linton in the parish of Skipton, who first fed me crisp, fresh asparagus. The first crunchy bite proved to be a love bite.

I have a couple of asparagus crowns growing in our garden. They were given to me some years ago by Bev Condon. It is good to have them and I often eat the young spears raw in the garden as I cut them. They go nowhere near to satisfying my voracious appetite for the vegetable though. At the end of the season I allow them to feather, flower and fruit, the foliage turns a beautiful autumn yellow. Apparently the little red berries are poisonous to humans.

Asparagus information

There is evidence of asparagus being eaten 20,000 years ago near Aswan in Egypt. The Greeks and Romans ate it fresh when in season and dried the vegetable for use in winter; apparently the Romans even froze it, high up in the Alps, in order to keep it for the Feast of Epicurius. The Emperor Augustus reserved an "Asparagus Fleet" for hauling the vegetable, and coined the expression "faster than cooking asparagus" for speedy action. The oldest recipe book in the world, Apicius's third century "De re coquinaria", has a recipe for it.

Like Rhino horn it has been celebrated in the East for its aphrodisiacal power and also as a counter for fatigue. By 1469 it was cultivated in French monasteries, though hopefully not for its aphrodisiacal powers. Louis XIV had special greenhouses built for growing it.

One of its most interesting properties is the pong it gives to one's urine, often as soon as fifteen minutes after ingestion. It is for this reason that in England it has sometimes been called "Chamber-maid's horror", though that greatest of French authors, Marcel Proust maintained that it "......transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume." Given the propensity of scientists for idiotic as well as useful research, it is hardly surprising that there have been all sorts of studies of who can smell asparagus-scented urine, who cannot and why.

The Chinese are far and away the largest producers. In 2005 they harvested close to six million tons.

Out to Dookie

Diana and I recently headed out to Dookie and Ian and Jenny Shield's farm to relieve them of a little sheep manure. We have expanded our vegetable garden and I have a long and loving relationship with sheep dung.

In the parish of Skipton, kneeling down in mature manure beneath local shearing sheds to fill bags with the stuff to raise cash for the parish was a regular part of my life. Raking, shovelling, dragging, sweating, toiling at such a task, helped this new immigrant parson to Australianise himself as well as get the sheep and shepherd imagery of the bible into sharper than usual focus.

Manure, Urine and Damp Wool

When a malicious old ewe, standing in the shearing shed above you, voids her capacious bladder through the grating on to your bald head, to the amusement of the parishioners toiling with you, the bible's sheep and shepherd imagery loses some of its romantic aura.

When you bless a fleece in a shearing shed, accompanied by a cacophony of corellas in chorus outside, fidgety sheep as well as fidgety parishioners inside, and with a natural incense rising to God as prayer, not from a thurible, but from a strangely pleasing blend of manure, urine and damp wool, then the sheep and shepherd imagery of the bible is absorbed in a rather more intimate and realistic way.

When you watch sheep castrated in the old fashioned way with the teeth, when you assist in the slaughter and butchering of sheep and observe them sheared, dipped and dosed, the sheep and shepherd imagery of the bible loses the last of its stained-glass sentimentality and is appreciated far more for its gutsy realism.

It all is too easy to be a book-bound, study-bound, lily-white-handed parson; a theorising, hypothesising, theologising parish priest; one obsessed with liturgical minutiae, or with fine points of doctrine, or with diocesan politics or with what General Synod is up to. Particularly if you are the Rector of a wealthy and well endowed suburban parish.

The Authentic Shepherd Stinks of Sheep

The desperation for cash experienced in small country parishes, which is the most debilitating and depressing fact of life, is also, paradoxically the most invigorating. It forces the parson out of his study and away from parsonic preoccupations to get alongside people in all sorts of ingenious schemes, enterprises and undertakings. It enables a mutual and realistic appreciation of each other to begin to grow between parson and people, and allows the bible, theology, liturgy, common worship and prayer to coarsen into the rude vitality of real faith.

An authentic shepherd has to stink of sheep. All of which, when Rector of the little country village of Skipton, I celebrated in verse:

                                                                                       Under a shearing shed

                                                                                                shovelling muck,

                                                                                      Crouching and grunting

                                                                                                and down on his luck,

                                                                                      An Anglican Rector

                                                                                                discovered the way

                                                                                      To keep cash-hungry bishop

                                                                                                and diocese at bay.

                                                                                      The offertory plate

                                                                                                each Sunday was light,

                                                                                      But he didn't despair

                                                                                                 at the pitiful sight,

                                                                                      Or rant and harangue

                                                                                                his faithful few,

                                                                                      He flopped to his knees,

                                                                                                but not in a pew!

                                                                                      Under a shed he got down

                                                                                                to his praying,

                                                                                      In sweat and in effort,

                                                                                                in action not saying;

                                                                                      And so there were filled

                                                                                                lots of offertory sacks,

                                                                                      Piled up high,

                                                                                                a great mountain of stacks.

                                                                                      This wasn't accomplished

                                                                                                completely alone,

                                                                                      He didn't perspire

                                                                                                and beseech on his own.

                                                                                      Parishioners too

                                                                                                came to kneel in the dung,

                                                                                      To pray with their muscle,

                                                                                                not with their tongue.

                                                                                      In Carngham they did it

                                                                                                without their Rector,

                                                                                      Hundreds of sacks

                                                                                                from this hard-working sector,

                                                                                      And in Wallinduc's rain

                                                                                                and in Wallinduc's mud,                                                                                    The hand of Sue Robertson

                                                                                                split and poured blood,

                                                                                      But still she dug on,

                                                                                                with the hard working Netta,

                                                                                      Inspiring the men

                                                                                                to do better and better!

                                                                                      So Christ Church Skipton

                                                                                                was solvent on dung

                                                                                      And happy am I

                                                                                                dung's praise to have sung.

                                                                                      The stuff has its merits

                                                                                                is far from obscene,

                                                                                      Its smell is not noxious,

                                                                                                though pungent its clean,

                                                                                      How well it dissolves

                                                                                                a church's debts

                                                                                      And eases a Rector's

                                                                                                worries and frets.

                                                                                      All praise then for muck,

                                                                                                it's most wonderful stuff,

                                                                                      A church in the bush

                                                                                                simply can't have enough.

                                                                                      Like roses and lilies

                                                                                                we need it to thrive

                                                                                      And keep mother church

                                                                                                fragrant, lovely and live!

Palindromes

I have just been reading a fascinating article on a man who spends nearly every spare minute of his life writing palindromes. He is an American called Barry Duncan and has completed one that is 400 words long, though it was not included in the article. Palindromes are words or phrases that read the same forward or backward. Here are some simple though ingenious examples: "Party booby trap." "Lisa Bonet ate no basil." "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!" "I Love Me, Vol. I". Fascinating.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (14)

Andrew Neaum

Ten years ago, on the day that a handful of hideously inhumane fanatics slammed planes into the World Trade Centre, I was on holiday in Merimbula. I spent pretty well the whole of September the eleventh in that year watching the atrocity unfold on television.

Bell birds, oysters and blossom

I remember the holiday more happily for other things as well. It was there that I discovered bell birds for the first time, whose chiming I initially mistook for musical tree frogs. I also sampled with gusto the large local oysters, walked round and canoed the beautiful estuarine lakes and revelled in the scent of the blossom of the ubiquitous, glossy leaved Pittosporum undulatum trees.

A couple of years later, on moving to Shepparton, I discovered to my delight that there is a very fine specimen of that tree growing in the corner of the Rectory garden. As I tap away at this diary column the air in the garden is heavy with its sweet scent.

Last weekend Diana and I passed through Merimbula while traversing some of the most beautiful countryside in south east Australia. The bell birds still chimed and the air was as sweetly scent-laden as ever.

A glorious journey

We headed from Albury through Tallangatta, Corryong, Khancoban, Jindabyne, Pambula, Merimbula, Bermagui and Moruya to Malua Bay, south of Bateman's Bay. There my son Peter was staying in the house of two friends overlooking the sea, while doing a painting job for them. He had suggested that we join him for a day or two, and so we did, thanks to Gail's return, and as a self-granted reward for four or five fairly onerous weeks.

The trip to Corryong is familiar to me and much loved, especially when so lush and verdant, though when we paused to survey old Tallangatta, covered by a very full Hume Dam, the wind was bitter, promising snow further along our route. The trip beyond Corryong was new to me and unutterably lovely and interesting, even if Khancoban proved to be something of a disappointment. With its romantic sounding name and situation I had imagined much more, but it seems to have been constructed for workers on the Snowy River Hydro project, rather than to have evolved over many generations and so it has a pre-fabricated look and feel.

Beautiful hydro electricity

After a brief look at Khancoban we pressed on to the nearby Murray 2 Power Station. There we managed to begin really to grasp some of the wonders of the great Hydro Electric scheme about which both Diana and I had first learned during school geography lessons, she in England, I in Rhodesia.

That anyone should have had the imaginative audacity to conceive and propose so wondrous and grandiose a scheme staggered us more even than the achievement of those who toiled so long and so well to make it a reality.

Hydro electricity is a most beautiful and usually beautifying form of human ingenuity and endeavour. I first became aware of its beauty and potential with the building of the great Kariba Dam in Rhodesia in the nineteen fifties, which is still one of the largest dams in the world and an "unnatural" wonder and asset that rivals and surpasses much of the "natural" beauty that surrounds it.

Over the divide

We pressed on up the mountains ignoring the advice of bossy road signs to do with snow chains, having ascertained from someone coming the other way that the road was clear, safe and free of snow and ice. As we got higher and higher there was a light sprinkling of snow on the ground beneath the trees, thicker in hollows and gutters. Near the highest point we passed through a very light and gentle snow shower, but nothing settled on the road, so all was well. We stopped briefly to take a photograph of the snow and skiers at Thredbo and then pressed on to Jindabyne where we lunched overlooking its cold but lovely lake.

We then took headed through Dalgety and Maffra over the sere, brown, rain-shadowed highland grasslands, their lack of verdancy probably due less to a want of rain than to a want of warmth. Eventually grassland turned to woodland and then forest as we descended to the coastal hills and plains to make our way through Pambula and Merimbula and up the pleasing and scenic coastal road to Bermagui and Tilba. There we joined the Princes Highway to Moruya and as twilight descended turned off along a beautiful estuary, arriving at our destination by about half past six.

Coastal bays and botanic gardens

The coast around Malua Bay is notable for innumerable and largely self-contained little coves, with rugged, rocky headlands and little islands.

We had a lovely full two days there in a comfortable house overlooking the bay. The well treed and densely bushed cliffs help disguise human habitation and our house had a resident and not too shy possum who allowed Diana to observe at close quarters for the first time the wide-eyed curiosity and alert translucent ears of its kind.

The main activity of our first full day was an extended visit to the Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Gardens. These are situated on a 42 hectare forest site, five kilometres south of Batemans Bay and they display entirely indigenous plant species that occur naturally in the region. Beautifully laid out and extensively and clearly labelled they were a delight to wander around, especially to Diana as she attempts to makes sense of Australia's unique and puzzling flora. The gardens were established in 1987 and some years ago were ravaged by a huge bush fire. There are only two full time employees, but an obviously very active and proud group of "friends" who volunteer their time, care, love and expertise.

Matters Anglican

We met and passed the time of day with an elderly lady and her daughter while wandering the gardens. Later, while visiting Bateman Bay's Anglican Church to ascertain service times, we coincidentally encountered her again, practising on the organ.

I had feared that Batemans Bay might be in the Diocese of Sydney, whose characteristic style of worship, let alone its theology, is extremely uncongenial to me. I was pleased to observe, however, that there were candles on the altar and that the parish is a part of the Diocese of Canberra Goulburn. The church building is a modern one, its architecture as is so often the case these days, of a sort conducive to and expressive of a theology more concerned with fellowship than with awe. Thank God for the "otherness" of St Augustine's.

The delightful old bird on the organ, summing us up well, advised us to attend the eight o clock Eucharist, describing the later one as "happy clappy". As it turned out we attended the early service in order to worship, but stayed on for the first part of the second, merely to experience and perhaps learn from it. At the first we underwent two "sermons". The first was a little dissertation on the September Eleven atrocity, the second a more substantial one on Stewardship, of all things. Neither of them was at all bad.

The parish is blessed by many retired clergy, and the deliverer of the second address was a Fr Peter Lord, retired from Warnambool in my first Australian diocese of Ballarat. We had a long and amiable gossip afterwards. He was at theological college with Bishop David Farrer and had some amusing reminiscences to share.

The "happy clappy" service was not much to my personal taste, but was interesting nonetheless. The two participating clergymen were unrobed and waved their arms about as the first twenty minute "bracket" of singing meandered on. Crucial to the music's success was an accomplished, middle-aged and articulate keyboardist who broke into enthusiastic, directive dialogue periodically, revealing the primary purpose of the music to be to soften folk up emotionally. The three female vocalists were less than accomplished, the middle-aged guitarist very good and the drummer restrained.

The service was well attended by a congregation less young than I expected. The arm-wavers tended to be middle-aged or elderly. There were about twenty children who went out to "kids church" once the singing session was over. Teenagers were very few, though there was a fair sprinkling of young adults. The bulk of the congregation was middle-aged or elderly.

Although most emphatically not to my taste, such worship illustrates, not surprisingly, that the cultural language most natural to the vast majority of Australians of all ages is "popular" and that therefore the organ and "high culture" are a barrier to most of our fellow citizens. The great challenge for Anglicanism (and Andrew David Irwin Neaum) is, on the one hand, not to abandon the minority who need to express themselves in worship by way of "high culture" and "good taste", while at the same time popularising for the majority without compromising the essential and distinctive truths and beauties of our tradition and sound, non-fundamentalist theology.

Too often, popularising Anglican churches cease to be at all distinctive and become mere and unnecessary rivals to various fundamentalist, protestant denominations.

Our return on Monday was by way of the spectacular Bemboka Pass, Cooma Adaminaby, Kiandra and Tumbarumba where we stopped for lunch. Then on to Jingellic and along the southern shore of the longest arm of the Hume Dam, beautiful beyond telling. At Talgarno we stopped to look at and photograph the lovely, simple little church where I had celebrated the Eucharist many, many times as Rector of Wodonga, likewise at Bethanga. Then by way of Wodonga we headed for home at exactly half past six. A memorable weekend.

At Diana's suggestion we have replaced the plastic flowers in the alcoves of the east end wall of St Augustine's with temporary icons. This is to get the feel of what something similar, but more permanent might look like.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (15)

Andrew Neaum

I submitted my application for Australian Citizenship last week. Having been in the good land of Oz now for a mere twenty seven years, it still seems a little premature, but I can be a daring and courageous fellow at times, and so take the plunge.

Mind you, walking down Wyndham Street last week behind two very young looking policemen, I noticed with still very British surprise the revolvers hanging aggressively from their hips. I think the following joke is meant to be more sympathetic to them than to English policemen. It comes from a friend who lives in England:

Question: How do you tell the difference between a British Police Officer, an Australian Police Officer and an American Police Officer?

Answer: First, lets pose the following question: You're on duty by yourself walking on a deserted street late at night. Suddenly, an armed man with a huge knife comes around the corner, locks eyes with you, screams obscenities, raises the knife, and lunges. You are carrying a Glock .40, and you are an expert shot, however you have only a split second to react before he reaches you. What do you do?

A British Police Officer: Firstly the officer must consider the man's Human Rights.

         1)      Does the man look poor or oppressed?

         2)      Is he newly arrived in this country and does not yet understand the law?

         3)      Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?

         4)      Am I dressed provocatively?

         5)      Could I run away?

         6)      Could I possibly swing my gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand?

         7)      Should I try and negotiate with him to discuss his wrong         doings?

         8)      Does the Glock have appropriate safety built into it?

         9)      Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway, and what kind of message does this send to society?

         10)    Does he definitely want to kill me, or would he be content just to wound me?

         11)    If I were to grab his knees and hold on, would he still want to stab and kill me?

         12)    If I raise my gun and he turns and runs away, do I get blamed if he falls over, knocks his head and kills himself?

         13)    If I shoot and wound him, and lose the subsequent court case, does he have the opportunity to sue me, cost me my job, my credibility, and the loss of my family home?

An Australian Police Officer: BANG!

An American Police Officer: BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! 'click'.... (Sergeant arrives at scene later and remarks: ‘Nice grouping!')

Anniversary verse

For our wedding anniversary daughter Ray sent us the following lovely and amusing piece of verse by an American Poet called Jeffrey McDaniel. Among all the unutterable rubbish being passed off as poetry there is still so much good stuff about!

                                                                               The Quiet World

                                                                   In an effort to get people to look

                                                                   into each other's eyes more,

                                                                   and also to appease the mutes,

                                                                   the government has decided

                                                                   to allot each person exactly one hundred

                                                                   and sixty-seven words, per day.

                                                                   When the phone rings, I put it to my ear

                                                                   without saying hello. In the restaurant

                                                                   I point at chicken noodle soup.

                                                                   I am adjusting well to the new way.

                                                                   Late at night, I call my long distance lover,

                                                                   proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.

                                                                   I saved the rest for you.

                                                                   When she doesn't respond,

                                                                   I know she's used up all her words,

                                                                   so I slowly whisper I love you

                                                                   thirty-two and a third times.

                                                                   After that, we just sit on the line

                                                                   and listen to each other breathe.

You are wrong Johnny Price

John Price took pleasure in pointing out to me that in my last week's diary column there was an error. I had claimed to have passed through Maffra on my way from Jindabyne to Pamubla, and Maffra, he informed me, is in Gippsland, not New South Wales.

Well John Price, as is usually the case, is wrong! There is in fact a little township called Maffra in New South Wales and we did indeed pass through it. For his information and education its latitude is 36.542, its longitude is 148.968 and it is 138 kilometres south of Canberra. I suspect that I am destined to become a better informed Australian even than John. When I am subjected to the prospective Citizen's Test, and I cannot answer a particular question, I shall boast in mitigation my awareness of there being two townships called Maffra in Australia.

Another response to last week's column came from England, in the form of an email from a friend of many years standing and a thoroughly good egg who has recently turned from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. His comment was in response to my musings upon our encounter in Batemans Bay with happy clappy worship and our struggle here in Shepparton to make the 10.30am Sunday Eucharist more culturally relevant:

How right you are in Ipswich

Yes, you have a reader in far-off Ipswich...

