Have you got round to reading this great novel

This is sometimes said to be both a Chinese curse or a blessing.. may you live in Interesting Times.. personally I am inclined to think it is better to live in interesting times.
It was an interesting week earlier in the year.
A funeral of a friend who died quite quickly. 
I was called to bless a dog that was going to be put down.
Australia is besotted by the centenary of ANZAC at Gallipoli.
The Dr told me my "blood" was OK but I have a B12 deficiency (reading the Wiki entry it seems to describe me to a T)
I read The Narrow Road to the Deep North  an amazing read for Australians intent  on misunderstanding the involvement we had in WW1 & WW2 :Thom Keneally's review here)
I attended one of the many Parish Nomination Committee meetings [I have become  a "professional Diocesan nominator"...and the level of vacancy makes it rather taxing... I take this role very seriously, and I am glad that His Grace seem to do so also] The church is changing, morphing, declining, growing....those things may seem contradictory...but church is rather like that

Interesting times!
In the meantime...I live with an interesting person (my daughter!....lest you forget!) , I married my niece. I visited a jail. And greatest of joys...I went to fix my daughter's shower....and was able to hold the most precious member of our family in my arms. I like that better than anything else (even better than the sound of my own voice!)

Interesting times! Interesting times?
A curse, but most likely,
a blessing

There she blows!

The State Opera Company's production of Jake Heggie's Moby Dick was truly amazing. (There are only two more performances if you can then do go and see it)
I always know when we go inside the Festival Theatre how fortunate we are to have such a facility.
But, in this electronic age it is also the effects and the staging that is the 'hero'.
The picture above is of the whaling boats and is essentially an electronically projected image. It allows all sort of things to be done on stage which could otherwise never happen. And someone actually asked me today if I felt seasick. And ion the great climactic scene at the end I swear I did.
The music is not melodic, but is powerful and rich. The ASO were truly excellent.
The  (all but one) male chorus were excellent...and drawn essentially from local talent it makes you proud. Their sound was phenomenally coherent and deeply moving .


For once, too, the story made sense which is more than you can say for most of the film versions of the novella. I suppose it seemed to me that it's about heaven and hell here on earth (or at sea in this case), about how we are driven and how we drive others. Rivetting stuff.
I think everyone who has seen it has been affected (two people in front of us left at half time). I found myself wondering about how all this fits in with the great tragedies that the world faces at this time. The famines, the wars, the imminent climate collapse....and of course whales are ever close to us as a sign of man's inability to grapple with creation
Yet some how art interprets life so profoundly that we all know that we need it to stay alive.

What are the indicators?

While, by and large, I am convinced by the argument that the presence of Australian troops in Afghanistan is part of (and probably necessary for) the 'war against terrorism'; the question that keeps being asked and seldom (if ever) answered is:when we will know that it is time to withdraw our troops?

Clearly there is a range of indicators that could, and perhaps should, be adopted. Not the least of which is the question of the cost in human life.

Let us also not forget that this cost is on both sides.

I do not pretend that there is any easy answer to this question. I would, however, like some assurance that this question is being grappled with.

I am not always convinced that this is so.

Transfiguring

By curious coincidence August 6th is the day the Church remembers the Transfiguration of Jesus (see Mark's account here). It is an event where three of the disciples see Jesus as he really is. This experience transfigured their understanding, and indeed their relationship with Jesus.

It is also the 45th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I often make the association that we are equally well transfigured by that event.

That awful event set before humanity the possibility of us being able to destroy ourselves. In a real sense it probably coloured the perceptions of baby-boomers for good or ill, and we were told in the last decade that the Generation X/Y kids found the likelihood of total human destruction all too likely.

It's worth giving a thought to both events today.

What is perhaps more amazing is that we have actually survived 45 years without blowing up the world.

Pacifism

I imagine a hard thing for good world leaders is making decisions about going to war, so recent decision to send more troops to Afghanistan must be hard for Rudd and Obama.  The principle is, I suppose, doing a lesser evil to allow a greater good. Though this is slippery slope stuff, and indeed the difference between politics and philosophy or ethics.

(Read for example an awful account of a current defamation trial in The Age. An alleged rapist and brutalist is alleged to have said about his brutality and killing of his enemies 

(Reporter),Paul  McGeough reported (in an interview with the man known as  Captain Dragan )  as saying: "Because of me, fewer have died than might have. And I don't think you will see any prisoners of war treated as well as ours."

Such language is of course total and utter rationalization. )

Thomas Merton says:

"I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible,  with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever"

 in The Collected Poems pp 374-75  as in Seeds p. 34

Our beloved leaders would do well to hear this caution

On not forgetting

We are reminded each year by the indomitable spirit of those who march of many things; I think of the fact that try as they may ANZAC continues to be more of a community observance than a political one.

