The price of freedom

Is aesthetics the price of freedom? Two months and lots of traffic disruption later the pictured protection has been erected on our nearby railway bridge...one on both sides of the bridge...
It can only be described as hideous.
We can speculate on its purpose. Ever since we moved to Blackwood the presence of microwaves, televisions and other miscellaneous smashable stuff at the bottom of the railway culvert has intrigued us.
How did it get there?
One thing that always concerned me was that, despite the fact that we live with in view of this bridge, we never actually saw anyone throwing such heavy stuff over the side. Another was the fact that the object at the bottom seemd to change! How could this be? Clearly there was a regular stream of whitegoods; and we never saw any of it.
Now we have been protected! The two curved monstrosities on either side are the price we pay for safety. Will they work? It remains to be seen.

La Traviata

What a delight to see La Traviata on Thursday evening. Forgive me for being boring but I have also seen this in Vienna at the Opera House, but more exquisitely at the Sydney OH with Dame Kiri when she was only a superstar rather than a megastar!!
At this point my opera loving second daughter punches me in the face and tells me to stop being so boring! And quite rightly so too! But they are highlights of my life.
Any way the Adelaide "Traviata" was fabulous, Kate Ladner was a stunning Violetta, almost as good as the wonderful Kiri. Sets were applauded. The Adelaide Symphony was terrific (particularly Paul Blackman the first bassoon.......husband of no 3's cello teacher!!!, Helen Blackman).
What I like about "Traviata" is multifold but some points are:

• it's a terrific story...based on Dumas' "La Dame Aux Camellias" it tells of how lkove should, and does transcend social pretension. We like to think that we have put this issue behind us. But I wonder?
• Verdi has some of the most emotive music he has ever written. Daughter 2 looked aghast when I told before the last Act that she would cry!.."You're going to cry aren't you?" she asked incredulously. I looked haplessly and sure enough I did.
• This is what I love about opera, the unashamed attempt to ravage the deepest emotional self. Once, in a group of ministers, a pathetic little Welshman said about German songs..."I can't imagine German music being emotional!"
• The Lutherans, who constituted half of the group almost choked on their sauerkraut. I began to sing like a Rhein maiden....Aah, aah, AAAAhh....and then extolled the beauties of Schubert. It was then I realised just how wonderful classical singing really is.

My aim is to mortgage my life and see the next Adelaide Ringe Cycle....it would be wonderful to join Peter Bassett (former Governor's secretary in SA) and see the Copenhagen Ring Cycle. Barring a lottery win it won't happen. Well you can see that Trav has made me higher than a kite. Go and see it if you can!! Expensive but worth it!

Celibacy (continued)

I am not against celibacy! I just don't see that celibacy should be a rule. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to be treasured. If it is a gift it is not a mandatory sentence.
It has about it a certain pragmatism....it is easier to deploy single people than it is to deploy families. But we need also to ask ourselves about whether the price of the enforced pragmatic solution is simply too high.
The price is paid by

1. The celibates themselves
2. The community of faith
3. Those who are victims of distorted sexuality.

It should be clear from both anecdotal and actual evidence that there are many priests in the Roman Catholic church who do not see celibacy as something that can be maintained. Anything up to and over 50% of American clergy say they have broken their vow of chastity, many maintain ongoing relationships with a partner. There is a web of deceit and sadness about all this.
Recent analyses of clergy in different places suggests that many priests are emotionally immature and are not only having to deal with the tension of enforced celibacy but also an underdeveloped psyche to enable them to deal with this.

The community of faith suffers at the hands of such people. There is a certain degree of caricature about what childless males might tell hapless families about moral issues such as contraception, divorce and the like; and we might not need to take this so seriously until we realise that this is also the counsel of those who are least equipped emotionally to give it!!
It is not true to say that all celibates are emotionally immature or psychologically damaged and damaging...but a signioficant number are!
There is also the sad cost of the number of fine men who would make excellent priests, but who have decided that God is also calling them to be married. Many felt deep hurt when renegade Anglican married priests were allowed to function as priests after defecting.
I still hear my sister-in-laws aged Catholic grandmother, whose parish priest is a married ex-Anglican, reminding her family that when she goes she want a real priest not an Anglican!