As an Orthodox Christian (for so I consider myself, at last - I have not attended an Anglican service since 17th July) I attend the Divine Liturgy at (usually) the Monastery or (occasionally) at St Helen's in Colchester. In both, there is 'all-age' worship in a timeless ritual that makes no concessions to modernity and is conducted in half-light. No guitars or organ; instead, age-old chants, a mixture of English, Greek, Russian, and sometimes French or Romanian. Children (well behaved), teens and other young people, adults of all ages, an atmosphere of intense reverence and prayerfulness. Icons are devoutly kissed, reverences made, and there is much crossing of oneself - done carefully and correctly, in the Orthodox manner, by all ages. No gabbling and chattering in Church. Every Holy Liturgy is a powerful experience, as it has been without exception for the sixteen years I have been attending them regularly, and as I remember from my youth when I nearly converted.

I have a wonderful sense of liberation - no more Anglican Agonies!

Eleven years ago I attended the monastery he mentions with him, and the worship was indeed lovely, a balm to my soul. Any flirtation with happy clappyness on my part is a matter not of taste, inclination or conviction. It is all grimly to do with "when duty calls or danger, be never wanting there."

Black watching

About eleven years ago I visited the museum of the Black Watch regiment in Perth, Scotland. It was there that it first struck me that the primary loyalty of soldiers in the British Army is more to their regiment than to their country. Many of their incredible acts of bravery, memorialised and celebrated in the museum, were obviously more inspired by a deep devotion to and pride in their regiment rather than by mere patriotism. This, I reflected at the time bears some sort of relevance to church membership.

When local churches grow really large, with great swags of parishioners, it is easy for individual worshippers to begin to feel unnoticed and anonymous. Once you begin to feel unnoticed and anonymous it becomes all too easy to drift off and away.

The great "mega-churches" cope with this problem by devising and brilliantly maintaining an elaborate network of small-groups into which every member is carefully knitted. A sense of "belonging" is thus granted to everyone, and so the drifting away problem ceases to eat away at attendance.

Traditional Anglican churches rarely become "mega churches" and I, being the sort of parish priest that I am and blessed with the sort of vocation that I have, would find such a church extremely uncongenial. Not least because the head minister of such a church has to be a manager more than a pastor, with no real and personal relationship with his ordinary parishioners.

However, even in a traditional Anglican parish such as ours, if we are really to feel a vital part of the parish's life, it is best to belong to at least one of the many groups that contribute to making the parish a vibrant whole.

Members of the choir, for example, have a personal loyalty to each other and their group that helps reinforce their loyalty to the parish and to God. Likewise the members of EfM, the Guild, the Friendship group, Youth group, and so on.

The Gardening Group likewise is a great source of joy, fellowship and common enthusiasm that reinforces its members pride in and sense of belonging to the parish and God. The gardens are looking splendid at present and one of our next projects is to refurbish the fountain in the garden on the south side of the church, to clear the stagnant pond and reline the watercourse to enable the merry babbling of water once again to grace the south side of the church. Once this is done we will put a plaque there in memory of Peg Galt and her husband. Peg designed the garden and help to maintain it in the years before we had the fine and large gardening group we now have, though Norm Mitchelmore, a vital part of the present group remembers providing Peg with much of the labour required for the garden's creation.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (16)

Andrew Neaum

Heading to Benalla and then Wangaratta last Tuesday we listened to Margaret Throsby interviewing a fascinating and very articulate monologist, author and actor called Mike Daisey. One of the songs he chose to play during the interview was so unutterably and "in your face" pessimistic, we could hardly believe our ears. We were transfixed.

Pessimism

There is something compelling about pessimism. My mother's favourite Old Testament Book was Ecclesiastes, a splendidly pessimistic, hopeless read if ever there was one, and I too love it for that..... Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun.... and so on. Many of us like such sentiments because, perhaps, we feel it is necessary to acknowledge the all too apparent futility of things. Relentless optimism is wearying because it refuses to acknowledge that it is only half the picture.

The song that transfixed us is called "No Children" and is sung by a band called "The Mountain Goats". The second half goes:

                                                                   I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow

                                                                   I hope it bleeds all day long

                                                                   Our friends say it's darkest

                                                                                      before the sun rises

                                                                   We're pretty sure they're all wrong

                                                                   I hope it stays dark forever

                                                                   I hope the worst isn't over

                                                                   I hope you blink before I do

                                                                   And I hope I never get sober

                                                                   And I hope when you think of me

                                                                                      years down the line

                                                                   You can't find one good thing to say

                                                                   And I hope that if I found the strength

                                                                                      to walk out

                                                                   You'd stay the hell out of my way

                                                                   I am drowning

                                                                   There is no sign of land

                                                                   You're are coming down with me

                                                                   Hand in unloveable hand

                                                                   And I hope you die

                                                                   I hope we both die

Listening to the song for the first time bowled us over. On reading its lyrics and considering them later, some of the shock was taken away by the realisation that it is the song of an alcoholic, and so rather than being sheer, unutterable, mind-blowing pessimism, it has possibly a didactic purpose, namely to depict alcoholism in such a way as to pass judgement on it. If so it is a pity really. It was one of the week's great experiences!

The Damnation Army

The cartoon on the front page of this pew sheet might offend a few of the po-faced. Let them be assured that it in no way mocks the Salvation Army. It simply presents a comic antithesis to it, the "Damnation Army"! The expressions on the faces of the two saucy, net-stockinged, high-kicking band girls are particularly well done.

Anglican agnostics and atheists

On Sunday we delighted in the first and surprisingly long episode of the television series derived from Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana novels "The Ladies No 1 Detective Agency". These books and now the television version of them are notable for presenting a positive, thoroughly attractive and undoubtedly authentic face of Africa. They help make clear why so many of us who have lived in Africa so love it.

Afterwards, on "Compass", Alexander McCall Smith was interviewed. He appears to me to be one of the most delightful, lovable and engaging of intelligent human beings. Although probably not a Christian he represents in his personality and outlook the very best of what I would regard as essential Christianity of an Anglican sort. Tolerant, humourous, forgiving, wise, perceptive, acute. I loved him. If he is not a Christian he reinforces a deeply held conviction of mine, namely that the fellowship of the faithful is wider than those who profess the faith. There are those who follow "the way, the truth and the life" without it's Christian signature. He is one of us.

Another likeable fellow, it seems to me, is the undoubted and quite pugnacious atheist Phillip Pullman, a hugely successful and accomplished children's author. In a recent article he attempts to answer a request from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to explain what he means by calling myself a "Church of England atheist". It is an honest and rather lovely article that reveals him to be more agnostic than atheist. He ends it by inveighing against the "demented barbarians" who, he maintains "....are doing their best to destroy what used to be one of the great characteristics of the Church of England, namely a sort of humane liberal tolerance, the quality embodied in the term "broad church". A broad church is exactly the sort of church I like. Inclusive, not exclusive; more concerned with helping people in distress than in maintaining strict forms of worship and a literal reading of the Bible; and, above all, characterised by a dislike of fanatical inquisition into beliefs and motives. What goes on in people's minds and hearts is their own business and, what's more, it's likely to be largely unknown even to them. What matters is not what they believe, but what they do.... The Church of England, at its best, knew that and acted on it and, while any scraps of that tradition remain, I'm happy to be known as a Church of England atheist." He too, I feel in my bones, is more on the right side than the wrong.

Gazanias, gazanias everywhere

On Monday we attached our bicycles to the car and headed to Nathalia where we ate lunch beside Broken Creek and then cycled the town. This we find to be a good way to familiarise ourselves with strange towns, and we have already done the same in Tatura. Nathalia was looking particularly beautiful, the creek full and colourful carpets of gazanias everywhere. We are not ideal tourists for we take our tucker and drink with us and so buy little or nothing. However we did look for, find and buy some rubber rings for our Fowler jars in preparation for a bountiful harvest of fruit to bottle this year. The great loop of Broken Creek upon which the town is sited makes orienting oneself quite difficult, and the tracks along the river are particularly lovely.

Islam at last

For the first and long heralded Islam Study, even with four or five apologies, there were still twenty one of us in the Rectory. Such a large group presents particular challenges, requiring thoughtful management to ensure participation by all and domination by none. We achieved this I think, thanks to some good prior advice from and discussion with Diana, an accomplished and experienced teacher. It will be good, as the study continues, to get away from a stereotypical view of Islam to view it for what it really is.

At this first session, the final, biggest and to me most interesting and crucial question we considered was: "Do you think the God revealed in Jesus in the First Century and the God revealed in the Quran in the Seventh Century are one and the same?"

Interestingly the word for God used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews is "Allah". What is more, Christians in Indonesia and Malaysia also use "Allah" to refer to God in both the Malaysian and Indonesian Language. The mainstream Bible translations in both languages use Allah as the translation of Hebrew Elohim (translated in English Bibles as "God")

All this acknowledges, surely, that we do indeed worship the same God. What is different and distinctive is our perspective on God. So the reason for remaining a Christian is not that we are right and they are wrong, but rather is because we consider our pers-pective to be the most focussed, clear and revealing perspective. Our doctrine of the Incarnation, for example, with its concomitant assertion that sacrificing love lies at the heart of the Godhead and provides humanity's raison d'etre, is a life enhancing insight and truth unique to our perspective, and one that we cannot live without. That there are glimpses and hints of this great truth in Islam and indeed in other great faiths goes without saying, but they are but hints and glimpses. However, Islam's perspective on God has its own unique and lovely features that we need to appreciate and even appropriate.

Unless one approaches other faiths (or even denominations) with some such sort of fairly nuanced understanding and respect that allows them their own validity and integrity, dialogue is impossible, competition inevitable and conflict likely.

A white rabbit and a bonfire

Saturday the 24th of October was unusually full. It began with a Men's Breakfast in the Parish Hall at Euroa, a cool enough morning for there to be an open, blazing and most welcome fire. Those present appeared to enjoy my Africa talk as much as I enjoyed their egg, bacon, sausage, tomato and company.

Afterwards Diana and I went on to Benalla for a seminar all about finding Christ in films and the media. The best part of this was the personality of Rob Whalley and a film from the early fifties called "Harvey" with James Stewart in the leading role. It was most enjoyable and extremely well acted, a thought provoking film about a man whose best friend is a "pooka" named Harvey — in the form of a six-foot, three-and-one-half-inch tall rabbit. Only he can see the rabbit, although others occasionally seem to be able to as well. When his sister tries to commit him to a mental institution, a comedy of errors ensues. As with many of the best comedies it provokes much thought as well as laughter and the sweet nature of the main character has something of the "holy fool" to it. In the evening we went off to the Pearsons, after the Vigil Eucharist, to participate (late) in the BBQ and to enjoy a wild bonfire in good company and a bitter wind.

As it was in the beginning

J.S. Bach's great Magnificat in D ends with the same melody as it began, to match the words: "As it was in the beginning..." So too I end as I began with an example of pessimism, more rueful than shocking though:

                                                                   My ranks of friends are getting serried;

                                                                   Another one has just been buried.

                                                                   I often wonder what I'm doing -

                                                                   Mourning their loss, or simply queuing?

                                                                                                Alexander Shivarg

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (17)

Andrew Neaum

One of the greatest of those simple moments in life that make everything worthwhile occurred when I was on holiday on King Island some years ago. On a beautiful, calm evening I was lying with two of my children, on a pebble beach, the sea gently sighed as larger waves intermittently gathered to crash more emphatically as dusk fell.

Miniature guardsmen

On the shore side of us, beneath low scrub and bushes, were little passages and burrows. As it became really dark small penguins came out of them to stand like miniature guardsmen, silent for the most part, but occasionally barking and churring too. Then, on the lip of the steep part of the pebble beach, we became aware of company. A row of penguins, fresh from the sea, their crops bulging with mangled fish, were simply standing there, leaning forward and eyeing us suspiciously.

After a while, slowly, quietly, they shuffled forward. Several of them were a mere foot from my foot and had to make a detour round us all because we were in their way. It was a beautiful, awe-inspiring experience and with what joy the returning seafarers were greeted by their mates.

Many friends

I have always loved animals, birds, reptiles and insects. I cannot walk through a paddock of cows without mooing companionably to them, or baaing my best wishes to sheep. If a blackbird whistles, I whistle back.

In my time I have had a pet penguin, on the island of Tristan da Cunha, a pet mole snake, at my bush school in Africa (we found a nest of them and used to take them to class in our pockets). I have had a pet pied crow, budgies, a dog, and at present have a bowl of over sixty comical tadpoles. They dart around in sudden spasms of energy, delicately nibble at floating lettuce leaves until there is only a fragile tracery of leaf ribs left, and they drift vertically with their mouths upward piercing the water's surface skin, to blow bubbles and kisses to our airy, other-world. A world into which they will one day leap to claim as their own.

I have kept chameleon eggs in damp soil in a little tub on my study windowsill until they hatched into exquisite, tiny, baby chameleon's and were released. I have placed their wary parents in the centre of a lawn to observe them flick out their astonishingly long and sticky tongue to transfix and then gobble grasshoppers. As a boy my school holidays were largely spent walking the African bush with binoculars bird watching. I have been to some of the world's best game parks, and seen lion, elephant, leopard, cheetah, and once, on horseback, almost bumped into a great rhinoceros.

Still one of the most thrilling experiences in life for me, is to discover a bird's nest in my garden, with a clutch of bright, neat, crisp-shelled eggs in it, returning sweet content to the word "nestled".

Paradox

Why do we love nature so? Why do we love animals, either wild or as pets? Humankind uses them and abuses them. They are made to work for us and are killed to feed us, but we also love them, are inspired and awed by them. We consider cruelty to them a most heinous crime.

There is a contradiction, a paradox to our relationships to animals. What is it all about? It has got something to do, I think, with a paradox or contradiction within ourselves.

We are all of us materialists to some degree or other. Our lives are busied, muddied, cluttered with activities to do with earning a living, with acquiring enough money and possessions to ensure our own and our family's security, well being and comfort. We cannot be otherwise, it is part of the human condition, but unless we are careful it becomes obsessive. We are so busy, busy, busy that we lose sight of greater values, or if not greater, at very least essential complementary values.

The natural world, in its uncomplicated beauty, the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, the birds of the air that neither sow nor reap, nor gather in to barns, remind us that there is more to life than security. That there is simplicity, beauty, innocence, and perhaps above all, there is simply being. The beauty of just being who we are.

Why do we love a daft little dog?

Why do we love a daft little dog? Or a rainbow lorikeet, or even a house sparrow? The answer is, simply for being what or who they are.

To acknowledge that beauty and respond to it, and its right simply to be, is the beginning of reverence and awe, which are also the impulse to worship.

Worship, reverence, deference, paying someone their worth, is not a characteristic of our day and age. We live in a world that debunks, deprecates and decries, that cuts down tall poppies, devalues the sublime and beautiful, cocks its leg against so much that is good and lovely and traditional.

Church-goers don't though. For we practice worship and reverence, regularly, Sunday by Sunday, we learn to bow the knee and respond to what is "other". We are all the better people for doing so.

Those who are not church-goers have to turn to nature to learn a little of what we are on about, namely, reverence, awe and worship.

It is no wonder that environmentalists and greens often appear quasi-religious, sometimes even to the point of fanaticism. They are closer to religious practice than they imagine or dare admit.

In bringing our pets to be blessed we acknowledge their worth, the important part they play in our lives, and simply our delight in their being, in that they are.

More than that, though we acknowledge that they are also a blessing to us, for they take us out of our self and point us to reverence and worship, like the lilies of the field.

Thank God for nature, for animals, for our pets, and for St Francis who reminds us of the importance of sweet simplicity and joy in what is natural, given and free.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (18)

Andrew Neaum

I was still a bachelor when I went to Theological College, though in my late twenties. Understandably then, I was pleased to learn while there, that a cassock or dog-collar on a fellow caused the hearts of women to palpitate. That women, or at least, certain sorts of women, simply adore priests. So opportunities for marriage and love would proliferate embarrassingly when once I was ordained and had begun to mince around in a cassock, no matter how ugly the face above my dog collar.

I can't say that I really found this to be so. Perhaps the face above my dog collar really is beyond the pale, but I don't think it was that. It is more likely that the information given to me was wrong. Certainly I would surmise a stethoscope around the neck to be far more potent a palpitator of hearts than a dog collar could ever be.

Doctors as heart throbs

Doctors are more 21st century heart throbs than priests. Firstly because they earn more money, and money is no mean aphrodisiac, but also because doctors are the natural heroes, heart-throbs and gods of a materialistic world. In a world where this life is the only life, then preservers and prolongers of this life are bound to be highly valued, well paid and idolised.

Of course we complain and grumble about doctors, but many of our brightest children aspire to get into medical school and we are very proud when they do. Furthermore our grumbles at doctors are grumbles that arise when they fall short of expectations, they are not fundamental grumbles. You come across not a few folk who are anti-clergy, and to whom the sight of a dog collar is worse than the sight of dog dirt, but you don't come across many anti-medicos. Even those who reject conventional medicine and orthodox doctors in favour of natural medicine, homeopathy, or quackery, are simply swapping denominations, going sectarian. They are venturing out to the fringes of medical orthodoxy where there remain doctors of a sort, health-mediums, quacks and gurus to worship by the score.

The Beloved Physician

This evening, at 5.30pm, we celebrate St Luke who is the patron saint of doctors. He is St Paul's "beloved physician". It invites us to consider medicine and doctoring in relation to our faith.

Not only was St Luke termed by St Paul the "Beloved physician", he was also the self-effacing author of St Luke's Gospel, and of the Acts of the Apostles. A man whose writings suggest that he was broad of sympathy, compassionate to the poor and to the outcast, pious, joyful, urbane and deeply loyal, remaining with St Paul right to the end, ministering to him and doubtless doctoring him in gaol. The beloved physician indeed.

Beloved, though, not as a prolonger and preserver of life, as an extender of materialistic horizons, but beloved as a person and personality.

A close relationship

The relationship between the medical profession and Church, between doctor and priest isn't what it once was. Our paths have diverged. In primitive times the priest and doctor were one. If you were ill you'd come to see witch-doctor Andrew Neaum at his shrine, temple, church or cave. There incantations, spells, trances, prayers and magic would play by far the larger part in his doctoring, though there would also be primitive unguents, pastes, noxious brews, herbs and purges on offer as well.

This is what it is still like in parts of the world. I remember one Sunday afternoon in urban Africa being called away from listening to Telemann or Mozart to go and see the parish church's African caretaker in his little house on the premises. He was apparently very sick.

When I got there he was lying still on his bed. I gave him a shake. He was stone cold. Dead as dead could be. He had drunk some "muti" Some medicine, an evil concoction of witch-doctor's leaves and berries and it had killed him.

Perhaps it is as well that the path of priest and doctor has diverged. Though it is wrong to blame religion for such mishaps. The man was killed by primitive medicine, not primitive religion. It is as well to remember that both medicine and religion were once primitive, and the witch's brew of

                                                                                 eye of newt, and toe of frog,

                                                                            wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

                                                                            Adder's fork, and blind worm's sting,

                                                                            Lizard's leg, and howlets's wing

is the forbear of penicillin and cortisone. Just as the slaughtering of animals and even humans, the burning of them on altars and the sprinkling and splashing of blood is the forbear of the Eucharist.

