Have I suddenly become older?

I was just asked again when buying a ticket whether it was a "senior" or an "adult"
The person in front of me was a 'senior'...and to my mind looked old. Surely I don't look that old.
I did think afterwards I could have said "senior" and saved 50 cents!

Public broadcasting

Lest we be in doubt about the value of public broadcasting, some programs of the last few days should help us to remember what a privilege it is to have a quality public broadcaster.

• Classic FM's 100 Symphonies last week had the country in a twitter. What huge fun it was to listen to 100 extraordinary symphonies and hear certain presenter illuminate us about them. I just thought it was hilarious the way people kept ringing in...I can't do any work, I have to have 5 radios on...and amazing works you just never hear...The final concert was amazing, and it would never have happened on commercial radio!!
• Landline Although I admit I come back from the Kirk on Sunday morning and just want to veg for an hour. This program is a great way to do it. Highly informative, entertaining and interesting. Real quality stuff. And not an ad in sight
• Australian Story last night about Major Mike Stone in Timor was powerful stuff. If you ever wanted to think we do good through our care for this little fledgling democracy, and through the military, and even through police chaplaincy...then try to watch this if you haven't already.
• But last night I was impressed by Peter Thompson's fine interview on Talking Heads with Guy Cooper the retirng CEO if the Taronga Park zoo. I didn't know of Cooper, but I am always impressed by how Thompson in his low key way draws people out and gets a very incisive story

And all this for 8 cents a day!

Just incidentally

With regard to the post below...although I think the battle is lost and dictionaries have given in

Pedo-philia it seems to me is not interchangeable with Paedo-philia.

Paedo...as in paediatric is to do with a child (from the Greek...as with kimono all words can ultimately be reduced to their origin in Greek) whereas ped...as in pedicure and pedal is to do with the foot (from the Latin), but the American tendency of the 19th century to 'simplify' everything ... eg defence, defense, practice and practise merely adds to the confusion.

By my reckoning I always think that pedophilia is love of feet!

Not in my backyard

I don't know that I can say anything new about whether or not paedophiles should or should not be housed in communities with children [as Tony Jones rightly said on q&a last night "What community does not have children?"] but there are a whole range of associated issues that are being obscured because they are short-circuited by that particular circumstance;

• the assumption, for example, that the penal system actually does rehabilitate people seems to me to be a bold one. If it is not a safe assumption then the argument that if a person has completed their sentence they should be left alone is a tenuous one at best.
• there is lots of evidence to suggest that the system in many respects aggravates people's criminalities
• if the system does not rehabilitate then surely the state needs to take some responsibility when it releases the unrehabilitated back into the community...put simply it has not done its job

There is also a whole raft of questions about the total undesirability of vigilante-ism. This is surely a bigger issue than this particular circumstance warrants. Vigilante-ism seems to me to be an enormous threat to a stable society. But it's not easy

Parents....amongst other things

Had our parents been alive, today would have been their wedding anniversary...and they would have been married for 62 (? or so) years.

At my mother's funeral I reflected, as you do, on the harshness of a person's life who was born in 1920, whose father had died tragically, who had one abusive marriage and then who had finally found my father and they had lived ...as it were, happily ever after ...unfortunately Dad died when he was only 60. My theme was (at the funeral) that she had had a hell of a life. But in her marriage and her family, even after having a stroke, she found great enjoyment and fulfillment... she would indeed have said that she had had a "heaven of a life". Never easy, but I think they both did what they could.

It's an important reminder that heaven and hell may be on opposite sides of the same coin

Clever little point

They came they saw!!!

Well Back to Church Sunday came and went. It was good that there was some, small response. And they were a mixture of people. My first thought was (thank you God!!) well of course this is something that needs to be there every week and need to be part of our mindset.
As always with church, what ever the games we play...ie. like marketing, evangelism, teaching, promotion, bums on seats...etc The real focus is the people. They are always worthwile, and each of them from the youngest to the oldest was indeed that.
Worth doing? Yes.

The Bells! The Bells!

I once thought that I would like to purloin the unused bell from St Barnabas' College and have it here at Blackwood.

However a number of things dissuaded me.One, the thought of being woken on Saturday nights by hoodlinks who just wouldn't be able to resist it. Two, my near neighbour, who finds our presence difficult enough.

So it was interesting to hear as ABC began their countdown of the top 100 symphonies that Rachmaninov 's Opus 35 The Bells Symphony-brought out a spontaneous lament from all over the country about the fact that bells have gone.

It is of course one of those things that gives some poetic coherence to community, links with the past; ordering of the day etc. etc....but we are so fearful about Christianity impinging on popular culture. Not so much the signs of the other religions, but another point at which Christianity as the 'religion'of the dominant culture is both patronised and compromised

Loss of faith

The Archbishop of Canterbury recently lamented the loss of Christian culture (here) and laid the blame at the feet of 'pluralistic' education.

I have some sympathy with this. In promoting everything, we promote nothing. At a local school recently year 6 and 7 children were told to look at SE Asia and pick a dominant religion to investigate. They were specifically told not to look at Christianity. The teacher wasn't being (she thought) anti-Christian she was rather making the assumption that most kids in that school would know about Christianity. I think this assumption makes more assumptions than it asserts.

I well remember when I was a teacher in the 70s, our principal challenging the school over the Easter weekend to find out what Easter was all about.