That there are also countless victims of this enforced gift is sad to behold.

But these three aspects are all sad indictments of a policy of enforced celibacy.
I am all for lauding the genuine gift of celibacy, but have increasingly less time for the notion of compulsion.

Counter cultural

In a report on the recent Synod of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, the ABC this morning presented a report on celibacy, one commentator said:

The gift of priestly celibacy, and that’s one of the terms I like to use, ‘gift’. It’s a reminder to the church of our essential purpose to bear witness to the kingdom of heaven, that even though we’re part of this world and we love this world and we’re here for the sake of the world in a certain sense, it’s ultimately our true homeland in heaven that we’re aiming for, and that’s why celibacy is a counter cultural sign of witness to the eternal things. Some think that by ordaining married men and allowing them to remain married as priests, that the shortage will be alleviated, now in the short term that may be the case, I don’t know. But I think in the long term there would be real positive things which are present in the church now, which could be lost through the loss of the compulsory celibacy of the clergy in the West.

In a rather old-fashioned view of celibacy, I think....that of it being a sort of superior state to matrimony...the notion of counter culture is simply inadequate. One would have to say for example, that the notion of faithful marriage is deeply counter-cultural too...and in many way more so than the ease of celibacy. Is it pushing the envelope too far to also suggest that same sex unions or marriages are also counter cultural?
We live, after all, in a world in which sexual fidelity is demeaned and anything, it seems to me, that promotes commitment and faithfulness should be seriously examined as potentially "bearing witness to the kingdom". It is too limiting to think that only celibacy can do this.
It is normative, it would seem to me, to see that this is what marriage is about. It would be delightful if the minefield of same-sex relationship could also be given the same opportunity to bear witness to the kingdom.....some will not agree with me.

In reality, we witness to the values of the kingdom where we find ourselves to be and in the state to which God has called us. We should be cautious about promoting one state over another with a sort of superiority that smacks more of us than it does of God.
We should be cautious about taking a gift of God, such as priesthood, and using that to validate our limited views. Who, after all, are and have been the key promoters of clerical celibacy? The celibate clergy themselves!....more

Bowling

There's no doubt that Ten Pin Bowling is a curiosity. I found myself looking forward to an evening spent with our small youth group and they had a great time. (why not play here)
I think the most enjoyable thing about having ten or so players playing 2 full games is the arrangement of chairs so that you have to constantly get up and sit down. A different array of chairs is available each time you go to sit and so you end up next to someone different each time, a little easy conversation followed.
We were all relaxed too, and no one took it terribly seriously. There was sufficient hilarity, like the ball that crossed the lane and smashed the bumper down, (thank goodness for bumpers) or the boys who fell flat on their backs....some of this seemed to get a little deliberate!....and sufficient success for everyone.
A lot of lessons there I think.

Fringe dwellers

As I walk our dog in the morning (often between 5.30and 6) I am intrigued by the number of fringe dwellers who are in our midst. There is a sheltered work environment near here and so we have a stream of people who work there. One man seems to be at the bus stop from 5.30 and just sits there waiting for the bus to come...he is there till at least 7.30 and often 8. Why? I don't really know. I say "Hello" to him and his introverted nature obviously means this causes him some pain. It is awful to encounter. There are occasionally others there, "What time is it?" they shout unaware that they are speaking at a level that I consider too loud, typical of so much of the behaviour of these innocents...unaware of what polite society considers extreme.
Then there is dear Annie, a Downes syndrome adult member of our congregation, who does the church rounds on Sunday mornings coming to us last on her way home. Her speech is really difficult to understand, unaware of all this she often stands at the lectern and offers a series of intercessions which seem jumbled and bizarre...Jesus was born in a manger, Mary and Joseph, Jesus died on the cross, I'm getting married, I love Andrew, getting engaged. Amen.. In a conversation with a Uniting Church colleague we decided that for a number of years we had been praying for Annie's Teddy Bear! I simply join my Amen to hers confident that God knows what this is all about.
Another of Annie's housemates was well-known in the area. A giant of a man who loped around the district. he used to knock at the door at all hours and ask for water...he seemed to have a genuine thirst!!(very scriptural). Last year on a boating holiday he drowned, his carer grabbed hold of his hand as he fell from a houseboat but could not hang on. His hand slipped from her grasp and he was lost in the depth of the Murray. We were all devastated by the loss of this "character", and by the exposing of the vulnerability of these fringe-dwellers.