Not so primitive

A primitive forbear doesn't give the lie to or invalidate its more sophisticated descendent. If it did, then our own ape-like forbears would give cause to write us and the whole of humankind off.

Indeed the one area in which primitive medicine and primitive religion were not as primitive as they seem, was in their marriage, their oneness, their togetherness. They belong together not apart. Though there divergence might well have been a necessary part of their growing to maturity.

We realise more and more nowadays how important the whole person is in the matter of healing. That there is a very real and important relationship between the spiritual and the physical person, and between mind and matter. Healing is hastened by peace of mind and acceptance.

We realise too, with the witchdoctors of old, that a great proportion of sickness is psychosomatic, that to be spiritually at peace and at one with God, and able to see purpose and meaning in existence, helps enormously in any journey towards full physical health.

This is how we interpret many of Jesus' remarkable healings. His presence and personality, his love and forgiveness helped those who were sick to see themselves as they really were, and yet still as loved and accepted by God, as forgiven. Their sickness as possibly self-inflicted, but certainly not God-inflicted. A realisation that sometimes brought remarkable physical results.

And so the priest's job in hospital today is seen by discerning doctors as complementary to their own role. The priest is there to assure of God's reality, love, forgiveness, and healing power. It is to comfort, set minds at rest, feed the spirit.

Religion in hospitals

There is, of course, no room for religious cranks and crankery. Too many fanatics and crackpots foul the pitch for true religion and virtue in the eyes of the medical profession.

So much so that although I am quite often called out to the hospital in Shepparton to minister to those in extremis, sometimes at the instigation and on the initiative of the medical staff, any general visiting is all but impossible because of over-protective privacy rules and rulings.

Yet the need for the priest in hospital and sickness is very real, and the atmosphere in Catholic hospitals is very different from that in non-religious hospitals.

The overt presence of Jesus the healer in statues, nuns and crucifixes reassures patients of an essential balance and sanity that is immensely comforting and healthy to most of us. Certainly, if you are elderly and very ill, but abominate any suggestion of euthanasia, you feel safer in such a hospital.

My old father would ask, whenever he visited a doctor for the first time: "Do you believe in euthanasia?" If the doctor said "Yes" or even equivocated or "ummed" and "ahhed" at all, my Father would never go back to him.

Acceptance and healing

And so we celebrate St Luke this week and in doing so thank God for all the wonderful workers of healing miracles in our local hospitals and clinics. If Christian we also resolve to take our faith beyond outward observance and into the heart. That is, in prayer, to take our anxieties and fears, our insecurities and sins, our worries about the future and all our doubts and failings, as well as any illnesses to God and in the quietude of devotion accept them all, and his love and forgiveness. Our acceptance, our saying "Yes" even to difficulties, illnesses and misfortunes as well as to gifts and to God, allows grace to operate in our lives, opens the door to love and sometimes even to physical healing.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (19)

Andrew Neaum

It is unfortunate to have a Clergy Conference during the week before a parish Fete and parish Confirmation, with our amiable Parish Secretary away too. It means I have had to pack two weeks into one.

Not all drudgery and deadlines

It also supports my contention that it is deadlines that make the world go round. Things simply had to be done, and so they were. I made a list of all of them and as far as I can judge they have been accomplished. The worst thing of all, I think, is translating orders of service into "Power Point" in order for them to be screened at the 10.30 service. Tedious indeed, made bearable only by the lively, optimistic music of Boccherini.

Nonetheless, during the past week it wasn't all drudgery and deadlines. We prepared garden beds and planted capsicum, aubergine and butternut squash. We had a delicious ratatouille on the banks of one of our irrigation channels and popped in to see John Horder on his farm, and Peter Ross Edwards in Tatura. We biked to Mooroopna on a beautiful afternoon to visit the hospitable Plemings and admire their garden, especially its avocado tree. We learned a little bit about downloading BBC programs from the internet from my son Peter, so as to be able to allow the first of a series on Islam to be watched by the group that meets each week at the Rectory. We released most of our tadpoles who were beginning to fling themselves suicidally onto the kitchen bench. We repaired the gauze on our bedroom window and explored the most interesting shop in Shepparton, the newly expanded Sikh grocery store on the corner of George Road and Hayes Street where we bought some potent pickles, samosas, a small sack of rice and a big bag of Aloo Bhujia (spicy potato noodles). Although as early as 5.30 in the morning as I tap away at this little column, I munch and crunch my way through a couple of handfuls of the last mentioned item. Delicious. We have also embarked on the long process of turning Joyce Aldrige's lemons in to a spicy lemon pickle. The Indian recipe uses no oil, but requires us to slow cook them for two whole months by placing the jar of pickling lemon pieces out in the sun! Our garden is shady, and so the jar has to be moved from sunny spot to sunny spot during each day.

A face like a warming pan

I have also read this morning the review of a scholarly biography of Ben Jonson the 17th century poet, playright, critic and much more. It is a book I intend purchasing once it has been kindled. It describes the man thus: Jonson was a bruiser, intellectually and physically. He was poet, soldier and brickie. That was when poets were hard. He once walked to Edinburgh and back for a bet. He put his own shoulder to the wheel when scenery needed rotating for his masques. Towards the end of his life he weighed 20 stone. Ugly bugger, too; he was described by his sometime associate Thomas Dekker as ‘a staring Leviathan' with ‘a terrible mouth' and ‘a parboiled face ... punched full of oilet holes, like the cover of a warming pan....'.

An irresistible book surely, one with the space too to list the items on the menu that was rustled up by the Merchant Taylors' Company to welcome Prince Henry into their ranks in the summer of 1607...Swans, godwit, shovellers, partridges, owls, cuckoos, ringdoves, pullets, ducklings, teal, peacocks, rabbits, leverets and a great turkey... along with 1,300 eggs, three great lobsters and 200 prawns, salmon, salt fish, plaice, sole, dory, carp and tenches, sirloins and ribs of beef, mutton and lambs' dowsets, neats' tongues and sweet breads, and to conclude the evening, figs, dates, prunes, currants, almonds, strawberries, gooseberries, cherries, pears, apples, damsons, oranges and quinces. Twenty-eight barrels of beer were provided to slake the diners' thirst, together with more than 440 gallons of wine.

What a wonderful thing it is to leave the contemporary world (just as full of interesting folk if only one knows where to look) in order to lose yourself in that mad, bad, religiously tumultuous, fascinating seventeenth century! If anyone is interested the book is Masques of Beauty and Blackness by Ian Donaldson: OUP, 533pp.

Homilies at weddings no more.

Almost invariably I enjoy my time with couples who come to be married in church. Few if any of them these days are church attenders and their appreciation of anything other than the building and its gardens is minimal, if not non-existent, but for the most part they are delightful and provide me with one of the few opportunities to engage with young people other than members of my family.

I no longer give a well wrought homily at weddings. The wedding guests at most ceremonies I perform are unlikely to understand them, let alone appreciate them. Instead I attempt to impart a gem of wisdom or profundity in my opening remarks, lightened with a little humour and then we get on with the business in hand.

There are exceptions. I whipped up a homily for my daughter's wedding. She understands me alright, too well in fact. Had I said anything unacceptable there would have been a loud bridal raspberry blown my way!

I composed one too for a friend whose marriage I performed in the Western Districts some time ago. He and his wife are keen Scottish Country Dancers and he had been part of a group who danced weekly at St John's Wodonga when I was Rector there. The homily (names changed) went as follows:

Orangutans and violins

The majority of husbands, said the French novelist Balzac, remind you of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

How true that is, how devastatingly true. We have all witnessed it over and over again, have we not? It makes us want to weep.

Women, like violins, are subtle, delicate and mysterious creatures, of infinite tonal possibilities, moods and character; sonorous, dark, rich, devious, ambiguous, deep, mother-earthy; silvery pure, ethereal, light, glittering, graceful; humorous, quirky, bouncy, buoyant.

They require the sensitivity, understanding, imagination, empathy and dazzling technique of a virtuoso, to sing the melodies they have it in them to sing.

Yet all they get, usually, is an unmusical, fumbling, philistine of an orangutan.

Jacqueline Russells and bagpipes

The majority of wives, though, remind you of a Jack Russell, trying to play the bagpipes. Darting, yapping, whining, nagging, attempting to draw a sweet melody from a lazy, uncomplicated bag of wind, from a great bladder of blah. When all it is capable of is a droning, burping, squawking, belching, cacophonous caterwaul.

Ah well! That is marriage. Attempting the impossible. A sweet duet on a violin and bagpipes, played by an orangutan and a Jacqueline Russel. Hopeless. Why do we bother with it?

Because it can work has worked, does work, and not infrequently. The impossible, like God, is worth reaching for, aspiring to.

Bach and the Tudelsack

My very favourite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach. He, in his sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, has worked greater miracles on a violin than any composer on earth,

And although it is inconceivable that such a genius should stoop so low as even to notice, let alone write for the bagpipes, we nonetheless find in the very final chorus of his charming Peasant Cantata, which is all about a bucolic wedding ceremony, that the bagpipe and the violin do converge, after a fashion.

The violin plays its sprightly melody to the words:

Wir gehn nun, wo der Tudelsack

der Tudel, Tudel, Tudel, Tudel, Tudel, Tudel sack......

In unsrer Shenke brummt........

And the word Tudelsack, as I am sure you all know, is German for bagpipes. The im-possible has been achieved. The bagpipes and the violin have come together in sweet harmony to celebrate a marriage in the music of the greatest of all the world's composers! Nothing is impossible! Not even a happy marriage.

The marriage miracle

The musical miracle is pulled off by the genius of Bach, but what of the happy marriage miracle, what is it that makes possibly possible such an impossibility?

It is the vow, the devastating vow, which, if profoundly meant, and therefore resolutely kept, binds Peter and Rosemary together, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until death.

The groom today, Peter gives as his wedding present to his bride, Rosemary, the assurance that he will never ever, ever reject or turn his back on her, will never, ever in any circumstance whatsoever, abandon her.

She is freed to be herself then. She doesn't have to pretend to be other than who she is in case she loses him, or in fear of him abandoning her. She can play the melody that she has it in her to play, she can be the melody that she has it in her to be. She can find herself in his steadfast, uncompromising love, secure, in complete trust, that he will never abandon her, ever.

She is given love's freedom to be herself, and vice versa. This is also Rosemary's gift to Peter.

The wedding present of wedding presents this, far more precious than anything money can buy. It make possibly possible the impossible. An Organutang and yet a Paganini. A Tudelsack so melifluously euphonius as to blend with a violin. A man and a woman one flesh.

It is no wonder that in Bach's little cantata they sing at the end of it all:

We're going to the tavern

where the merry bagpipe drones

and shout full of glee

Long live Dieskau (or Peter, or Rosemary) and their kin,

May they be granted whatever they desire

and whatever they have set their heart on.

Grace at the Reception

At the Reception that followed the wedding I gave them a grace composed for the occasion as follows, Rosemary, as well as being a dancer, is also a church choir chorister:

                                                         We thank you Lord for song and dance

                                                         Both of which can spark romance

                                                         That kindles into wedded bliss

                                                         And so to happy days like this.

                                                         With Rosemary espoused as wife

                                                         Peter's hobby's made his life,

                                                         For love his life has so enhanced

                                                         His every step from now is danced.

                                                         While Rosemary as Peter's wife

                                                         Has had her hobby made her life

                                                         With Peter's love declared life long

                                                         Her every syllable's a song.

                                                         Lord, let your music of the spheres

                                                         Inspire their marriage down the years,

                                                         And every step of their romance

                                                         Adumbrate the cosmic dance.

                                                         If you'll excuse my French, "un peu",

                                                         Grant them a heavenly "pas des deux",

                                                         And may a deep harmonious chord

                                                         Best symbolise their sweet accord,

                                                         And now let wit and mirth resound

                                                         And copious food and drink abound

                                                         Fuelling joy beyond all measure,

                                                         And happiness, delight and pleasure.

                                                                                                              Amen.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (20)

Andrew Neaum

I prepared for one of the most hectic of the year’s weekends by departing for a peaceful diocesan Clergy Conference in beautiful hills east of Melbourne. I returned last Friday afternoon.

Hectic

There was a funeral interview that evening as well as the funeral itself to prepare for and then conduct on Parish Fair Saturday. There was also the Fair to play my full part in as well as a sermon to compose (or select and edit from my archive) for 8.30am on Sunday morning. Then there was Sunday’s Confirmation liturgy and a power point version of it to knock together. There were pew sheets, service sheets and funeral sheets to finalise, print and fold.

However, things that have to be done are done. It is deadlines that keep the world functioning. Among life’s greatest pleasures are deadlines met and challenges faced. It was an exhilarating weekend. All went off extremely well.

The great Fair and Garden Party

The Fair was a triumph. At its end both Diana and I were too weary to sleep, but to be a merry insomniac is infinitely preferable to being a miserable one. To share, laugh and gossip one’s insomnia into guffawed irrelevance renders insomnia a pleasure not a curse. We joked, laughed and tittered ourselves dilly until well beyond midnight.

To be an authentic St Augustinian parishioner is to all but stew and drown in our annual Parish Fair. Those who drop out, fall out, pull out, miss out almightily.

For the week leading up to the great day the place murmurs, buzzes and hums with purpose, single-minded good will, effort, strain, perspiration and jollity. It is good simply to be a part of it all. (So why was I away at a conference then?)

Pat Gibson

In the Fair our parish unites in a stupendous, common effort. One of the reasons for this is that Pat Gibson, our leader, director, and inspiration is guided not by mere goodwill, duty or even faith, rather she has a coherent and compelling philo-sophy to guide and direct her. She, more than any of us, sees that St Augustine’s, in its Parish Fair, is the City on a Hill and Light to the World that it is called to be in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Her primary motive, therefore, is to pull in to shine out, anyone and everyone who in anyway belongs to us. Success lies not so much in money being raised as in all sorts of people’s sense of belonging to us being reinforced and emphasised. The family becomes extended family. Community and Church meld.

The sense of purpose and joy is palpable. I love it. We all should love it. If we don’t it is time we reread our Gospels. Grizzles and moans approach blasphemy.

My gratitude to Pat Gibson is as boundless as my admiration of her meticulous attention to detail and irrepressible good humour. She is a star at the centre of a galaxy of parishioner stars. Well done everyone.

How did we do?

Just because our purpose transcends mere money- raising, we raise a great deal. Once more we appear to have surpassed the previous year. Our takings at the time of writing, including all the raffles, come to well over $24,000. Expenses are likely to be about $1,800. This is wonderful.

Betty Bush’s appeal for each family to support the Cake Stall was itself well supported and hugely successful. That fact that we sold out of BBQ “ingredients”, as well as Gourmet Luncheon salads and quiches, strawberries and cream and “exotic” desserts, and that the Ham on the Bone looked very bare, indicates a record attendance.

The Gem Club and “Arms” displayers were delighted with attendances. The most enjoyable and varied free concert was attended by approximately 90 people.

It was altogether a great day. The final meeting of the Parish Fair and Garden Party Planning Group is on Thursday 10th November at 4.00pm in the Narthex. Do come along. We need and appreciate suggestions for the future and we must discuss what went right and what went wrong.

A new word

I learned a new word this week. One I am unlikely to forget: nosism. It means the use of “we” in referring to yourself instead of “I”. It comes from the Latin word “nos” which means “we”. It would also indicate that the pronunciation of the word is more likely to be “noss-ism” than “nose-ism”

A common example is the “royal we” (Pluralis majestatis), which is a nosism used by a person of high office, such as a monarch, earl or pope. It is also used in certain formal contexts by bishops and university rectors.

Apparently the expression was first used in England in 1169 when the King Henry II, hard pressed by his barons over the investiture controversy, assumed the ancient biblical principal of the “divine right of kings,” namely that the monarch acts conjointly with the deity. Hence, he used “we” meaning “God and I...”.

There are also editorial nosisms and authorial nosisms, such as: “by adding four to six we obtain ten”. In this sense it is cosily inclusive of the reader with either the author or editor.

If, like me, you spend any time at all in nursing homes, you are almost certain to have come across what is known as the “patronising nosism”. Here the word “we” is used not instead of “I”, but instead of “you”. For example: “how are we feeling today” or “aren’t we looking grumpy?”

Witty Mark Twain once said, “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.”

Biblical and Islamic nosisms

The reason I stumbled upon the word was because in our weekly Islam Study Group at the Rectory we noticed that in the Quran, Allah sometimes uses the first person plural for his singular self and we wondered why.

A little research shows this usage to be a feature of literary style in Arabic. A person may refer to himself by the pronoun nahnu (“we”) for respect or glorification. He may also use the word ana (“I”), or the third person huwa (“he”). All three styles are used in the Quran.

In discussing this in our group Helen Malcolm reminded us that in the Book Genesis God refers to himself similarly in the first person plural: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness....”

There is much scholarly debate about this. Can it be a relic of a former belief in many Gods? Is it simply yet another example of the plural of “majesty” or “excellence”? Might it perhaps be a very early hint of a Trinitarian God? Or does it bear reference to angels, archangels and all the heavenly hosts?

Scholarly consensus, insofar as I can determine it in a busy week, seems to settle on it being a combination of the plural of majesty, though with likely echoes or hints of the heavenly hosts.

Such speculations are fascinating to the likes of me. They might well get right up the nose of others, proving to be “nosisms” of a rather more literal, physical and brutal sort.

Foot gear

Many years ago I remember shaking hands with a formidable woman after church who instead of saying “Good morning,” or, “That was a brilliant sermon, Andrew”, said: “Your shoes are dirty!” A useful piece of information this. A reminder that when people come up to Communion, all they see of the priest are shoes, and that therefore some sort of an effort needs to be made by those who administer communion to ensure that their shoes don’t distract people either by their dirtiness or by their peculiarity. On those hot days in summer when I wear sandals, I suppose that I should make sure that my toe nails are well manicured. With the attention to detail that Anglo Catholics pride themselves on, the toe-nails could be painted in the liturgical colour of the day.

Luxuriating toes

In biblical times priests performed their duties in the temple barefoot. I would love that. I love to get out of my shoes. Like Nelson Mandela freed from gaol, my toes luxuriate in liberation from the close confinement of shoes, which, because they are such dirty things, used always to be discarded before entering any holy place.

Moses at the burning bush was told to remove his, even out there in the desert, because God was present and the place holy. Muslims today still remove their shoes before entering a Mosque. Before entering even an ordinary house in biblical times you removed your foot-gear and in many households here in Australia this is becoming more common.