In those days most of the kids had some idea it was about Jesus and his crucifixion. Not so sure that is true. I certainly can no longer assume 30 years aftyer I was ordained that a random group of Aussies can more or less sustain the Lord's Prayer with a little help from their friends. This is not, I think, because of an embarrassment about praying publicly. It is because by and large we have no clue.

Strangely the army did quite a lot to sustain religious culture. So, service men and women of WWII and to a lesser extent Vietnam, probably were made to recite the Lord's Prayer on parade. Now that there are less of them they don't permeate a funeral in the same way so you can't always be assured even the 'traditional' words will be picked up.

Does it matter? The loss of common heritage. I think it does. I always go back to the way the Bible stories permeate English literature.

How on earth do you (for example) understand Wilfred Owen's devastating poem. The Parable of the Young Man and the Old...if you don't understand what the sacrifice of Isaac is all about, or that it comes from the bible, or what sacrifice is about?

I think Rowan Williams is right, not just or only from the religious point of view. But from the cultural point fo view also.

A once in a while opportunity

This post is set to publish automatically at 9:09...just so that it will have published at 9:09 on 09/09/09

On not being a dummy

Family First Senator, Steve Fielding, protests he is "no dummy" because he mispronounces 'fiscal' as 'physical'. (here) Indeed mispronounciation (sic) is no reason for dismissing of a senator, his ideas, or his policies.

His scepticism about climate change, his failure to appreciate the nuances of economic argument, and his difficulty understanding that there are many members of the electorate who have more complex understandings of social order than the narrow Christian rightist position. These may be some more significant reasons.

The Elementary History of Detention

Most of us who have read a smattering of Dickens, or done a little history of the 19th century and before will no doubt have wondered about the curious practice of making those who are jailed pay for their imprisonment!
Yes this was indeed the practice. It is of course a practice which victimises the poorest of the poor.
And it seems bizarre!
Bizarrer still when you realise that until today those in the detention centres of Australia have been required to reimburse the government. Even more bizarre when we appreciate that many 'ordinary' citizens seem to think that the practice of making refugees pay for the privilege of being in Baxter, or Villawood, and latterly Nauru (now closed) and Christmas Island; has been on our statute books.
Praise God that today the Senate has voted to remove it. (here)
I take my hat off to Senator Troeth, who voted against the majority of her (Liberal) party to do the right thing

PS In a small footnoote: Senator Fielding, wanting a bet both ways says these laws went too far but voted for them any way...and then wonders why people think he is......

Great quote on prayer:

Got this good quote from a friend the other day....
I found it helpful in terms of those times when we stop our practice of prayer
:

Prayer, in the sense of union with God, is the most crucifying thing there is. One must do it for God’s sake; but one will not get any satisfaction out of it, in the sense of feeling “I am good at prayer. I have an infallible method.” That would be disastrous, since what we want to learn is precisely our own weakness, powerlessness, unworthiness. Nor ought one to expect a sense of the reality of the supernatural of which I speak.
And one should wish for no prayer except precisely the prayer that God gives us
– probably very distracted and unsatisfactory in every way.

On the other hand the only way to pray is to pray. And the only way to pray well is to pray much.

If one has no time for this, then one must at least pray regularly. But the less one prays, the worse it goes. And if circumstances do not permit even regularity, then one must put up with the fact that when one does try to pray, one can’t pray – and our prayer will probably consist of telling this to God.

As to beginning afresh, or where you left off, I don’t think you have any choice. You simply have to begin wherever you find yourself. Make any acts you want to make and feel ought to make, but do not force yourself into feelings of any kind.

You say very naturally that you do not know what to do if you have a quarter of an hour alone. Yet I suspect the only thing to do is to shut out everything and just give yourself to God and beg for God’s mercy and offer God all your distractions. (Dom John Chapman in Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land)

Accidently smelly feet

You know the National Press Club addresses are wasted on the likes of me. Too few people with too little to do at midday on a Wednesday.
Today's was particularly good.David Kilcullen: Author And Guerrilla Warfare Expert giving us some pretty incisive analysysi of what is really going on in Iraq, Iran adn Afghanistan. I am not sure if you can see it on the web but it's worth tracking down.
(here's a former interview on Lateline)
His book The Accidental Guerilla (reviewed here) offers piercing critique, or so it seems to me, of the difference in warmongering policy and the policy of reasserting stable governance. Is it likely, he asked, that American lawmakers are going to to move to scale down war efforts when thousands of jobs in their electorates are dependent on weapons manufacture. He at least is askign the questions. I hope they get more airing

Julia's journeys

The Deputy P.M. is in India at the moment trying to shore up the rising tide of panic about violence against Indian students, particularly in Sydney. You would wonder why it requires such high level governmental representation until you hear that the foreign student revenue is something like 15 billion dollars a year.

And the whole service delivery appears to be a bit suspect (Four Corners exposed this a few weeks ago)...chefs who use an electric frypan, accountants who never count a bean...aand so on.

Amidst all this is the fear that we all have, that the genuine education system (perhaps the schools, TAFE and the Universities) has actually been sold out to economics of the paying students. And they are now so dependent upon the revenue that their actual service delivery may be compromised if they can't maintain student numbers.

The economic rationalists call this the dictates of the market and that this is the reality of the world.

Meanwhile the educationalists bemoan that there is no longer any learning for its own sake. Where is pure science and unbridled research? Where is the opportunity for genuine philosophy and scholarly (rather than political) history? Where is the exploration of classic and modern literature, of ancient text.....and dare I say it....theology