There have always been people like this in every ministry setting in which I have found myself and I find myself drawn to these people who God has given us as a gift.

Tonight, as we gather at the Convention Centre to commission the servant of the servants: May we remember that we are not to be so seduced by the glitz, glamour and opulence that we forget that outside that place in the city of Adelaide there will be many hundreds of fringe dwellers who are the ones we are called to serve.

Total immersion

A correspondent responds to a previous blog saying, "The Adelaide anglican church seems to have jettisoned it's (sic) principles, if media reports are anything to go by!"
By this, I guess they are referring to yet another delay in resolution of the issues to do with the abuse to young boys by Bob Brandendurg wqhile he was a leader of the boys group CEBS. Reports on Monday suggested that one of the lawyers, Peter Humphries, acting for some of the victims had notified the media that the victims had formally rejected the church's three tier level of compensation of $25K, $50K, $75K for various levels of culpability.
I would not want to suggest that I know more than I do.....the general issue was made known to members of the Synod who met some weeks ago.
Any way my response to my correspondent was:

Jeffrey Driver (the new Archbishop)..... who will be commissioned on Friday will have a baptism of fire...not that he will be unaware of that....
I am happy to go on record again as saying we (the Church) must do everything we can to respond to the hurt and pain that our sisters and brothers have felt at the hands of the church.
I am aware that this is not straight forward, and that should be a sadness to us all.

The baptism will be vigorous, total immersion, I suggest, and it will be a measure of the man to see how he runs with this. It should be remembered, however, that he will not have all the solutions on Friday nor even in a couple of weeks. He will be running a race which has largely been predetermined for him by the actions of those who have been steering the ship before he got here. He will no doubt take firm control and move us onto a some what different course but that will take a little time.

I would also note that the issue about the rejection of the offers (paltry as they seem to me) has been known (at least in principle) for some weeks and it has at least crossed my mind that Mr Humphries has made his move in the week of the Archbishop's commissioning quite deliberately to maximise publicity and focus the issue. This is as it should be, Humpries has a job to do and does it quite well it seems to me.
In the original bishop election weblog there is a subtitle: "Give us a shepherd after your own heart" which is a quotation from the traditional prayer for the election fo a bishop. I believe this prayer has been answered in Bishop Jeff, those of us who pray should pray that it be earnestly realised in these early days of his ministry here.

Compasssion fatigue

Treading a fine line on Australia Talks Back last night, Tim Costello (cv here and here) was careful not to accuse individual Australians of being ungenerous in their support of the recent earthquake appeal. There were the inevitable callers who reminded us that we should "look after our own" and that "charity begins at home." Costello, with a lifelong interest in the welfare of the impoverished in our midst, was careful not to disparage that idea. Would I be alone in supecting, though, that those who protest that "charity begins at home" also seem less likely to be magnanimous towards the homeless and underprivileged in our midst than those who give generously to overseas causes.
A couple of interesting points that tease one's intellect were made by a number of callers who were less diplomatic than TC

• Australia gave $10 million almost immediately to the US in response to the recent cyclone disaster
• Australia gave $500,000 to the earthquake appeal as its first response, though it has since brought it up to $10 million
  
• Both disasters were appalling but the Pakistani disaster affected at least 5 and probably 10 times the number of people
• Our initial response represented about 2c or less per person. Even the latter response represented only 50cents per person
• $10 million represents less than it cost to mail out the information about the proposed Industrial Relations changes.