The disciples of Jesus were instructed to shake off the dust from their feet as they left any place which refused to listen to them. This is what all strict Jews used to do when they arrived back in Palestine after travelling abroad. At the border they would take off their sandals and give them a good shake to get rid of all the foreign dirt and filth clinging to them. They did so as to avoid contaminating the holy land of Israel.

A clever reversal

Some time ago I came across a clever reversal of Jesus’ famous saying about dust and feet: the whole point of ‘shaking the dust off your feet’ is that, actually, you can’t. The dust on our shoes has to be rubbed and polished off. It can’t be shaken off, more’s the pity.

So too it is with the dust of doubt and disbelief, of materialism and self-centredness, the dust of cynicism and despair, of worry and fret, the dust of self-doubt and indecision, of fear and aimlessness. All of which settle upon us in our daily tread out and about in the world as disciples, away from the centre of the Kingdom of God.

As we walk and stamp our way about the world, we raise just such a dust. It settles on and blurs for us the things that really matter: the joy of simplicity’s beauty, of sweet self-forgetfulness, of life’s many, simple little acts of love. We can’t see any shine at all because of all the dreary dust accumulated, as it were, upon our shoes which cannot simply be shaken off, but needs wiping, polishing, shining, buffing off.

Blue but beautiful feet

This is one of the many reasons for remaining active members of the family of God. In the life and worship of God’s family we wipe, polish, shine, buff off the dust of materialism, busyness and fret with and among good, lovely and openly Christian folk, before our beloved Holy One.

It might also be a good thing to emulate our Islamic brothers and sisters and symbolically leave our shoes at the church door.

The first baptism I ever performed was of a little baby who, on a frosty but sunny winter’s day in Zimbabwe, screamed from the service’s beginning to end. This, it turned out, was not in horror of me or of baptism, but because its Dad, though instructed to put its booties on under the christening robe, had forgotten to do so. Its feet, although beautiful, were blue, poor little thing!

I trust that over thirty years later the baptism has borne its fruit. That those little feet, now pink rather than blue, much larger and possibly callused and corned, yet meet with Isaiah’s approval, because “how beautiful, upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring good tidings, who publish peace; who bring good tidings of good, that publish salvation; that say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’”

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (21)

Andrew Neaum

I have been resident in Australia for twenty six years. This means that I have now lived longer here than anywhere else in the world. My time in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe lasted for about twenty five years, and during that time there was a year and a half in England teaching, and two years and a half studying in South Africa.

A new citizen

With this in mind, a few months ago I decided to apply at last for Australian citizenship. It proved to be remarkably easy compared to the hugely complicated business of applying for a provisional Permanent Resident Visa for Diana. After submitting my application forms and certified copies of this, that and the other, I was phoned after but a few weeks by a friendly man with a strong Indian accent. He told me that all was well and that I would soon be receiving a letter from Canberra informing me of the approval of my application.

He went on to ask me why I had waited so long to apply. I told him that it was a mixture of idleness and inertia, which raised a chuckle. I then asked him if I would have to undergo the Australian Citizenship Test and he replied, "Oh no, there will be no need, we respect senior citizens far too much for that!" It was my turn to chuckle.

Ambivalence

Oddly, when I am in England I feel happily Australian and when in Australia happily English. In the United Kingdom I support Australian sporting teams, in Australia English ones. This ambivalence might be supposed to derive from uncertainty as to my identity and confusion as to exactly where I belong, perhaps arising from an early childhood spent in a variety of outlandish places. However I suspect it has more to do with a hard to account for, but deep-rooted perversity and scepticism in me that finds it easier and more comfortable to define myself by opposition rather than by belonging.

A born sceptic I tend to dabble in and worry myself frazzled in the writings of atheists in order to be assured of and hold on to God. I appreciate his likely presence by dwelling on his undoubted absence. I love paradox.

Pullulating timidly

Needless to say then, my favourite piece of Australian verse is not a rollicking bush ballad, nor a patriotic jingle like our less than admirable national anthem. Rather it is A. D. Hope's famous poem "Australia", expressive of an ambivalent, subtle, understated love of his native land that arises out of and also in spite of a clear-sighted, honest, critical disdain:

                                                            .....her five cities, like five teeming sores,

                                                          Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state

                                                          Where second hand Europeans pullulate

                                                          Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

                                                         Yet there are some like me turn gladly home

                                                         From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find

                                                         The Arabian desert of the human mind,

                                                         Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

                                                          Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare

                                                         Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes

                                                         The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes

                                                         Which is called civilization over there.

Exercising the vote

Once I am pledged I will be required to vote. I have never voted in my life. My few years as an adult teacher in England did not coincide with an election. Nor was I ever a Rhodesian or Zimbabwean citizen in all my years as a resident there.

Will my first trip into a polling booth be as exciting to me as it was for all those long- deprived, black South Africans after the fall of apartheid? When it comes to voting in local government elections, will I be able to resist the blandishments of Mr Muto?

Walnuts once more

The walnut tree is covered with little green walnuts, and the cockatoos regularly send spies overhead to monitor their edibility. We eye them similarly ourselves because Diana has a Canadian/Greek daughter in law, Olga, who has introduced her to a Greek recipe for delicious, sugar-glazed, green walnuts (Glyko Karythi). We hope this year to beat the cockatoos to the immature nuts and work wonders with them.

This week we used nuts collected over the last few years to make walnut marzipan again. We wrap it around date and walnut cake to eat as a dessert with natural yoghurt and home made lemon curd. A curious but delicious combination of flavours and textures.

You can of course pickle green walnuts. However, like pickled eggs, they rarely live up to expectations, being too mouth puckeringly vinegary.

Down by the riverside

Last Sunday Diana and I enjoyed a splendid meal and the excellent company of the Murchison and Rushworth folk. After a pleasing Eucharist in the lovely Murchison church there were tasty nibbles in the church hall over a cuppa, then many of us made our way to the home of Robert and Heather Smith, which is set on the edge of the woodlands that flank the Goulburn river and which are alive with the calls of birds.

On every fifth Sunday the two congregations get together for a single service followed by an excellent meal in someone's home. There is an open invitation to all of us for these, the more the merrier. The cost is usually $20 and for catering purposes numbers need to be phoned in. So when notice of one such feast is given in this pew sheet, do take up the offer. The Fennels joined us last Sunday and were royally welcomed. A lovely day.

House blessing and Islam

On Melbourne Cup day Diana and I went to bless the fine new home of Handson and Lynett Nhanhanga on Verney Road North. The house blessing service I have refined and developed over the years is lovely, full of good biblical quotes and fine prayers. With young Comfort sprinkling the holy water, and robust little Blessing in his Dad's arm, it was pleasing to note that the word "blessing" and the word "comfort" both occur in the service, a fact noted by an alert Comfort. It was good too to bless a kitchen in full use, emitting delicious aromas to blend exotically with the incense. After a lovely meal we dashed off home to consider Islam in the good and lively company of our study group.

Next week's study will be the last until after Christmas. Diana and I head for New Zealand on the 14th of November for two weeks. We will reconvene the group to finish the course early enough to complete it well before Lent.

Daily journals

One of the most amusing facets of applying for Diana's permanent residence was the need to explain our relationship, and to give an account of its history. Mere friendship began twenty seven or eight years ago, and as proof of this we turned to my daily journal of the time. There we discovered not only compli-mentary comments about Diana and her family, but also rather less flattering ones, to her amusement and my embarrassment. Diana, Michael, Pula and Martha arrived on the island of St Helena in 1984. On July 31st my journal contains the following: "On Sunday though cold, to the Houghton's after St Martin's for what proved to be a very pleasant afternoon. Still think they are excellent..... roast chicken but with little imagination or finesse and bread and butter pudding - bottle of wine and sherry before. Went walk in afternoon round Mundens....." As Diana points out, she was feeding our family of five with her's of four after a morning involved at their church which included managing a Sunday School in her vicarage with sixty children. We were lucky to receive a cooked meal at all, with or without finesse!

A first journal

The first most personal, perhaps lurid and certainly most interesting journal I ever kept was when I was teaching in London in the very early seventies.

It was a time when I was courting a very Roman Catholic girl, was teaching in a succession of truly terrible schools and re-discovering the Christian faith. My faith, though not my attendance at church, had been sorely tried and all but shelved during my last years at school and right through university. I imagined at the time that it was reason and intellect that brought on my doubt. The wisdom that comes with maturity, coupled with hindsight, suggests the more probable cause to have been a combination of libido and hedonism.

Sadly I destroyed my first journal in a fit of timidity. I feared that it might reveal too much of what lay behind "the face that we prepare to meet the faces that we meet". Certainly I could not bear the thought of any unauthor-ised person reading it. So the record of one of the most significant periods of my life has gone for ever. I regret this enormously. I would love to make again the acquaintance of the man I used to be.

Cold water

The man I used to be was one who in an unlikely bed-sitter in Chiswick had at that time a most significant religious experience. He also had a kindly landlady who expected him to bath only once a week and who turned off the hot water for the duration of summer.

So perhaps it was cold water that doused my libido and hedonism sufficiently to allow faith to re-emerge and recapture me. If so it was cold water combined with listening to the singing of Psalm 37 on a cold weekday afternoon in Westminster Abbey choir stalls: "Fret not thyself because of the ungodly...." If so it was cold water combined with attendance at the Eucharist and evening Benediction in the smoking, gold-glittering gloom of All Saints' Margaret Street. If so it was cold water combined with a religious experience that came upon me as I was kneeling by the maroon bedspread-covered, narrow pallet of my tiny bed-sitter and reciting the Sanctus at the end of a poor attempt at prayer. As I did so I was overcome by a sensation of light and heat and a sureness of God's reality and presence.

After many vicissitudes these experiences led me to an ACCM Conference in Woking, to a theological college in South Africa, to a diaconate and first curacy in Salisbury, Rhodesia, to a rectorship in Gatooma in Rhodesia which while I was there became Kadoma in Zimbabwe, then on to a vicarship and archdeaconry on the Island of St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean and then to four rectorships in Victoria, Australia.

How stupid to destroy a journal that recorded the beginning of all of that!

Celebrating Rectory life

Since my time in London I have kept journals intermittently, and for the past ten years regularly, but no journal has ever been allowed to be too personal. I remember once reading an edition of Evelyn Waugh's journals. After making some more than usually outrageous statement he would add in brackets "future editor please expunge that comment", or words to that effect. My private journals also take account these days of possible future readers, authorised or unauthorised. I am careful and so nowhere near as interesting as I might otherwise be.

Like Waugh's journals, this diary column in the parish pew sheet, much of the raw material for which is extracted from my private journal, has an editor, myself, who all too readily expunges anything truly outrageous. My purpose is to celebrate priest-hood, parsoning, parish-life and pastoring, rather than to startle or dazzle.

In 1972, a large, jovial, big-bellied Arch-deacon at my Selection Conference in Woking said to us all at the end of the Conference that he had been a parish priest for thirty eight years, and that to be one had been the most interesting, glorious, and varied of privileges and vocations that could ever be. I could not agree more.

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Andrew Neaum

Welcome to summer. The church windows were flung open last Sunday, casually tearing six months worth of draught insulating gossamer, kindly spun by churchy spiders to seal them for winter. The ease with which the spiders webs were torn proved their amazing endeavours to be as ephemeral as life itself, disillusioning even spiders into a morbid contemplation of the transitoriness of life.

Blackbirds, lorikeets and bats

Between the Rectory and the Church white mulberries have begun to fall, squelching beneath churchgoers' feet. Although white their juice stains the rectory carpet if brought in on shoes, and so we favour discalced feet on our visitors. I fear for this lovely mulberry tree's future. Idle puritans would sooner be shadeless than have to sweep a patch of pathway daily for a month. The blackbirds already gorge themselves on the first ripe berries and we wonder if last year's bats will return. These denizens of the night, the purported reservoirs of vile diseases, with their leathery wings, ferocious appetites and uninhibited dropping of dubious juices upon curiously upturned faces both fascinate and repel.

The rainbow lorikeets have returned to dazzle us during the daytime as they feast, offering an unmusical and incomprehensible squawking to rival or complement worship inside the church. I will again be attempting to attract them to our bird tray with food especially manufactured for these nectar and pollen eaters. They relish not only mulberries and nectar, they also delicately nibble at the grain I put out for other birds. This is frowned upon by ornithologists who maintain it could well damage their delicate brush-like tongues.

Blinding vision

To my dismay one of the loveliest gardens at our end of Orr Street has been utterly destroyed by developers. Particularly fine was a huge elm tree, possibly the best specimen in Shepparton, which was crudely lopped and uprooted as if worthless. Likewise a divine persimmon tree whose light golden leaves and deeper orange, golden fruit beautified the street for months. It was ruthless, total devastation. I am told that the place is to be turned into some sort of eye surgery or optometrists rooms, and that the beautiful garden is to be its dull car park. Fancy enabling people to see only by destroying all that is worth seeing.

There is a kind of heroism in the daily life of some of our parishioners that is both surprising and heartening. Some of them are folk who without realising it take to heart the words of Samuel Becket: "Don't lose heart, plug yourself in to despair and sing it."

A Great Panegyrical Repast

On December 11th at 12 noon we will be celebrating with a great "Bring and Share" luncheon in our hall some very special and remarkable folk. Not least Norm Mitchel-more, who after years and years of meticulous and devoted service as Parish Treasurer is passing on the task to Jeanette Smith. Also Heather Fitzgerald, one our wisest, most eirenic and lovely of parishioners and ex churchwardens. There will be another remarkable person to celebrate as well, who at the moment I cannot reveal, but will do so when all is certain and ready to be made public. So book the date, and if you don't know what a panegyric is, google it!

Farewell to another Heather

The coming year is to be one full of change for the parish. This is not least because our Parish Secretary, Heather Camm, leaves us at the end of the year. She and Roger having sold their house in Euroa will be moving to Melbourne. We will celebrate her more lyrically later, but her going is a great loss to us, for she has been a very dear friend to pretty well all of us, a very special, loving Christian.

So invaluable has she been we have had to aim as stratospherically high as possible to replace her. With the Vestry's concurrence I have asked Diana Neaum to take over her job for an initial stint of six months and she has agreed. She is too responsible a woman to accept such a position lightly and without due consideration. She even rang the wife of a former dean known to us both who had been the secretary in her husband's parish for some years to ask how it all worked. Amid much good and sensible advice was the comment "you will have to be content to stand in the shadow of your husband." To which I could only respond, "Small chance of that! It is far, far more likely that I shall have to grow accustomed to standing in hers."

Although a Landscape Architect by profession Diana is not without secretarial experience. When George Carey retired as Archbishop of Canterbury he asked Diana to become his P.A, which she duly did for a year and a half until he and his wife left Bristol to live elsewhere.

Names and faces

Many years ago Joan Harder put together a display of photographs of parishioners which is now about thirty five years old. How fascinating it is to see present parishioners as they were then, and to remember those who, aided by the prayers of mother Church, now rest in peace.

Diana has been putting into effect over the past few weeks a long-time scheme of mine. Namely to take a photograph of all present church-going parishioners who are willing. With digital photography this costs nothing and provides a visual record of who we are at this time to enable ruminative reminiscing in years to come. It will also assist new clergy (as well as parishioners) to sit quietly at a screen and troll through the flock in an attempt to fix names to faces in the memory. This is becoming vital for your present Rector, never very good at fitting names to faces and getting worse. Names, not faces, tend to be lost in the chaotic maelstrom that is my subconscious. There they jostle with all sorts of less consequential fragments from a full, varied and unutterably fascinating life.

We have now about 160 photographs on file. Already they are fun to troll through. Any we consider unflattering we replace.

Eels and sphincters

On Monday Diana and I head for New Zealand for two weeks. This is a holiday initiated by the Department of Immigration. Diana's provisional Permanent Residence Visa to be activated requires entry from another country. Goodness knows why. One assumes a good reason even when there is no evidence of it. While in New Zealand we will be throwing ourselves upon the hospitality of friends. The first of these is a doctor we both knew on the Island of St Helena. I did not get to know him as well as Diana because it was his predecessor who parted me from my appendix, assisted in the birth of Elizabeth and accompanied me down precipitous cliffs to fish. On one such trip he filled me in on the details of a then current and fascinating Island tale.

One of the tastiest of fish to be caught from the rocks was what the islanders termed a "Conger", but which in fact was a Moray eel. Not only are these eels ferocious and likely to give an unwary fisherman a nasty bite, they also have Y-shaped bones running down their backs. These are totally indigestible and so if swallowed pass right through the system, if you are fortunate. Given their shape, however, before their journey is complete they often lodge themselves somewhere to irritate, fester and cause nasty problems.

On the island at that time there was a woman who was somewhat strange, to put it delicately. On all festive occasions such as processions and weddings she would feature prominently in front of the band always dressed up in homemade wedding gear, prancing and cavorting, her withered shanks all atremble with excitement and joy. The doctor with whom I fished confirmed some of the bizarre details of a story about her that one would normally have dismissed as fanciful. She had once fed her husband "conger" eel without ensuring that all the bones were removed. These he had swallowed and most unfortunately one of them in its passage through his body lodged itself maliciously in his sphincter. This soon began to cause him much dire distress.

Like all good wives his was something of a soother and healer, and she determined to sort his problem out. Without tweezers to hand she resorted to a pair of pliers, causing him such agony, by all accounts, that the unfortunate man rushed from his house bellowing like a bull to pull up a banana tree by the roots before repairing back to bed to allow septicaemia to establish itself and bring on easeful death.

Good company

Egotists can still be good company, but only if they are articulate, witty and well informed and so able to feed and parade their ego by dazzling as much with accounts of others as of themselves. The very, very best of company, however, is that which attends. The sort of person who is so comfortable with himself that he is free fully to attend, listen to and take you seriously. Their lovely worth, by its very nature, is largely unremarked upon, but they are to be treasured and loved.

Most people who rabbit on incessantly about themselves are damaged folk, compelled to push themselves forward for constant affirmation and reassurance because denied it as little ones. They tend to be unconscionable bores. In a competition for the most boring title for an autobiography the winner was: "No, I tell a lie, it must have been Tuesday."

Two highlights of each day. A scalding hot shower in the morning. Getting into a crisp bed at night. All the rest is parenthesis.

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Andrew Neaum

Back home from New Zealand, with a Sheila on my arm.

No fanfare

The prime purpose of the trip was achieved with so total an understatement and lack of fuss it seemed more characteristic of Britain than Australia. The culmination of hours and hours of painstaking work, phone con-versations, photo-copying, document endorsing, form filling and exasperation, was simply to hand over Diana's passport to an Immigration Official at Melbourne Airport on our return, have it stamped as perfunctorily as was mine, and then handed back.

That was that! An English lass had become and Australian Sheila, albeit provisionally.

Had we not asked if there had been any change of status, there would have been no evidence or acknowledgement of the fact! The Sheila behind the counter did smile when I suggested that there might be a little more fanfare for so notable an achievement, and she reassured us that Diana's change of status was all electronically noted, if not passported.

Having one's cake and eating it

There is almost as great a joy in homecoming as there is in getting away. Our fifteen days in New Zealand, in being spent entirely in the homes of friends, were in a sense days at home as well as days away from home. A case of being able to have one's cake and eat it.

Our home is, or should be, a foretaste of and insight into the very fellowship and happiness of heaven. It is where we retreat to be ourselves, or as my great hero Dr Johnson puts it, is where we "sink to our natural dimensions". "...... The great end of prudence," he says at the end of a passage of profound wisdom, "is to give cheerfulness to those hours, which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises, which he feels in privacy to be useless encumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."

To be allowed by others to be a part of their homes and lives was a privilege of privileges to Diana and myself and it added another great dimension to our holiday. We were observers and discoverers of not only a very beautiful land, but also of often beautiful and always fascinating and generous lives.

Tuesday 15th November in New Zealand

I sit on the bed of a lovely, wooden, high- ceilinged house in a sylvan setting of North Island, not far from Keri Keri. We left the Rectory at about ten past five yesterday morning. The flight itself was easy and pleasant. We had booked with Virgin Airlines, but the flight itself was with Air New Zealand and they offered us a decent enough lunch, which was welcome as we had had but one piece of toast before we left at 5.00am.

Diana had organised a "travel card" for access to cash, but we have messed it up a bit by my pulling off the pin number backing too impatiently. This means that we haven't the number for one card. Even worse, the money I put on to it electronically doesn't seem to be there yet, and we were charged seven dollars for extracting $200 at an ATM.

There was a long trek to the domestic terminal at Auckland on a cool pleasant day, and then again a trouble free trip on a little plane with only one row of seats of each side of a narrow aisle. The cockpit door was open all the time and so, seated second from the front, we were able to see what the two pilots were up to. How green the countryside, and how varied: great bays and islands with large areas of mudflats, the tide being out. Little sign of beaches around the bays over which we flew near Auckland. As we came down towards the Bay of Islands we noticed with interest lots of tiny fields with strangely tall hedges, apparently protection for Kiwi Fruit. Peter and Primrose our hosts were there waiting for us at the little airport.

Peter and Primrose

Peter was the surgeon on the Island of St Helena when both Diana and I were there. He did several stints on the island, his time there coinciding much longer with Diana and her family's time, than with me and mine. He was easy to place in the small crowd waiting for our flight, not at all ravaged by time, a gently older version of the man I remembered. Primrose, his delightful and sparkling wife he married after my time. She, as is he, is English and they met on Alderney in the Channel Islands. Hugely hospitable and kindly to us, they live in a lovely wooden house that overlooks a forested hill face. There is a little river at the bottom of a very lovely garden that melds into pleasing wildness as it drops steeply down to the riverbank.

The guest room, an upstairs eyrie with its own little balcony, was lovely to settle into for a couple of days. The illustrious doctor himself has not been well, which necessitated a slight curtailment of our stay with them. They have a little cabin cruiser and had planned taking us round some of the islands in the lovely Bay of Islands, but this was not to be. Instead they took us sight seeing with Primrose at the wheel of their car.

Our first trip was along winding and hilly roads with a short ferry trip to a peninsular upon which is the town of Russel, the original and short lived capital of NZ. This part of New Zealand was the centre of all the turmoil and antagonism between the British and the Maoris that culminated in the Treaty of Waitangi, the site of which is nearby.

Russel is nowadays a pleasing little town. All its houses and buildings appear to be made of wood and are painted much the same colour. We looked over the oldest still-in-use church in the country. Outside its front door is a tomb of the wife of a local surgeon who, it informed us, was once the surgeon on St Helena! On enquiring about this strange coincidence in the interesting little local museum, we discovered the tomb to be fairly new and not dating from the nineteenth century as we had presumed. The surgeon had remarried and was still around in the nineteen forties, actually remembered by the informative lady in the museum.

The town has a lovely bay front, lined with large, sprawling Pohutukawa trees. There, on the verandah of its old wooden hotel, we had a very good fish and chip meal, sharing a table with four gross Australians, who were on shore from a great floating cruise ship. In conversation with them we, snooty seasoned sea-travels for the real and utilitarian purpose of getting from A to B, had some of our prejudices about mere tourists turned into unjustifiably incontrovertible truths.

Peter is a neat and tidy fellow, serious though with a good chuckle whenever the humour becomes irresistible. Like me he takes the Spectator, but largely for the articles I tend to skip, namely the political ones. He intimated no appreciation of the magazine's "lowlife" correspondent, Jeremy Clarke, whose column reduces Diana and myself to immoderate laughter almost every week.

He is one of those doctors who during the height of the British Empire appear to have been more common than they are nowadays. Widely travelled, interested in far more than just making money or in a stable and static career, fascinated by outlandish places. Such doctors are in a sense relics, pieces of imperial jetsam. He was once a ship's doctor, and was a surgeon on the Falklands as well as St Helena, doing shorter stints in Borneo, Anguilla, the Orkneys, Channel Islands and goodness knows where else. He has lead a most interesting life, one that he doesn't make enough of in exaggerated anecdote and tall story.

His wife with the delightful name of Primrose is a bright, artistic, spark of a woman, who paints fine pictures, walks, gardens, thinks, reads and laughs a lot, even at my jokes. She took us to the oldest surviving building in New Zealand, which is part of an Anglican CMS mission that played a large part in the early history of the place. There we caught the tail end of a tour of the old Mission House, a tour which was taken by a tall woman guide dressed in period clothes. She told us that she was half Fijian, and seemed very relaxed and unapologetic about the cannibalism that used to be a part of Polynesian culture, saying that in crowded circumstances it seemed a not unsensible expedient! However, as far as I know, the motivation for cannibalism had more to do with absorbing the power and spirit of enemies than anything else. When asked if she was a volunteer she said "Oh no! I am well paid." A rare and welcome viewpoint. Very tall, she explained her height as being the result of her half Polynesian makeup, "we are big people thanks to our diet of yams and taro...."

The well maintained and kept old wooden Mission house is set in a lovely spot and has a traditional garden round it, overlooking the Keri Keri river. The almost as old and imposing Stonehouse next door is a museum, around which we had a good ramble. Most of its exhibits are to do with the missionaries, many of whom were heroic, and with the Maori wars and the Treaty of Waitangi.

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Andrew Neaum

The week's best comment would have to be the complaint made to me, that with the Rector's wife in the Parish Office parishioners will have no one to whinge to! That is probably not a bad thing. We don't employ a secretary to field, absorb or suffer whinges and whines. Affirming, not whingeing, should characterise Christians. However, as a long time clergyman's wife, Diana is well practised in the art of listening to whinges and criticism in order to filter them judiciously into forms suitable to the tender susceptibilities of sensitive clergy. Most of us at times need a whinge, and now and then they carry some justification. Perhaps at out next AGM we should elect a Parish Whinge Receptor, to listen to and filter whinges of dross and rubbish and then pass on any small residue of legitimate criticism.

Too beautiful this year

My children have some close ties to New Zealand, mostly through a family that was warmly connected to ours when I was Rector of Ararat. I wonder if they will be reading this account of our two weeks holiday there with more than usual interest.

On our return we received a card from Rachel in Jerusalem where she is helping to run courses at St George's College. She says: "I could live in Jerusalem a thousand years and not come close to getting a handle on its glorious, passionate beauty." She precedes this comment by quoting the second half of a glorious sonnet by Edna St Vincent Millay.....

                                                         Long have I known a glory in it all,

                                                                    But never knew I this;

                                                                   Here such a passion is

                                                         As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear

                                                         Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.

                                                         My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

                                                         No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Somewhere in this pew sheet I will print the whole of the sonnet, it is lovely.

New Zealand Birthday

Back to New Zealand. It was only when I lay on the bed of our little eyrie in the lovely house near Keri Keri, opened my small travelling laptop and pressed Control-D to begin the day's entry in the Journal which is the quarry for this article, that I noticed it was my birthday, the 16th of November. Needless to say Diana had not forgotten the date.

After a proper breakfast of scrambled egg, followed by toast and lovely Manuka honey, my birthday was duly recognised with presents and little candles stuck into a pair of very sweet oranges from the orchard behind the house. A mere remnant of an orchard now turned over mostly to kiwi fruit vines, which are grown in hugely high-hedged paddocks on trellises which are high enough to walk under to pick the fruit dangling invitingly and conveniently down. Pruning on top of the trellises must be something of a hassle.

Summing me up well, the Summers gave me a book called Preposterous Proverbs, its subtitle being my mother's very favourite proverb "Fine words butter no parsnips". Diana gave me a book on New Zealand and two seat belt covers.

The loveliest of loos

After breakfast we set out for the airport to collect our hire car and travel south to Tor Bay to stay with our second host. The trip was trouble free, with one little shower of rain early on, and mostly sunny, though cool, thereafter. The countryside was beautifully lush and green and for the most part, as in England, it was either cultivated, or rich pastureland so well grassed that sometimes the ubiquitous dairy herds were all but invisible in wind-waving unmown hay. There seemed to be little flat land, it was very much up and down along a curvaceous road with very many grassed hills that were for the most part, sharp angled beneath their turf, indicating relatively recent volcanic origins.

Our first stop was at a place called Kawakawa, famous above all else for its public conveniences — the Hundertwasser toilets. Hundertwasser was an anti-rationalist artist, environmentalist and architect. As an architect he was an enemy of straight lines and so his work is vaguely reminiscent of the more famous Gaudi architect of the great church of flowing lines in Barcelona. Hundertwasser's brightly coloured toilets in Kawakawa are indeed a delight to use, different and fascinating. Relieving oneself was more than a mere convenience, I felt that I was participating in a work of art. Sculptured columns, flowing lines, mosaic tiling, tufts of native grass adorning the roof, a tree incorporated into the structure, copper handwork, sculptures and cobblestone flooring, it was amazing. Of all rivals to being the most uninteresting place in a city or town the public conveniences would win. Not so in Kawakawa.

Ruapekapeka

Our next significant stop was twenty of so kilometres south of Kawakawa. We headed off the road and up into lovely, well grassed hills, all buttercupped and daisied, the unmetalled road lined with cow parsley. We had spotted a signpost to a famous Pa: Ruapekapeka. A Pa can be the site of a fortified village, but is more usually that of a fortified hilltop defensive position. Ruapeka-peka is a very fine example of the latter. It is the site of the final battle between the British and Maori in the "War of the North". We parked the car and walked through a fine carved wooden archway at the beginning of a path up the hill. On reaching the site itself there was very clear and striking evidence of long gone palisades, earthworks and trenches. There is now too a great big and very fine carved commemorative Maori pole, with the characteristic, glaring, fierce faces.

Apparently the British victory over their opponents had been aided by an unfair attack on a Sunday, when the newly converted Maoris were at prayer! Nothing is beyond perfidious Albion. Though ironically accounts of colonial history nowadays, both here in Australia and in New Zealand, do appear so to bend over backwards in an anti-colonial and pro-indigenous fervour, that they transfer the deplorable triumphalism of our own proud accounts of our history in days gone by, to those we conquered all of whom are painted as having been heroic and faultless. An ironic colonial legacy.

Continuing south

After a lovely walk all over the beflowered and grassy Pa in bright sunshine and a brisk, cool breeze, we headed back to the car and made our way to the port of Whangarei. There we found a grassy park adjacent to what appeared to be a large yachting berth, empty of yachts, and ate what was to become our standard lunch. A fresh and crisp baguette, with a delicious New Zealand avocado pear each, supplemented this time with a modestly sized blue brie cheese. We abandoned cheese in later lunches for the unutterably delicious Manuka honey.

We then headed on south towards Auckland, avoiding the toll road and finding our destination with ease. So much so we arrived before scheduled and were able to do a beach walk around the eponymous Tor of Tor Bay. Of particular interest to our inquiring minds and salivating mouths were the great clusters of small mussels, oysters and other little molluscs on the rocks we walked across. The sea and fine seafood of course play a big part in the life of New Zealand. To my shame, however, I never sampled the much vaunted, but unappetising looking mussel fritter.

We had arranged to stay with a cousin of Margaret's, Penny, who lives in a two-bedroomed flatlet at street level beneath her daughter's house. In her eighties, for she is the oldest of all Margaret's cousins whereas Margaret was the youngest, she has been very, very ill, but remains the doughtiest and bravest of persons, the family archivist and focus. She offered us the alternative of going out to eat, or pork chops at home and we decided on the latter. I cooked them, keeping half an ear cocked as Diana interrogated her about the Margaret's extensive and interesting family.

One of the most interesting things about a second marriage, and sometimes the most difficult, is the melding of two families. Immediate family is one thing, but even if that is achieved, there remains a vast network of distant and then more distant relatives and their stories who have helped to make the present the present. All need to be absorbed, appropriated and at least in part understood if one's sense of belonging is to be complete. A vast hinterland awaiting exploration then. It is like emigrating to a new country. All the history, geography and literature learned or absorbed during one's school years fades into utter irrelevance in a new land, leaving a great gaping hole which, if you are an adult, is never, ever quite adequately filled.

Our time with Penny was spent mostly talking. Much of it to do with family matters, but also with faith as well. Most of her family are church involved, some of them intimately so. She herself remains a stalwart, thoughtful, traditional Anglican, some of her family of more enthusiastic varieties of the faith. We had two lovely walks while with her, the first up a steep valley, almost opposite her house, through thick forest with large trees and many tree ferns, very lovely and wild considering it is situated in the middle of a suburb. The second walk was more extensive, several miles along a wide flat beach, muddy coloured presumably from being estuarine. Along its landward side were splendid examples of the sprawling Pohutukawa trees with their seaward side roots exposed in impressive, snarled tangles.

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The lemon pickle that we have been cooking for a couple of months by sunlight in the garden has now been bottled and broached. Simple, delicious and beautifully fiery.

In the Rectory

The Rectory bursts with life. It hosts the Gittens family, who are here all the way from North London for a couple of weeks. There are Llew and Martha (Dad and Mum), with Max and Bella, their lively children. Martha is Diana's daughter whom I first knew as a shy little girl at about the same age as far from shy Bella now, who is six. They fly off on the 2th to stay for a while in Thailand before heading back to the winter-gloom of London.

It is good to have the garden in production once more. We have both sweet corn and maize growing, the former already tasselling, the latter reminding me of the thousands of acres that used to characterise Zimbabwe. Already six foot high it is dark green and robust. My memory tells me that maize cobs, if picked young, are infinitely preferable in taste to sweet corn. I look forward to putting that judgement to the test. Another much loved plant we have growing and which reminds me of Zimbabwe is a less than robust looking gem-squash. The fruit, perfectly round in shape, when eaten young with a dab of butter, I love. For a brief while some years ago they appeared in our supermarkets here in Victoria, but no longer. I gather they are not uncommon in Queensland.

All those farewells

Last week's farewells and thanksgivings went off swimmingly and the Carol Service was better attended than usual, due largely, I suppose, to its linking to our Panegyrical Repast.

The amount of work (and pleasure) that goes into this annual service deserves a good attendance, and so the linkage was inspired. For many years now, in several parishes, I have balanced scripture readings with secular readings at Carol Services. This is because to do so provides a refreshing and unusual perspective on a story that commercialism and sickly Christmas cards conspire to turn banal.

The main secular reading this year was a particularly poignant and compelling story by a Frenchman called Henri Bordeaux. Beautifully read in four segments by four of our regular lectors it was most moving. I visited Nola Brewer last week to give her Communion and she told me how she had read the story at home, and that it had moved her to tears. Because it was so beautifully sad I had hesitated to use it, for Christmas is marketed as relentlessly cheerful (all that dreadful "ho, ho, ho, hoing"!), but Diana gave it the thumbs up and so use it we did.

The choir and organist, as usual, sounded lovely. Many thanks.

From the heart

The meal that followed was joyous, well planned and great fun, containing not a few highlights. The first of these were the two speeches by Heather Fitzgerald and Norm Mitchelmore given in response to two well wrought panegyrics from Bev Condon and Norm Weaver. They were from the heart by two devoted parishioners whose achievements over so many, many years underline the truth that it is parishioners, far more than transitory clergy, who authenticate and characterise a good parish.

Another highlight was the presentation of gifts. Heather's lovely necklace was solemnly paraded into the hall, right around and through the hall, pinned to a cushion held by young Comfort Nhanhanga, preceded by an even younger Robert Shields holding a large farewell card signed by all present. There was something very touching about the natural grace and seriousness with which they performed this task. Norm's gift was a very long, non-kinking hose. This was paraded in and around the hall, unravelled. An exceedingly long, green snake supported by members of our fine Gardening Team.

Perhaps the strangest highlight of the evening was the cleanup in the kitchen at the end of it all. The place hummed with hard working, happily harmonious parishioners making light of a big job with joyous good humour.

More farewells

We farewelled another departing parishioner with a gift and words of gratitude, in the person of Jenny Moran whose faithful and reliable work as lector, sidesperson and flower guild member was duly acknowledged. We then thanked in absentia, Greg and Verna Pestell who soon return to Benalla parish at the expense of ours, but who for several years now have been all but indispensable as 10.30am Sunday attenders and participators. We recalled too, with gratitude, John and Gaye Gaylard who for many, many years have been hugely generous to our emergency food cupboard, to the tune of thousands of dollars.

It was a great Panegyrical repast indeed. As so often, I am hugely grateful to Pat Gibson for her creative, meticulous and detailed planning.

Fawning, flattering twerp

The word panegyrical has been lurking in my subconscious, awaiting its moment, since my days as a student of English Lit., in the glorious 1960's when it was so good to be young and alive and frisky.

Poets in ancient times and also in the 17th century, were expected and sometimes paid to write great paeans of praise for all sorts of unworthy swine: Charles II and Oliver Cromwell to name but two.

It is a difficult task wholeheartedly to praise people without beginning to sound like a hypocritical, fawning, flattering, boot-licking, and sycophantic twerp. So I was glad to be merely MC and toast maker rather than panegyricist. It was Bev Condon's and Norm Weaver's task to peal forth the paeans of praise. They were fortunate that it was not to dubious characters like Charles II or Oliver Cromwell, but rather to two of the finest of St Augustinian flowers.

On Wednesday at the 10.00am Eucharist we farewelled Heather Camm, our Parish Secretary. She has endeared herself to that congregation in particular and has regularly acted as Eucharistic Assistant to them, which she did last Wednesday. The Gospel for the day admirably suited the occasion enabling or inspiring the following little homily:

Good news for the poor

Jesus said: "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard.... The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the good news preached to them ..... blessed is he who takes no offence at me...."