It is difficult for mere mortals to get our heads around such things. One would be tempted to say "there's something rotten in the state of Denmark" were it not for the fact that we have all been so easily distracted by the birth of the little Australian princeling

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the principal principle

We are having a lot of issues thrown at us lately concerning matters of principle and a good deal of community tension. Whether it be Industrial Relations, Issues of National Security, or one that affects me at the moment...codes of professional conduct.
They all have similarities.
Not the least of which is the argument...current circumstances require stern measures.
This often seems to mean: cast your hard-won principles to one side it is time to be realistic!
And "being realistic" often means what one local Adelaide journo used to describe as "Shut up and eat your muesli!"
This seems to me a dangerous practice. Should we cast aside principle in favoiur of dubious pragmatism.
One problem with this is that often what we are doing is appeasing the crowd, or the media.
That is, we need to be seen to be doing something!!
Terrorists blow us up, therefore we need to be seen to be getting tough, so let's pass draconian laws so people will be in no doubt.
Some clergy molest children, so let's impose wordy codes of conduct as asign of our willingness to change.
We could benefit from industrial flexibility so deregulate everything.
The time frame is always too short to fully consider these things, and the consequences can never be fully envisaged.
We should not stand still but as the Germans say Eile mit Weile...hurry carefully, or perhaps "more haste, less speed ". And be cautious before we jettison principles

Prayer in the face of disaster

Faced with so many disasters, "natural" and "man made" (yes largely "man" rather than 'human made', I think). Many, not just Christians, are drawn to prayer.(see here for example). We might, and do, ask whether it makes the slightest bit of difference. Some will have ready answers, either way.
It is of course a complex issue and raises all sorts of questions.

• How can God answer the conflicting prayers of people with equanimity..God give us more rain; God stop this torrential downpour
• How can God line up on conflicting sides of a struggle: God of Israel, God of Palestine...come to our aid
• How can God overcome the will of those determined to act in an evil way? ....Auschwitz!
  

These are three of the more simple issues! The real problem, it seems to me, is what do our prayers say about the sort of God we allegedly believe in. Very often, our prayers betray more about us than they do about God. We are not called to institute the God we would like to exist, (in general the God who will do my bidding!), we are called to to follow the true God and respond in obedience.
What I do believe, and from my own viewpoint "know", is that God deals with me personally and invites me to change and grow.
It is easy, on one level, to fire my prayers off at Pakistan and Iraq and feel good about it. But, in the end, I need to choose to act in my sphere of influence...what will the earthquake in Pakistan actually call me to be and do?
In so far, too, that I know there are many men and women of all faiths (and none) who are open to acting responsibly in every situation...I pray too that they also may respond.
It is "drop in the ocean" stuff. But is, I suggest, not all we have but where change begins.

You laugh at me

I am always inspired by the wisdom of children, and I am particularly inspired when children seem to start "getting it" what ever 'it' might be.
My youngest told me she had been looking up "witty quotes" on the internet...so now at age 12 she has discovered "wit".
Her particular fine example I share with you went something like this:

You all laugh at me because I am different:
I laugh at all of you because you are all the same!

Which is variously attrributed but may be the work of guitarist Tom DeLong.
I was quite impressed

Natural disasters

Pakistan seems further away than Aceh, Indonesia and the media coverage that much more remote. I wonder if our response to the need for Aid will be as spontaneously generous....it doesn't seem to have caught the imagination as the Tsunami did, even though it is a disaster of immense proportion too.
We have been gripped, and rightly so, by the recent Bali Tragedy. But in the end, even though it was an act of barbarism, in the scheme of things it pales alongside this current earthquake. Please at least think about supporting the work of Red Cross (see here) or perhaps CMS or ABM/Anglicord in this area.

congratulations to me

I just noticed that the last post was my 100th. Quite a milestone!