It is rarely arguments and discussion that bring people to God, rather it is example. It is God lived in people's lives. It is love and sacrifice; it is kindness, compassion and forgiveness demonstrated in people's relationships and living.

When John the Baptist wanted to know if Jesus was fair dinkum, if he was the expected one, the Messiah, God's anointed one to trust and back as such, Jesus didn't argue his case to John's messengers. He simply pointed them to what he did and was doing. He simply carried on living his life in front of them, healing, loving, and imparting hope and good news. Especially and most interestingly, we are told, to the poor.

He didn't argue his case, even before Pontius Pilate. He lived his love, loved his love, died his love, and converted a world. Authenticity demonstrated, not argued.

So too, ultimately it has to be with us. Unless we live love and die love; unless we love sacrificially, live, give and love extravagantly, over the top, whole-heartedly, we remain unconvincing, unimpressive, easy to dismiss, easy to ignore, easy to take for granted. "Christian? Oh yeah, so what! I'm just as good as you are...."

Through the Narthex window

For the past seven years, there has been a little window in St Augustine's through which authenticity has shone more brightly than most. It's the window in the Narthex that looks into and out of a gloomy parish office.

From the gloom has shone the face of Heather Camm, with its halo of blonde hair. Always welcoming but, as with Jesus in the Gospel, especially to the poor.

Not only has she spoken love to such folk, she's sacrificed her time for them, walked the second mile with them, a third mile for them. She's sacrificed her own money for them, gone to Melbourne with them, worried over them, cried alongside them. She's listened to them, sometimes interminably, she's badgered, bothered and harassed the Rector on their behalf, encouraged, cajoled and urged him to love them.

She has loved widely and welcomed hugely not only the poor. She's been a beacon of tolerance and acceptance to everyone. But it is her love of the marginalised, more than anything else, that has defined her ministry among us. In the words of Jesus himself, the poor have had the good news preached to them, and blessed is he who takes no offence at her.

The Kingdom of God in Shepparton

The Kingdom of God here at Shepparton, for the past seven years, has shone particularly brightly from the gloom of the parish office through its little narthex window, in the face of Heather Camm.

That we will miss her goes without saying, for she has certainly loved us all, but that the poor, the fringe-dwellers, those often despised, forgotten and overlooked, will miss her too, and she them as well as us, probably even more than us, makes her a true sister of the Jesus she dearly loves. It also authenticates her, makes her the genuine article, fair dinkum,

She is too, of course, a sinner, has her own shortcomings and failings. These are as nothing though, in the light of an authenticity, that has helped turn our narthex into a refuge, a respite, a little outpost of the Kingdom of God. God bless you Heather, and thank you.

THIS AND THAT (26)

A highlight of this Christmas Season for me was the Carol Concert given in our Church on the 16th December by Sempre Cantare.

This was not just because of the unutterable loveliness of the music, or of its setting (the church glowed beautifully with unanticipated late evening sunshine from usually unnoticed windows), nor was it just the young loveliness of the five girl singers and their guest.

There were two other particular graces. The first of these was the modesty and lack of affectation on the part of the choristers. Not one of them was in anyway a showoff. There was no evidence of what I like to call diva-ticulitis. The second grace was their generosity in giving of their beauty and huge talent not only to the audience (a mere voluntary gold-coin donation was all that was requested for so superb a concert) but also to charity, because what was given (over $500) went to Anglicare.

Whenever, or wherever beauty and charity (love) coincide for us, believing or not, we are in Jesus of Nazareth territory, the kingdom of God is at hand. For me, a passionate believer, it was one of Advent's most blessed and blessing of experiences. Deo gratias.

Highlight two

Another highlight of the season has nothing to do with Christmas at all. I discovered last week that when I cancelled the last part of my nostalgia binge in 2010, the trip back to Tristan da Cunha, I had the foresight to book a voyage there for two in 2012. This being so and all being well, in September next year Diana and I will be boarding a South African Antarctic research vessel, the S A Aghulas, to retrace a voyage made when I was a little boy to the most isolated community in the world. In 1952 I travelled there on a Royal Navy frigate and left in 1956 on a British Petroleum tanker, both those journeys gratis. Not this one I fear, but what is cash? Mere dross!

Round robin

I send to family and friends around the world a "round robin" at Christmas. We also receive and enjoy a good number in return. They keep folk in touch with what is happening, and time and distance attenuated relationships alive to be rekindled if ever circumstances permit. These letters are usually over positive, but none the worse for that. Mine is on the website, a tad sermonic possibly, but there for anyone interested. The previous 25 episodes of this ongoing diary column are also on the web.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (27)

On Australia Day I take the pledge and become an Australian Citizen. The event is to be marked by a public holiday I believe. I am mildly flattered.

The Reverend Gail Bryce

Gail said her farewell as our Associate Priest by celebrating Midnight Mass as lightning flashed, thunder grumbled and holy smoke filled the building. Celebrating the Eucharist is for her the acme of priesthood, she does so with care, precision and devotion. It was a lovely celebration and she was able warmly to greet and farewell all present, as they left the church. We wish her well as Rector of Tatura and thank her for over six years of devoted priesting among us.

Digger's Rest

On Tuesday we took Martha, Llew, Max and Bella to the airport after two very pleasing and lively weeks with them. Martha is Diana's daughter and it was lovely to have our Australian family augmented by a contingent of the English family. Our biggest family day was Christmas Eve, when Nathan, Lil, Meg and Susan all from Benalla, as well as Peter from Albury (soon to be Tamworth), joined us for a feast of feasts. The four grandchildren got on together delightfully well and they enjoyed setting up the altar crib-scene as well as later, with some excitement, attending the Children's Christmas Eve Eucharist.

It was fascinating having a family of vegetarians in the Rectory. It in no way inhibited our diet, but rather expanded it, indeed, the visitors did most of the cooking. Being broad-minded vegetarians, they don't mind sometimes cooking meat for others.

Having dropped them all at the airport, Diana and I found our way to Diggers Rest, of all places. Over many years Diana and Michael (her late husband), had a lot to do with a monastic community called the Society of the Sacred Mission. One of the Society's Australian Priories we knew to be sited at Diggers Rest and so resolved to call in and say hello to any monks still resident there. At least one or two of them Diana was bound to know. We were disappointed. There appear to be no residents at the Priory at all. We peered into all its windows only to discover that it is empty of all but a few sticks of basic furniture and a shelf half full of books. So we lunched on a neglected patio, in heavy shade, overlooking nearby gentle hills, surrounded by a pleasing variety of twittering and very active birds. Egg and guacamole sandwiches were supplemented by our very own speciality of specialities, homemade date and walnut cake with homemade walnut marzipan both within and without. Quiet bliss.

We thought Diggers Rest itself an unprepossessing place. It did though contain a pleasing surprise, namely a monument in honour of the great escapologist and magician Harry Houdini. Apparently in 1910 at Diggers Rest, in a Voisin biplane (purchased in Germany prior to the trip) Houdini made the first ever controlled, powered flight of an aeroplane in Australia! Perhaps every Australian child picks up such fascinating information during their schooling, and so this strange little tidbit is widely known and appreciated. It came as a complete surprise to us.

Back to the New Zealand Trip

On November the 19th we left Margaret's cousin Penny's place at Tor Bay, North Auckland, to head south for Hamilton. Penny is a kindly, godly and courageous woman. Recovering with good humour from extreme ill health and vicious though effective medicine, she was hugely hospitable to us, as well as good company. Our time with her was rewarding and before we left she gave us, on disk, a copy of the family history she has been compiling, with lots of old scanned photographs, to pass on to our own likely family archivist, Elizabeth.

Heading south

The trip south through Auckland, which is far and away the largest city in New Zealand, was all on hideous motorway with a spaghetti junction in the middle that beggared description. There was little chance to see any beauty in what must be a fascinating city, so dominated is it by water from both the east and the west. The island comes here to the narrowest of isthmuses. All the significant ports are on the east side, the inlets on the west are apparently too shallow for ships of any size.

We turned off east after a while and headed through rolling, lush pastureland towards a place called Miranda, but bypassed it to look at a hot spring with the largest single pool in the southern hemisphere. We resisted the very minute temptation to enter, at a cost of thirteen dollars apiece, to have what would have amounted merely to a swim in an ordinary looking swimming pool whose only novelty would have been tepid water. From there we headed along flat coastal plain, well grassed and heavily farmed, to the Coramandel Peninsular and a town called Thames, which I estimated to be about the size of Ararat, though once much bigger when it was the centre of a large and frenzied gold-mining boom. There we parked and walked right up its main street.

The peninsular is obviously very mountainous and well forested, the town itself being backed by mountains once famous for Kauri trees that are now all but logged out, as indeed are most of the great hard wood timber trees in New Zealand, necessitating strict preservation and much replanting.

As we walked up the street in a cool breeze there was a slight sense of being in a land other than Australia, but it was hard to put a finger on what made the difference. The buildings are not as well balconied or verandahed as in most Australian towns, there is less brickwork and more wood, but many of the businesses of Australia are present, like ANZ, Westpac, Dick Smith and so on. We were relieved to visit a bank's ATM and discover that the money on our travel card had now come through.

From Thames we headed over the mountains, stopping by a river to eat the left overs of a stir fry I had cooked the previous day. The river was spoiled scenically by dead, sprayed gorse, and a breeze so cool that we had to huddle below the bridge for warmth. There were many lovely places thereafter as we headed for a while down the coast, and then back inland through a variety of smaller towns through increasingly prosperous looking pasture land, with many acres of young maize plants sprouting, probably for silage. The area around Hamilton appears to be prosperous and productive.

We stopped at Morrinsville to see the railway station, one of Diana's little obsessions. It proved symbolic of the sad decline of the railways everywhere, because it consisted of no more than a gravel wasteland with a track running through it. There was a tiny relic of a platform, no rolling stock, not even a shed.

In Hamilton

Eventually we arrived at Jan and Linda Joustra's house. When I was first Rector of Wodonga, the Joustras lived in Rutherglen, Jan being the Rector there. We became friends largely because of our common passion for Scottish Country Dancing. At the time of this New Zealand trip he was Dean of the Cathedral in Hamilton, but we learned that he had recently resigned and so in about a month's time we will be attending his induction as Rector of St Andrew's Brighton.

Their house on Riverside Road in Hamilton was their own, and had been sold only a couple of days before we arrived. It is a beautifully furnished, immaculate place in which they had lived, allowing the Deanery to be rented out and a proportion of its rent to be paid to them in lieu of accommodation. Many clergy would appreciate such an arrangement, but it would never do for me. I love to live next to the church in which I serve, and consider it an essential part of the job. Our bishop thinks likewise, so this arrangement is unlikely to be encouraged in this diocese.

Jan is a fascinating man of many and diverse talents and hobbies. He is an accomplished weaver, owning several great looms, he also embroiders beautifully, producing magni-ficent vestments, and he paints and makes icons. He appears to be a very effective priest, emphatically untrendy, and so both traditional and successful, a rare accomplishment these days. He certainly appeared to run a good show in Hamilton as Dean. While sociable and friendly he can be necessarily ruthless, demanding and expecting the very best, and he knows how to delegate and directs things d'haut en bas, managing to keep up his art work and weaving in all of this.

On our first evening he showed us the outside of the cathedral. It appeared to be beautifully kept, with the new porch he had been instrumental in adding to it, brilliantly achieved with three great glittering icons on the outside, at the top, designed and executed by himself. Linda his wife is a lively, petite woman of Chinese descent. She is an accomplished accountant, and for all the time they have been in New Zealand has worked for a European concern whom she joined during the three years that Jan was a priest in Monaco. This means that most of her work is undertaken during European business hours, during the night by way of the phone and computer. Before Monaco, they spent nine very happy years in Hong Kong, not far from Linda's parents home. I can remember encouraging him to go to Hong Kong from Rutherglen, not least because adventur-ousness should be a part of parish priesting, but also because the diocese had just begun its drift backwards into status-quoism with the appointment of David Farrer as bishop, and Jan, for all his liturgical traditionalism, is very much a liberal theologically and politically.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (28)

The departure of Monsignor Peter Jeffrey is a great loss to his parish, to the entire local Christian community, and to the whole city.

Getting it less than right

I was phoned by a gracious reporter from the Shepparton News to make a comment or two on his departure. Because I hate being mangled and garbled by reporters who don't grasp what I am on about, I said that I would email my comments to him and did. This, unusually, he gratefully acknowledged in a thank you email.

There was one notable and slightly embarrassing error even so. The word "often" was added gratuitously and inexplicably to my remark about Fr Peter having stepped in to take services for us at St Augustine's in my absence. It made it sound as though he was always moonlighting in St Augustine's!

He has taken part in a variety of ecumenical services at St Augustine's over the years, certainly. However it is only once (maybe twice, but certainly not "often") though far, far more remarkably, that he has stepped in to take a service (not a Eucharist of course) on a Wednesday for us, when no Anglican priest was available. Splendid fellow!

Here is what I actually sent (at short notice) to the Shepparton News....

Father Peter Jeffrey has been a splendid friend of St Augustine's Anglican Church and its clergy and people for all of the eight years that I have been the Anglican Rector of Shepparton.

Without compromising his own Church or its views, he has crossed denominational and faith boundaries with ease and confidence. He has been able to do this because he is no dogmatist or absolutist. His sureness of faith is in the God of compassion, forgiveness, acceptance and love who is common to all believers and faiths at their very best, rather than at their all too often worst. He has not only preached in St Augustine's Anglican Church, he has also stepped in to take services for us in my absence.

To me he is a man of broad sympathies, wide experience and deep compassion, prepared to meet people where they are and for who they are. He loves people, is interested in people, listens to people. Not chained to his desk or pulpit he is a man of the community and as such has often shamed me for being less so than he is.

I admire him enormously, wish him God's greatest blessings and hope that his new role in the Church will be less onerous than the one he leaves, because he deserves that.

The Parish Office

Although Diana has not yet taken over the role of Parish Office Secretary, she is already ordering the Office to her liking. At present she is rigorously updating the Parish Roll and aligning it with all the new information garnered from the Stewardship Campaign. This means that we have had to do a little reordering of Rectory house-keeping duties. Not at all a bad thing. My serious listening to music (as opposed to listening merely as accompaniment to mechanical tasks) is now done while I perform the ironing. A very useful combination of two of life's necessities. Devotional listening to Bach's Sacred Cantatas is still done in the Lady Chapel with the assistance of my ipod.

Over Edom will I cast out my shoe

One of the great joys of the past week has been reading and finishing Stephen Fry's autobiography, "Moab is my Washpot".

Because I was brought up to say Morning and Evening Prayer with my parents as a boy, the title of the book was immediately recognisable. It comes from Psalm 60 and Psalm 108 "Moab is my washpot, over Edom will I cast out my shoe...." It is the sort of colourful sentence that stands out to stick in the mind of a young lad. It must have done so for Stephen Fry too.

The autobiography covers no more than the first twenty or so years of his life and is very candid and eloquent. It is often funny and sometimes very sad. It moved me both to tears and guffaws and caused me to love and admire the fellow enormously. He admits to doing some truly dreadful things, and towards the finish of the book ends up in gaol, a convicted thief. There is nonetheless something most appealing about the man. He is painfully honest and extremely clever, as well as vulnerable and compassionate. I am now a devoted fan.

Glory in a British Home Stores cardigan

He is no believer, sad to say, and he can sometimes say harsh things about those of us who are, but I like to think that he might just retain some sort of a soft spot for the Church of England. In his late teens, during one of his most troubled times, having been helped by an Anglican priest, he had a conversation with his bishop about being ordained. He was advised to wait awhile until God's grace became clearer.... Fry then goes on to say:

The Bishop was right of course, I had no vocation at all, merely the kind of vanity of a Henry Crawford in "Mansfield Park", the vanity that made me think I would make a better preacher, a more stylish preacher than the kind of soggy, incoherent priest that was beginning to proliferate all over England. I knew I couldn't believe in God because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook. That is the grand way of putting it, I was also absolutely convinced, if I want to put it more petulantly, that if there was a God his caprice, malice, arbitrariness and sheer lack of taste made him repulsive to me. There was a time when he had on his team people like Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Laud, Donne, Herbert, Swift and Wren: now he had awful, drippy wet smacks with no style, no wit, no articulacy and no majesty. There was as much glory in the average Anglican priest as you would find in a British Home Stores cardigan. Of course what I didn't know was that - looked at in the right way - there is as much glory in a British Homes Stores cardigan as can be found in St Peter's, Rome, the Grand Canyon and the whole galaxy itself, but that is because I looked at nothing in the right way......

I would like to send his description and robust defence of homosexuality to all the poofter-bashers of my acquaintance. It would be a waste of time though. They are all too thick to make head or tail of it. (There is a nasty pun lurking in that comment which doesn't bear spelling out.)

Back to New Zealand again

So back to our sojourn in New Zealand. The Cathedral in Hamilton is very pleasing and set on a hill. I preached there on the Sunday we were staying with the Joustras, the Feast of Christ the King. At the early service, which on this particular Sunday of the month, I was delighted to discover, was a genuine 1662 rite, there were about thirty present in the congregation. At the later service, with a choir of about twenty or more and the sanctuary party, there must have been at least a hundred and thirty or forty folk present.

The choir was truly excellent and the service beautifully done. A real treat. It reinforced for me the truth that when what is traditional is presented beautifully it can work and attract a decent congregation. So long as it is accompanied by a theology which asks and attempts to answer, with honesty, what are real and contemporary questions, rather than merely peddle irrelevant platitudes. It needs too to be accompanied by good pastoral care, and education.

The young were particularly noticeable in the choir, but there was an active Sunday School too.

We don't have to sell out to the slap-happy-clappiness of other traditions. Rather we need to cherish our own as an invaluable strand in the whole ecumenical Christian mix, but strive to do it well, really well.

Most interestingly the parish Administrator at the Hamilton Cathedral turned out to be a man whom Diana knows because he was chaplain at the hospital where her father died and ministered there to her Dad most effectively and kindly. A soft spoken, well educated and gentle priest, he was at the centre of a great controversy in London in 2008. His relationship with another male priest/doctor was blessed in a famous old church, with 300 or so guests and much solemnity that included trumpets, bridesmaids, and a doctored 1662 wedding service, followed by a great reception with a ten tier cake, bridal waltzes and so on. Great fun by all accounts. However, because all of this hit the headlines and was against the Church of England's guidelines at the time, both he and his partner were stood down as priests.

His partner is a New Zealander and so they have now settled in that country, but cannot serve as priests there either, at least yet. On the evening before we left Hamilton we went round to have a drink with the two of them and found them unutterably delightful. I had the strongest two gin and tonics I have had in years, and it was most enjoyable to converse with two such fine and articulate people. They are in the process of building a large house and ultimately a chapel, to become a smart venue for weddings.