Political relevance and ethical importance

In promotion for the latest edition of The Monthly we read, Robert Manne, in “Biff Goes Bang”, delivers the final word on the person everyone is hearing but no one is listening to. “Once Mark Latham has been discredited, and perhaps destroyed, some citizens will notice that the Diaries – for all their grandiosity, occasional cruelty and vituperative madness – are considerably more important in their implication than they have been led to believe.”
Manne has a point, putting Latham's bitternesses aside, the importance of his critique is that he is an insider. A Laborite (hideous term) who has been the Labor member's Labor member. He should (perhaps) not be dismissed out of hand as a disappointed could-have-been.
What is curious for me is the interplay between political idealism and political pragmatism (politics-the art of the possible).
Part of Latham's problem, it seems to me, is that he has gone from being idealist to pragmatist and, now, attempting to go back to idealist again.
An idealist when young and under Whitlam's influence, a pragmatist when power was in his sights, and now an idealist again when all that didn't work out.
The trouble is that to be perceived as an idealist you have to be relatively uncompromised, and the one thing a pragmatist is not is uncompromised.
Whitlam remained to many an idealist because the steamroller of the agenda of the early 70s looked like uncompromised idealism. As they got tangled up in pragmatism (which they were not very good at) this tarnished, and one might wistfully wonder whether Whitlam would still be seen as such an idealist if he had remained in power, say, another 5-10 years.
Hawke and Keating were ever the pragmatists, politicians par excellence, as indeed is Howard. There seems little room for idealism in the pragmatism of the "comfortable Australia" which is promoted by the present PM.
(bye the bye I was intrigued to hear former Liberal Premier Greiner discussing the Brogden affair recently observing that his main political filter was "winning ".

He told Geraldine Doogue:
"I used to have a sign on my wall which was a bit like Bill Clinton’s one about ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. I used to say, ‘It’s winning, stupid’. And I used to look at everything in opposition from the obvious prism of how does this impact on winning. I think there is a fair bit of evidence to say that some of these factional worriers don’t look at winning at all when they consider their actions, their internal actions, and their actions are almost all internally focused. They don’t look at that as relevant at all. And that’s my real complaint."

Now I don't have a political problem with that, but let's not think that "winning" is ideology.
What, I suggest, Manne will offer us about the potential importance of Latham's insights is the struggle that Labor is having to decide whether it is still an ideological party, or whether it has totally sold out to the idea of winning.
That Latham seems to be trying to paint himself as spotless in all this is curious, but we will view that better with the wisdom of hindsight.

[for another fine exampe of Manne's opinion see this article about the dilemma he states as "When Jewish loyalty meets the brutality of the state of Israel."]

Preachings

For those who care:
I am putting some of my weekly preaching thoughts on an adjacent weblog: Coromandel Preachings. I am still experimenting with this format so please be patient.

Anglican time bomb (ii) - Does it matter?

The WORLD magazine artcle (see below) suggests that the Anglican Communion will blow apart and that it is only a matter of time. It also states that "ECUSA(The American Anglican Church )stands to lose many of its largest churches; they are led by conservatives. Even the mother Church of England will shrink. Evangelicals and other conservatives lead many of its most thriving congregations." Indeed Primate Akinola's prominence in all this also has some basis in the fact that the Church of Nigeria is one of the largest Provinces in the Anglican Communion. In Australia, the size of the Diocese of Sydney is often cited as "success", and its prominence in promoting the conservative moral agenda is to be noted.
I actually find it a little disturbing that we are so easily seduced by the equation that size=success.
It is also a trap we fall into when assessing the importance of Islam in our community.
Whilst size is obviously a measure of something, it doesn't seem to me to be a particularly Biblical value.
Were the success of Jesus to be measured by the size of his group of followers, then I doubt we would see him as being particularly successful. Were Francis of Assissi, or Teresa of Calcutta to have been seduced by the language of size then it is difficult to see that they would have had much impact.
They were, after all, radical Christians not economic rationalists.
I do not suggest that the Church should not listen to itself, or that the African Church should be dismissed. I am rather urging us to put aside the many prejudices we have about these issues and to try and listen intently to that the other side is saying.
Let us not say: We are sophisticated, liberal and rich, therefore listen to us.
Nor: We are large, simple and conservative, therefore listen to us.
It may be that the time has come for the Communion to start functioning in a different way. That we have come to the end of the colonialism of the Anglican Communion, just as we have come to the end of Empire.
There will be a certain amount of sadness about all this, and a great deal of risk. But there is also opportunity and challenge.
To relate in a new way. To move in different directions. To return to fundamental principles; even though we might radically disagree what these principles might be.