From Hamilton we took an afternoon trip which involved a walk in two woods. The first was but a remnant patch of great, buttressed kahikatea trees, whose strange swaying tops in a strong wind were eerily fascinating. We then walked a real forest, on the side of an old volcano, with monster trees and heavy vegetation. New Zealand abounds in beautiful walks, but there is little fauna of any description in evidence. The predominant birds appear to be sparrows and blackbirds. We spotted Eastern Rosellas which, according to Jan, were not introduced but blown over from Oz. We also saw Australian magpies and possibly an English thrush.

At dinner on the same day, a fine roast leg of lamb cooked by Jan, the mother of the English priest who had ministered to Diana's father was present, as was a churchwarden from the Cathedral, a retired judge. Our conversation ranged far and wide, some of it to do with Maori politics. We learned that the Maoris have a king, elected originally to provide a spokesman and figurehead for the Maori nation equivalent to the English monarch, and destined to become more or less hereditary. We were told that an excellent queen had married beneath her, and that the present monarch is a fairly inarticulate and very limited panel beater, though to my mind there is nothing wrong with panel-beaters and I have known some very articulate and intelligent ones.

Great settlements of cash and land were made to the Maoris some decades ago resulting in huge business concerns that seem to be largely successful nowadays, though there have been mistakes and scandals along the way. Our host, Jan, opens his church services with Maori greetings and calls himself a pakeha, his churchwarden refuses to do so, maintaining that she is not happy to be characterised by race, and pointing out that with Chinese and Indian immigrants the term pakeha (of European descent) has become an inadequate and inaccurate term for non-Maoris anyway.

As with the aborigines in Australia, the welfare system, we were informed, is dominated by Maori recipients and they are over represented in the underclass.

To Raglan

On another day in Hamilton we headed west to the coastal town of Raglan. A greyish, windy day turned into a grey and lowering day and ended with penetrating but light rain.

Raglan is a seaside town on the west coast, with black volcanic sand to remind me of my years on Tristan da Cunha and St Helena. It is a famous surfing venue. We footled a bit in the town, visiting an environmental centre and then bought a pineapple, baguette, two avocados and some juice, before heading off along a rather grim estuary, in strong cold wind. We walked and walked, the wind exhilarating, down the estuary to open and real sea, past wind surfers and kite surfers, one of them on a little wheeled trolley device scooting around on the wide expanse of black sand.

We assumed there to be no way out of the bay we walked to, and so decided to cut up the steep slopes that had once been cliffs, heading through thick pampas grass, which sliced up my arms and legs, and then encountered thick bushes covered with spines that forced us to retreat. Further up the beach we found some steps and a decent track all the way up to the top of the cliffs and then down though a wooded area with well maintained paths and planted here and there with some of New Zealand's great trees.

We got back to the car after a couple of hours invigorating walk as rain began to set in. We had half an avocado each and then lots of the lovely manuka honey we had bought in Thames. This was the only wet day we had during our two week visit.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (29)

Andrew Neaum

What a delight on Sunday afternoon to find on my doorstep a copy of the second volume of Stephen Fry's autobiography, this one called simply and less imaginatively: "The Fry Chronicles". Many thanks to Charlotte Brewer. I am already deeply absorbed.

A contented existence

There are two important adjuncts to a contented existence for the likes of me. The first is to have a good and enjoyable book on the go. The second is to ensure a regular, concentrated music-listening session.

I remember years ago reading C. S. Lewis, in a collection of his letters, advising someone not to read books from duty, merely because they feel they ought to do so. Enjoyment, he maintained, is the all important criterion. If after a couple of chapters you are not enjoying a book, discard the thing. To my regret I have disregarded this sound advice with my electronic Kindle, and so have still only purchased one book on it. It is a book I feel I need and ought to read, but which does not compel me, so I am not even half way through it.

A person whose faith and integrity I greatly admire reminded me last week that for some good folk Stephen Fry's books are bound to be too strong meat. Fry uses extremely bad language, is no Christian and enthusiastically promotes views that many Christians would find hard to stomach. Be warned! I, however, love the man, not least for a vulnerability, honesty and compassion that chimes with the Gospel that I am so passionate about, in spite of all the aforesaid.

Style and substance

Fry's views on the relation between words and thought particularly intrigue and fascinate me. He says, in a recently published little article on the late Christopher Hitchens, that the "connection between style and substance is absolute. A true thing badly expressed becomes a lie". He goes on to quote what he calls an old complaint:

         "How can I tell you what I think

         until I've heard what I'm going to say?"

In "Moab is my Washpot" he quotes Oscar Wilde as saying that language "is the parent, not the child, of thought". All this I find to be true of my own experience. Until I have put my mind's vague, jumbled, inchoate, mere potential ideas down on to paper, dressed them, redressed them, ordered, reordered and punctuated them, I don't really know what I think or mean. Even in writing a simple, gossipy diary column like this, which I enjoy enormously, the greatest pleasure of all lies in getting the words just right, lies in making crystal clear and exact sense of ideas and experience. So too with sermons. I begin with a mind full of mere potential, a cloud of vague, jumbled possibilities, that is all. It is only when I have finished that I discover what I think.

If we do not love words, if we have no ear for their music, cannot balance them, arrange them and find the exact one or cluster from a good reservoir readily on tap, how can we even think? Though mathematicians and visual artists manage to so without words, do they not?

Australia Post

I have complimented Australia Post several times in this pew-sheet. Not least in the Sunday after Christmas edition's cartoon, which showed a wife looking at an envelope pushed through the letter slot in her door and saying to her husband: "Aren't the Post Office wonderful? Someone just put, ‘Miserable old git, Shepparton', and it found you!"

Sad to say I now have a complaint. The double-issue Christmas edition of "The Spectator" didn't arrive here in Shepparton until January the fourth! The magazine is posted weekly in Sydney on the same day. With Christmas this year on a Sunday the double issue should have reached expectant subscribers in good time for Christmas. Certainly my brother received his copy in Brisbane before Christmas, so what is wrong with the local mob? Or with Victoria? The Christmas rush cannot be blamed because it is a not infrequent failure. On January the 10th I received on the same day the editions for December 31st and January the 7th. Well done for January the 7th, but how disgraceful and shameful for December the 31st.

Italy, Greece and then Greeneland

I brought together Italy and Greece last Monday. There was a monster, home-grown aubergine from the garden to be made something of. Instead of tackling the traditional and somewhat finicky moussaka, I decided to hybridise it with a lasagne. Alternate layers of grilled aubergine with layers of pasta, all in a rich vegetarian sauce made for a delicious repast. Four meals worth too. Well done Andy old man.

That evening, full of moussaka/lasagne we visited Greeneland. There being nothing worth watching on television we decided to search out a DVD instead and before heading out to hire one we visited the library to see if there was anything going free. There we found the latest version of what I think was Graham Greene's first notable novel: "Brighton Rock", which both of us had read years before. The book was published way back in 1938 and the first film version, starring a young Richard Attenborough, dates from 1947. We found this new film version compelling, authentically bleak and extremely well acted. Its setting among the nasty, racing fraternity gangs of the thirties is moved forward to the sixties era of mods and rockers, successfully we thought. Our memories of the book were so partial and scanty that we couldn't be offended by any departures from the original plot. The Catholic Church nearly always plays a part in Greeneland. In this film, interestingly, it is the non Catholic Ida (Helen Mirren) who is far and away the most moral and attractively free personality, though this is made more clear in the book than in the film.

The Bible and Quran

I feared that our resumed Islam studies might appear a little anticlimactic after so long a break. Not at all, not at all. There was much robust and animated discussion in our comparing of the bible to the Quran. I find that for myself the study is deepening my appreciation of Christianity in its unutterable uniqueness, while at the same time opening me up to an appreciation of the many admirable qualities to be found in Islam. I was talking to a friend recently who told me that at a dinner party he had faced incredulity from a pair of barely even nominal Christians, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, and indeed my friend himself, should find it acceptable for Christianity and Islam to find and welcome common cause in facing down extreme secularism in our society. We do need to though. Islam at its best does have a lot in common with us. At its worst, like Christianity at its worst, it is vile.

The citizenification of a Pommy

The excuse for the barbecue on Sunday the 29th of this month is the Australian citizenification of the Pommy of pommies that is me, [pommy - plural pommies (some-times capital) slang. Definition: a mildly offensive word used by Australians and New Zealanders for an English person. Sometimes shortened to pom. Of uncertain origin. Among a number of explanations are: (1) based on a blend of immigrant and pomegranate (alluding to the red cheeks of English immigrants); (2) from the abbreviation POME, Prisoner of Mother England (referring to convicts)]. It is likely that there will be kangaroo sausages on offer, and probably a piece of light verse to honour the occasion. The last is likely to be too irreverent to take the form of a grace before the meal. If you intend coming please sign up in the Narthex. Some of us might like to bring either a dessert or a salad, but not everyone needs to. So please indicate if you intend so doing.

Toast for breakfast

My first job as a deacon and priest was at Harare Cathedral (then Salisbury Cathedral) in what is now Zimbabwe. Margaret and I lived at 5 Hadlow Place, a spacious flat which Diana and I visited on our trip to Zimbabwe in 2010. Mattins each morning was at 6.00am and the first of several Eucharists each day followed at 6.30am. To the Eucharist came an eccentric clutch of pious ladies, a mere couple of not dissimilar men and now and then a passing and usually odoriferous scallywag or two. Because some of those who attended were employed in the city and lived a long way out in the suburbs, and also because in those confident, blessed and lovely days, to eat before mass was forbidden, some of us would then gather in the hall to have a light toast and coffee breakfast and gossip. I remember them with joy. In February we hope to begin to do something similar for a few days of the week here at St Augustine's. At present the clergy tend to gather for gossip, banter and debriefing in the sacristy and porch after the daily Eucharist, but with one at least of the new team coming all the way from Goorambat, breakfast would allow and encourage us to indulge ourselves more expansively, creatively and thoroughly. Any aspirant pietists and eccentrics in the parish, as well as passing scallywags, ordoriferous or otherwise, will make for a perfect breakfast. Many, many thanks to the dear parishioner who has donated to us a new and very fine toaster. May she join us for breakfast now and then.

Goodbye to Hamilton

Back to our New Zealand trip. We left the Joustra household in Hamilton to make our way to Rotorua and then Tauranga. En route we stopped to have a look at a little place called Tirau, notable for its creative use of corrugated iron, parking the car and having a ramble round. It is one of those spots that is almost totally dependent upon tourism and pretty well every shop appeared to be of the tourist attracting sort. There was not even a decent supermarket or grocers, so we pressed on to Putaruru, off the main Rotorua Road, where, with an eye for lunch, we stocked up on a baguette, a couple of Kiwi fruit, a couple of apples and an avocado, and then headed on our way along a route that joined the Rotorua road further along.

On the way we spotted a "Walkway" beside the Te Waihou river and decided to walk it. It proved to be about 4.7 kilometres each way, and very beautiful. We spied a little kingfisher with a yellow breast, as well as a stoat, wrens, ducks and later on some decent sized trout in a more gently flowing portion of the river. In the end we spent about two and a half hours walking up and down the river, which wended its swiftly flowing way through well grassed, often hilly meadows, heavily stocked with grazing cows, then through a gorge, before opening up once more into lovely and hilly meadowlands. At times, when flowing over sand or white rock the water, which was beautifully clear, appeared to have a blue tint to it. I have since discovered that the water springs, with force, from underground and is considered as pure as any in the world. It is bottled and sold, collected where it wells up out of the earth's depths from deep and ancient aquifers.

The water flowed silently for most of its course, except over occasional rapids and in the gorge, and also almost eerily fast. We watched a duck float downstream, passing us from behind at some speed, faintly puzzled but insouciant seeming.

It was a good nine and a half kilometre walk, and totally unplanned. We arrived back at the car well after two in the afternoon, more than ready to demolish a large baguette with avocado and tomato and then manuka honey.

Stinking mud holes

From there we pressed on to Rotorua, having left little time to explore it thoroughly or allow it to please us. Though I doubt it would have much pleased us, no matter how much time we gave it. It is a large and not very pleasing tourist town. We had asked advice as to what could be seen without paying through the nose for, and so made our way to a central park where we found steaming, boiling, sulphurously stinking, unpleasant mud holes, fenced off and surrounded for the most part be ti trees. A mud hole is a mud hole, of limited interest and no beauty. We wandered around and took a few photos, noting how steam appears from holes and fissures in the ground in all sorts of places throughout the town. Diana, by the way, found the boiling mud holes unutterably fascinating and takes issue with my negative description of them!

Jan Joustra had told Diana to look out for Rotorua's Maori church, which we found sited on a little peninsular pushing out into the great lake. Brown and cream, mock Tudor on the outside, it was very lovely inside, the walls made of, or covered, by tightly woven patterns of brown and green, presumably flax, with lots of carved wooden pillars. The pillars had no faces, unlike the Maori statues seen elsewhere, though mother of pearl, staring eyes were very much in evidence.

We were told by another visitor, just leaving, not to miss the etched, glass west-end of a little chapel which, she said, was quite new and "stunningly beautiful". The full length window, which looks out over the lake is indeed lovely, though I found the etching of Jesus, as if walking on the lake's water sentimental.

Outside, a wander around revealed the lake to be no warmer than you would expect and so thermal activity is not that extensive. There were little emissions of steam here and there on the land round about though. A pair of black swans and a cygnet paraded before us and we delighted in two pied cormorants as well as ducks and gulls.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (30)

On facing myself in the mirror to shave on Tuesday morning, I discovered that there were blanks in my vision. I cleaned my glasses, but they were still there. This sudden lack of vision brought to my mind’s eye a sad vision of a life without vision. Equanimity returned as soon as I realised that I was suffering from one of the residual migraines that still affect me.

Migraines entered my life with ordination, so my fallible memory tells me. Were they the result of “expectation stress” then? One of the consequences of being expected to appear more godly than in fact I am? Or was I beginning to develop a halo too tight for the health of an ego-enriched and swelling head, which was restricting the flow of blood to vital areas of the brain?

Some time during my tenure at Wodonga they began to diminish in intensity, until now they are almost unnoticeable. I get no head-ache and no nausea, just blanks in my vision for a period of about twenty minutes. Their decline into insignificance could well mean that sanctity and sin, piety and mischief, good behaviour and bad behaviour have reached such a state of happy equilibrium in me that they ensure not only peace of mind but health of brain!

Attitude

Important to a contented life is one’s attitude, is being in the right frame of mind. Every week at its beginning brings a list of chores for me that are very time consuming. At the top of that list is the weekly music that needs selecting, printing and emailing to various people. Then there is the pewsheet joke to select. This can takes ages, because over the years I have used almost every good joke that exists and I do not like repeating one. There are also the cartoons to select and scan, this article to write, Wednesday’s sermon, Sunday’s sermon and the Islam Study to prepare and so on and so on.

I have developed a routine for accomplishing all of these chores with no fuss or bother whatsoever. Indeed I enjoy them. However, when something extra pops up to disturb the routine, such as a funeral, or a call away to deal with someone’s crisis, or a day of meetings in Wangaratta, the even tenor of my life is roughed up, and I find myself worrying about things undone. Life begins to lose its edge of enjoyment.

Until, that is, I pull myself together, advise myself to adopt “the right attitude” and acknowledge and admit that what is really necessary to be done does always get done and moreover is easily doable. This sometimes actually works.

It is similar with the daily Eucharist. Even this great privilege can come to seem just another daily chore. It shouldn’t. After all the priest doesn’t “say” the service, nor does he “do” it, he “celebrates” it. All I need to do to acknowledge this, is simply notice and so enjoy the most lovely walk I make each day. Which is down the arched southern ambulatory of St Augustine’s from the priests’ vestry to the chapel. Through the last arch the view of a lovely chapel prepared and waiting for worship, is of a glorious little cave of wonder, warmed and brightened by flickering candles, so numinously and glitteringly alight that it allows a sense of celebration to overwhelm and consume.

A courageous atheist

The foibles, absurdities and excesses of faith are often mocked and sneered at by “cultured” atheists. We should be above resenting this, or responding in kind.

However, I do gain some amusement from their futile attempts both to have their cake and eat it. By which I mean having dumped God and religious practice, they still hang on to vestiges of our Faith’s moral teaching, still strive diligently to place their children in our schools, still pretend to their being some purpose to their existence and some real content to morality and love. They are as tepid and timid in their unfaith as are so many Anglicans in their faith. They appear to lack the guts to face the consequence of their unbelief.

In the light of this I was interested to read a review by Richard Marshall of a book called The Atheist’s Guide To Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. The book is by a different sort of atheist, a more honest and courageous one. He is a philosopher called Alex Rosenberg. According to his reviewer Rosenberg maintains that there is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose .... because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology..... belief in free will and purpose and all that .... is belief in hokum of the same order as belief in God. The atheists’ self-image as the hero nihilist choosing her fate is condemned as being just as hopeless as the religious self image....

I can only commend Rosenberg for facing the facts as he sees them and not attempting to both have his cake and eat it, like Dawkins and co, though the cake is one I would neither want to keep or eat.

Back to New Zealand

The port of Tauranga is apparently the largest exporting port in New Zealand. It is on the northeast-facing, white sand beached coast of the huge Bay of Plenty. It is also the site of the grounding of the container ship Rena, which was still all of one piece when we were there, clearly visible. It has since broken in two and is now in the process of being reduced to elemental junk.

Our hosts in Taurunga were David and Joanne Harricks. They had been parishioners of Holy Trinity Parish, Ararat, when I was Rector there. Their children were good friends of my children and played a lively and creative part in the activities of the liveliest youth group of my ministry.

We found their house with little difficulty, and David was there to greet us. He holds a franchise for snack foods which he sells all over the place, with no small success, but which means he can keep hours to suit himself and so was able to look after us well. The house in an old fashioned one, its most pleasing feature being a wide central passage. Modern houses are so parsimonious with space for mere passages, it is always a pleasure to find a generous one.

David and Jo appear happy with a simple life. Their backyard vegetable garden seemed to us to be impressively productive, with prolific egg-laying hens, fish, guinea pigs, a cockatiel, budgerigar and little quails. The sort of back yard that fascinated my children in long gone Ararat days, and does their own grandchildren now. Both David and Jo have always been creative and imaginative do-it-yourself types, interested in self-sufficiency wherever possible. David can turn his hand to most things.

There appear to be no fly screens in New Zealand. Unlike in Australia flies are hardly a problem, though they do get into houses now and then, as do mosquitoes. Every time David killed a fly he would take the trouble to carry the corpse outside to feed to the goldfish! That I consider to be a really impressive example of recycling.