The Anglican Time Bomb

There is no doubt that many are troubled by current goings on in the Anglican Communion. The weblog of one of the evangelical parishes of this Dioceses, St Matthew's Kensington, points us to this, and leads us to another site "World Magazine" [which amongst other things has a very nice picture of Primates Akinola (of Nigeria) and Venables (of the Southern Cone).]
One of the things this "crisis" in the Anglican Communion ostensibly is about is the struggle to understand the place of homosexual Christians in the life of the Church. It is a complex issue. It had a climax in the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Bishops and one Australian commentator made the comment that he was deeply disturbed about the way the Bible was used in this discussion. For some it would seem to be a fixed rule book and for others a point on a journey.
As a fixed rule book it has a few problems since it has internal contradictions. It also has whole areas of life which have been ignored for centuries by Christians as being culturally obsolete, whilst others (like the attitude towards homosexuals) have been strictly, narrowly and even cruelly enforced. .
As a point on a journey it has problems too. The Anglican formularies are strong on the place of Scripture.
Article 6 of the Thirty Nine Articles says, for example..
....
VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scripture we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church................

A particular discussion is whether the Hebrew Scriptures are binding on Christians..continuing

VII. Of the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises. Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.

What this suggests, at the least, is that our understanding of the Scriptures is evolving and that already at the time of the Reformation it was being understood that some things in the Bible were temporal and others were not. The debate is about that.

What, might we ask, does the last clause of Article 7 mean.....what is "moral" and what is not? Why has the Church chosen to fixate on the sexual dimensions of morality and yet regarded most other aspects of the Mosaic law as non-binding? What, for example, of the prescriptions in the Mosaic law about inter-marriage between races...is this moral or not?
Most would find these ideas totally repugnant today, but we hear little about them.

What is it about homosexuality that brings forth such condemnation? Some Christians would say we do not condemn homosexuals, but then they make such pervasive sanctions against them that it is difficult to think otherwise.
What do we say, for example, about those who choose to give themselves in committed relationship (see for example the journey of Luke Gahan and Matthew Culleton here).
The Bible says little, dare I say nothing, to this situation which would not even be spoken about by the Scriptural authors. It is not dissimilar to the issue of contraception, which can only be addressed by inference because it is only in the last 40 years that the real possibility of non-procreative sexual intercourse ........I am straying from the subject, so I will save more comment for a later post
continuing

Labour Day

As I understand it, the public holiday we have this weekend is called Labour Day and celebrates the introduction of a civilised working regimen in Australian society. That regimen including: an end to unlimited working hours, the right to proper working environments, sick leave, holiday pay, the right of workers to not be unfiarly dismissed and so on.
There is a certain sense of irony, then, that the Australian Parliament is also hurrying to pass radical new laws which will remove many of the safeguards that this day celebrates.
Not the least is the exemption of small businesses from unfair dismissal laws. Now, it would seem curious that "small" in this context appears to mean 'less than 100 employees'. In the scheme of things the firm with 75-100 employees would not seem particularly small. Indeed the Small Business Coalition's own report defines a small business as

A small business is a business which is independently owned and operated, with close control over operations and decisions held by the owners. Business equity is not publicly traded and business financing is personally guaranteed by the owners. The business will have less than twenty employees.

This would I think accord with people's understanding.
Maybe the whole debate, if conducted rationally, would actually bring out certain objective challenges that we face in the workplace. But this seems unlikely to happen when we are hell-bent on getting legislation through by the end of the year.

What I think we are witnessing is not a political expedient but rather the dogma of economic rationalism once again being slavishly adhered to. "Why is it good to ban unfair dismissal laws? Because it will free small business to be more flexible and thus benefit the whole workforce?"
Now, I can see various non-sequiturs and logical leaps; or at the very least matters that are open to debate. If we are not going to debate them then we should be aware that we have entered the realm of political ideology and we should tread cautiously...but we won't do that, will we?