Up the plug

The next day Jo went off to work, and we and David headed for “The Mount”. This is an impressive volcanic plug joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. On the one side of the isthmus is a harbour and on the other an excellent if sometimes dangerous surf beach. “The Mount” is the geographical feature that gave its name and character to a town immediately north of Tauranga called Mount Maunganui. The two towns are now one with the help of a bridge connecting them. As we drove down into Tauranga it was the volcanic plug that first struck us, adding geographical enticement to the place. There is a great volcanic plug on the island of St Helena called “Lot’s Wife” for obvious reasons.

We met David and Joanna’s daughter Emma at the base of The Mount, with tiny Caitlin on her back and young two year old Tristan in hand. He walked gamely all the way up the plug.

On the way up David pointed out an indigenous bird, the tui, one of the largest members of the honeyeater family. The English name of the bird used to be the “Parson Bird”. This is because at first glance the bird appears completely black except for a small tuft of white feathers at its neck and a small white wing patch, causing it to resemble a parson in clerical attire. Like parsons these birds are loquacious, and like your Rector intelligent. They are noted for mimicry and like parrots can be taught to imitate human speech.

There was a lovely view from the top of the plug. In the distance was the grounded container ship, in the harbour a moored, huge cruise ship. The link between the two which became apparent in last week’s news from Italy was of course unforeseen by us at the time.

Millions of dollars worth of church

On the way home we stopped at a church to which David goes at Christmas. It is a huge, ugly building, all concrete outside and built at a cost of some millions of dollars to replace one burnt down by an arsonist some years ago. It doubles as the city’s largest audit-orium, is in the round, has plush cinema seats and an upstairs balcony. It must seat hundreds, possibly a thousand. I took some photos but didn’t count.

We met the priest who kindly showed us around. He proved to be an interesting evangelical with a wife as co priest, both of them intelligent and lively and in no way narrow Sydney-type evangelicals. He said in response to a leading question of mine, that they had lots of trouble with an intrusive diocese.

Diana and I interrogated him thoroughly as he showed us all around an ugly building with everything that opens and shuts. There are still $700,000 owed on the building, but they obviously get large numbers at their main service.

Electronically there is all you could dream of or nightmare about. He talked of moving the big cross on the wall behind the “communion table” to one side so as to allow for a central screen, but was not offended at my comment to do with it possibly being seen as displacing Christ, acknowledging this to be a difficulty. We covered all sorts of topics amiably, agreeing to differ on some. He was a good fellow, with a sense of humour and an evangelical whom I felt to be of a genuine Anglican sort, an impression you don’t often get with Sydney evangelicals.

He implied that nearly all traditional churches in New Zealand would have congregations of little over 25 and suggested that they would wither away as time went on. Perhaps he is right, though he hadn’t even heard of Jan Joustra and his traditional cathedral which still attracts a large congregation. We were told that there was only one truly evangelical bishop in New Zealand. He was also interesting on the Maori church which he implied to be largely a political creation with almost no worshippers at all. Jokingly he suggested that the proportion of ordained to laity in the Maori Church was about 1 to 3. St Faith’s in Rotorua being an exception. Apparently the Maoris there were never at war with the settlers, and it was evangelised by someone outside, rather than a New Zealander, Maori or otherwise.

There appears to be a huge and growing reliance upon non-stipendiary ministry in New Zealand. He also claimed New Zealand to be far more secular a country than either Britain or Australia, something we did not pick up at all.

Fish, chips and mirrors

In the early evening we went down to a hugely popular fish place on the sea front. There both fresh and cooked fish were on sale and we queued to order fifty five dollars worth of fish and chips which we took to the home of Emma and her husband Ben. Ben and his father own what appears to be a very successful mirror making business. To make most mirrors these days, I learned, aluminium is sprayed onto acrylic. It is apparently very slightly less perfect than silver as a reflector but hardly noticeably so. The old backing to mirrors, which I remember learning of in my youth, Ben seemed to know nothing of at all, namely amalgams of mercury and silver or mercury and tin.

Mirrors are fascinating. They enable me to finish with a favourite quote from Saul Bellow: ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER 31

Andrew Neaum

In all the twenty seven years I have been resident in Australia, never once have I felt disadvantaged, seriously discriminated against or despised for being a Pom. Any disdain for the Pom’s that I have detected in people’s reactions to me, has been jocular, never anything but mild and undoubtedly well deserved. The Poms are, after all, a perfidious lot, or can be and have been.

On being Pommie

Socially speaking, to be English in Australia has for me seemed to be more an advantage than a disadvantage. People appear to love my apparently ineradicable English accent and to appreciate my Englishness.

The circles in which I usually move are of course Anglican, and for all the insistence among patriotic Australian Anglicans that we are no longer the “Church of England”, the word “Anglican” means, at least etymologically speaking: “English”. So in what is a typically ironic English way we have replaced three anachronistic words (indicative of what has now come to be seen as deplorable, derivative, cringing de-pendency) with a single word that means much the same thing. I love it!

One of the main reasons that I feel so English is because I have lived there so little.

I was nearly seven when I left Britain for the first time. Since then, as an eleven year old boy, I resided there for eight or nine significant months, and as a twenty five year old teacher, for a year and a half. All other of my five returns to the beloved land of my birth have been extended holidays or long-leave visits of only a few months.

Except for the first seven years of my life, then, I have lived for longer periods on the island of Tristan da Cunha, in South Africa and on the Island of St Helena than I have in England. Without excepting even those first seven years, I have lived far longer in Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe and Australia.

As a reference point and part of establishing who I am, I have felt it necessary to cling to my Englishness and embed myself in English culture. Although revelling in and enjoying enormously my life as an exile by the waters of a variety of Babylons, I have always remembered Zion, my treasured geographical and spiritual homeland.

During my Rhodesian school days there was a largely taken-for-granted affinity between Rhodesia and Australia. We were both parts of the same British Empire. In geography lessons Australia received some prominence. Merinos, gold, the Great Artesian Basin, as well as Ballarat and Bendigo, let alone Sydney and Melbourne, were all familiar to me as a school boy, long before I ever thought about migrating here. Possibly from my history lessons and certainly from comics, courageous, swashbuckling, irrepressible, Australian diggers were a part of my childhood mythology too. So Australia has always seemed, if not home then an extension of home, a distant, admired relative.

My Australian evangelist

It was the year and a half in London as a teacher, however, that introduced me to Australia’s most successful evangelist for someone like me. Coincidentally, in honour of the Australia Day upon which I received my citizenship, this personal evangelist was awarded in London the honour of “Australian of the Year in England”. He is Barry Humphries, no less.

His relationship with Australia is possibly as ambivalent as mine. He too is a voluntary exile, though the other way. When I mention him to his fellow countrymen, not a few of them deplore him. Unsurprisingly, for satirists are rarely universally acclaimed. If they satirize well. Yet there is a bitter sweet irony involved in satire, if you happen to love what you mock, and I feel Humphries does. It is an irony that I deeply appreciate and which is peculiarly English, but also, in the case of Humphries, Australian.

Dame Edna, Bazza Mackenzie, Sir Les are absurd, sometimes even despicable, but also not entirely unlovable. Even when the satire is most savage there are traces of affection. This is not only piquant, it is also heartening because it betrays the satire into being fundamentally optimistic. The mockery’s intent is not merely to expose, tear down and destroy but is also an invitation to laugh at the self for the absurdities of the self in order to see the self in better and truer perspective enabling the transcending of the self’s absurdity.

My time as a teacher in London was when the satirical magazine “Private Eye” was at its very best. I loved it, especially Humphries’ and Garland’s little comic strip “the Adventures of Barry ‘Bazza’ Mackenzie”.

On the face of it Bazza did little to raise the esteem of Australia in the eyes of the Brits. He is a parody of the uncouth, Earls Court dwelling, Fosters’swilling, okker Australian: crude, unsophisticated, loud, drunk and aggressive. The comic strip pushed the boundaries of crudity to the limits of that time and eventually even Private Eye had to terminate the story. Yet there was that side to Bazza Mackenzie, already aluded to, that elicited a sort of wry affection in me and many others. He was not unattractively naive as well as boorish. In his own gauche way he was honest, candid, an innocent if boorish buffoon among pompous, arrogant devious Brits who were mercilessly portrayed as such. Although attempting to bed every English girl he meets with single-minded fervour, Bazza never, ever succeeds.

The Chihuahua and Kev the Rev

My favourite vignette is of him boarding a tube train very late at night, much the worse for wear from grog. He sits down opposite the only other passenger in the carriage. She is an exceedingly posh lady with a tiny, pampered Chihuahua on her lap.

The hot carriage and its swaying motion have their inevitable effect upon the inebriated Bazza. He suddenly and abruptly stands up to deliver a great technicolour yawn all over the lady and her Chihuahua. She jumps up in horror, and poor Bazza is mortified. “I’m sorry, Lady, I’m sorry Lady” he keeps saying. Then, looking down at the contents of his stomach on the floor, he spots something that puzzles him. He picks up a wriggling, chunder-smothered Chihuahua and says: “Geez I don’t remember eating that.”

I grew to love Bazza, Humphries, and with him a country that could be so readily satirised, laughed at and laughed with. What is more Bazza’s despised brother is a clergyman, “Kev the Rev”. An inspired example of prophecy, Kevin Rudd’s prototype!

Why did it take so long

So it was that when the time came to settle down and rear my young family after an idyllic stint on the Island of St Helena, Australia as a possibility was not discounted. I already viewed it favourably. Moreover, my brother had migrated here some years previously, and my father and mother had recently joined them. So I wrote to a couple of Australian bishops offering myself as one of the brightest stars in the Anglican firmament. John Hazlewood, the Bishop of Ballarat, was prepared to take a punt on me and offered a position in his diocese. So to Australia we came in August 1985. I have been resident here ever since.

A few months ago I was phoned by an immigration official with a strong foreign accent, who informed me that my application for citizenship had been successful. He went on to ask, in a very friendly fashion, why I had taken so long in applying. Off the cuff I replied: “Idleness and inertia”, but is that really so?

Not entirely. It was marrying an English Diana in England and then returning to Australia that tipped me over into applying at last, after 26 years. The balance of my family circumstances and identity has now shifted markedly England’s way. Not only is Diana English, two of my four Australian Citizen children reside in England and both of Diana’s two children and their families are English and reside in England too. Inevitably we are likely to be more frequently in England than heretofore, as well as more regularly in touch with England.

All of this caused me to recognise and acknowledge that as well as being ineradicably English, I am also ineradicably Australian, that I have lived here now longer than anywhere else and that it is the best of places in the world to live.

When I am in England not only do I feel Australian, I am proud to be so. Just as when in Australia I feel English and am proud to be so. Another irony then. It is the increase and influx of Englishness into my life that makes me want to make indelible my Australianism. So a Citizen I have become.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER (32)

I first learned to swim, after a fashion, on the island of Tristan da Cunha.

A bald-headed, dog-paddling, dill

There, below the cliffs in front of our home, in the middle of the vast South Atlantic Ocean, the tide as it receded from the volcanic, black-sand beach, left lots of clear rock pools containing red-whiskered, baby crayfish, as well as a variety of small, darting fish and an occasional octopus. All of which my brother and I, as little boys, delighted to catch. It was in these pools that I first learned to put my head under water and, with a push, to project and propel myself from one side of a pool to another without touching the bottom.

I have loved water ever since, though, because never taught to swim, I am a hopeless swimmer stylistically, an unco-ordinated, thresher and swiper of the water, a bald-headed, dog-paddling, dill.

One of the great moments in learning to swim in the sea is when first you learn to open your eyes under water. Only then do you fully realise that you are in a another world, another element. You are buoyant, able to fly. An intruder in a new, silent world, where colours are strangely different, but rich and crystal clear. The landscape is altogether different too, not worn and moulded by rain and wind, but near the surface by sweeping currents and pounding waves, though deeper down hardly worn or moulded at all. A world profuse of life and growth.

Fear of salt water in the eyes

Being baptised should be just such a dive into a new world, a new element. A dive out of the everyday world into the loving, forgiving community of Christ. A different community where authority is crowned with love’s thorns, and where power manifests itself as love. A different community in which the dominant virtues are forgiveness, mercy, acceptance, honesty, generosity, love, understanding and empathy.

Such virtues are not dominant outside of this new and different community. Outside, too often, money and selfishness rule, and achievement is measured in cash and possessions.

The un-baptised, or those who for some strange reason reject or ignore their baptism, can often see little reason to plunge into our wonderful new world. They fear salt and water in their eyes, are frightened of love, generosity, self-giving, and of letting go of the material.

Hum-bug and hypocrisy

To excuse or exonerate themselves from such madness, they tend to focus on the negative, concentrate on the humbug and hypocrisy of the official Church and on the undoubted hypocrisy and humbug in nearly every single one of us.

“The Church”, they say, “is all hum-bug and hypocrisy, is no different from any other community, is as full of greedy, grasping, unremarkable humanity as is any other community. What is the difference? Why plunge into that world and life and community?”

I suppose they have a point. Too often the magical underwater world, the under-the-waters-of-baptism world of the Church is indeed unremarkable, not characterised enough by the sweet virtues of Jesus, of acceptance, forgiveness, mercy, generosity, open-heartedness and love.

And yet, there is nowhere else in our world and our society, where sacrifice and love and forgiveness are so unequivocally and emphatically preached, manifested and put on show, as in dear old Mother Church. The Church represents the ultimate alternative life-style.

Under the waters of baptism

Every Sunday, every Wednesday, every day, in St Augustine’s the rule and kingship of Christ is proclaimed. His astonishing sacrifice is recalled and represented on our altars, is reached for on our knees at the altar rail, his word and his Gospel of love proclaimed, his life is retold and relived.

Those of us who attend, even if we fail, do at least make our effort to be there, to be different, to listen, to say our "Amens". Our aspirations, our hopes, our desires are indeed different. We can open our eyes under-the-waters-of-baptism and even if love’s salt stings them, and the call to sacrifice seriously and radically, like great waves, buffet and frighten us, tempt us to footle in the shallows instead of fully plunging in, we do still catch a glimpse of the new world’s beauty. We come back for more, desire more fully and completely to enter into it and be a part of it.

How important it is, more important than our beautiful worship, more important than balancing our books, more important than filling our pews, more important than brilliant sermons, bible studies, and pew sheets, that the congregations of our parish, are truly loving and forgiving and accepting communities. Are a different world, a different element, an underwater world, an under-the-waters-of-baptism world. The kingdom of God himself, the kingdom of love, an irresistible under-the-waters-of-baptism world. A world enchanted by love, by Jesus.

Our congregations, in no small way, are in fact just that for me, and I trust for you too.

THIS, THAT

AND THE OTHER (33)

Andrew Neaum

There have been three pictures of my good self in the Shepparton News over the past few weeks, with accompanying articles. This does not mean that I have suddenly become publicity hungry. They were all initiated by the News, not me.

In the press

Being reported on in the press is rarely pleasing. What you say is too often garbled and precised into incomprehensibility or idiocy. Far worse, however, are those off the cuff comments which are accurately reported and yet in cold print appear to be callous, obtuse, naive or worse, as indeed they are!

The first article was to honour Monsignor Peter Jeffrey, the second was about becoming an Australian Citizen. The third was just an overspill from the second. I had rabbited on so profusely in an interview that the reporter, doubtless short of other news, must have decided to give the rabbit a second run.

There was one small benefit from all of this. I visited in hospital last week a delightful elderly parishioner who has not been to church in years, for wholly excusable reasons. She pronounced herself only able to recognise my beardless self because of the photographs in the paper. My offer of a clean-shaven kiss for a hundred dollars was declined, though with no visible shudder.

Another positive spin off from my citizenship acquisition was that at the ceremony two delightful Muslim young women, Elaf Al Tuhmazy and Fatima Zaoli, were granted jointly the "Young Citizen of the Year" award. Diana was impressed enough by their speeches to ask them if they would like to address our Islam Study group and Elaf was free to do so. She joined us, with her younger brother Majed, last Tuesday and they delighted us all with their banter, sense of humour and good sense.

One of the most important distinctions to make when considering Islam in relation to Christianity is between culture and religion. Much of what the western world finds easy to criticise in Islam is in fact culturally rather than faith based. The Faith calls for modesty in both men and women, but how that modesty manifest itself differs hugely from culture to culture. The Hijab worn by Elaf is worn by choice, as much a mark of her delight and pride in her Faith, as a guarantor of her modesty. We threw all sorts of questions at her and she delighted us with her Australianism as well as her commonsensical and yet devout practise and understanding of her Faith.

Longing for death

I tap out these random thoughts for the pew sheet having just listened to a Bach Cantata while I did the ironing. I have a book with the words of all the Cantatas, in both German and English, open on the filing cabinet as I iron. This particular Cantata (BWV 161) is most wonderfully beautiful, though its subject is not the sort that would appeal to many. It is all to do with longing for beautiful death! Bach and his librettists seem to be so accepting of and positive about death. It is astonishing.

The Cantata begins with a heavenly tenor aria, accompanied by flutes and continuo, the words begin:

                                                                   Come, O sweet hour of death,

                                                                   When my spirit feeds on honey

                                                                   From the lion's mouth;

                                                                   Make my departure sweet,

                                                                   Do not delay, O my last light,

                                                                   The moment when I shall kiss my Saviour.

A fascinating reference back to Samson finding honey in the carcase of a lion he had killed earlier, just as the redeemed are granted the honey of Salvation from the body to the Jesus our forebears killed. Later on, in one of the recitatives there is a thrilling musical representation of an insistently ticking clock to the words:

                                                                   Close in, then, happy day of death,

                                                                   Strike, then, O final hour.

To turn a chore like ironing into devotion is a good example of creative "multi-tasking" I like to think. Bach spices up my devotional life enormously and impresses upon me how necessary it is to experiment with one's devotions, quiet time and prayer life and to be prepared to spend money in developing it. All of Bach's cantatas at the time I bought them were an enormous expense, but one that I have never regretted for a moment.

Sweet candlelight

I love candles. To my mind, their flame imparts the softest and loveliest of all lights, fragile, flickering, warm and gentle.

In previous generations they had a happy association with bees and honey as well as with tallow. This last is not so sweet in all its associations of course, tallow being animal fat, but the word "tallow" is a lovely sounding word for all that and animal fat, in the hard days of yore, was treasured not despised as it is today.

The use of candles in Christian worship was to begin with entirely functional. In the early Church vigil services were held on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and so light was needed and candles and oil lamps provided it.

Like with so much in the church, functional use soon led into symbolic and ornamental use. A good example of this tendency can be seen on my cassock. Most cassocks have a row of buttons down the front. Over the years the number of these buttons has been granted a symbolic significance. There are thirty three of them to signify the probable number of the years of our Lord's life. Or, for those of a more Protestant disposition, thirty nine for the Thirty Nine Articles. In the 20th century however, an ornamental signi