As the particular political concerns move out of popular consciousness these people keep marching. All of us are particularly aware of the enormous cost of war...and of the brevity of our attention to the cost paid largely by the young and those who lack influence for the decisions of the powerful. What senseless waste, what total insanity.

Wilfred Owen, the poet of The 'Great' War wrote in one of his finest poems The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, of the travesty of who makes the decisions and who pays the price

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him, thy son.

Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,

A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not do so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Same, same but different

There are lots of candidates for catchy - but cliched - titles for blogs about the change in Liberal leadership.
Methinks he protests too much is one. His need to convince the legendary 'battlers' that he is not a 'silver tail' was obviously uppermost in some strategists minds. I don't think he was very convincing but time will tell.
Turn Bull into reality could be another one. Again we will wait and see.

Should we worry too much that he is rich? In one way this is a sign that this is a man who knows how to achieve, and surely we want successful people in key leadership positions.
Any way I suspect in six weeks all this will be academic, he will either be chewing it up or stuffing it up. I suspect the former, and the personal critique will then all be a bit beside the point.
Certainly will be interesting
Personally, I was in agreement with Turnbull, that it was disappointing to see that the one of the first comments the PM made was that the Republic would now be a key issue.
This is such a political ploy, aimed at agitating the Liberal Party from within, about what is essentially a minor issue.
For heaven's sake a strong opposition is a good thing(here for example). On the other hand it was good to see an encouragement from Rudd to identify key bi-partisan issues. As these troubled times go on it is clear that there are more and more issues that are just important and not just or substantially political.
I could and would name the River, education, the intervention, the War and health as just some. of these

getting out of the war

One headline today reads "Obama: Discussing the war he never agreed to!"
It is, necessarily, part of the dilemma that he faces. In order to be seen as credible by the wider electorate he now has to get up to speed on how you deal competently with a war....even though he didn't think America should have been in that war in the first place.
The President, of course, is also the Commander-in-Chief, [a scary thought when you think of George Bush] but Obama does appear to be taking it seriously. And is being taken seriously by those who will have to cooperate with him. (See the steep learning curve here)
It will always be an issue for incoming politicians. The electorate will have to decide whether the fresh approach outweighs lack of experience. McCain seems to me tired and not up to the task. Obama at least has the capacity to grow and learn.

Foxes find holes

A story doing the rounds in the US press (here) about the erstwhile Iraqi veteran who, in declaring himself to be atheistic, finds himself under attack from his alleged comrades (perhaps not a word you would use in the Amercian military).
Having to be put under protection because of his open atheism, there are huge questions here about what sort of society America actually promotes when it can't even tolerate a modicum of difference amongst its own.
We are not talking here apparently about a couple of fundies from the wild hills of Kentucky..or is that Dakota...or are they Black Hills...but you get the point. But ranking officers who tell an atheist who doesn't want to pray that he is some how threatening the glorious constitution, or that when a couple of them want to meet together to discuss their common plight they are some how threatening the war effort.
It makes the Australian Christian Lobby (here) look positively smart by comparison.
More significantly it suggests how ill-founded this particular Iraqi war is.
In the minds of many in power not about democracy at all, but about some curious religious view which doesn't tolerate difference even amongst its own.
The problem is not that people shoudn't be allowed to hold whacky or inconsistent views; the problem is that when it is officers who hold people's lives in the palms of their hands, and they are manifestly confused about what they are on about.
Here for example

in July, while still in Iraq, Hall organized a meeting of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. According to Hall, after things began, Maj. Freddy Welborn disrupted the meeting with threats saying he might bring charges against Hall for conduct detrimental to good order and discipline, and that Hall was disgracing the Constitution. (Err, I think the major has that backward.) Welborn has denied the allegations, but the New York Times reports that another soldier at the meeting said that Hall's account was accurate.

What sort of democracy, freedom, religion, tolerance etc.etc is being promoted?
This stuff, to my mind, is slippery.....and really really scary!

Failing to remember

April 25th is a day of great solemnity for Australians, known as ANZAC Day when we commemorate the awful fighting in the Dardanelles which it is often said, though I think some what inaccurately, is the time when Australia became a nation.
The whole idea that you can only become a 'nation' as a result of some awful war is in itself suspect. It is perhaps a justification of the foolishness of old men who seem to think that war solves things.
War, however, should be recognised; and the sacrifice of those who suffer honoured.
We will hear many times the phrase, 'Lest we forget' . Am I being too pedantic to plead that rather than failing to forget we should make sure that we remember.
It is. these days, often remarked that re-member is the way that we can think of that word. Make sure that we add members, of the quality of those we have lost.
And that we embrace the philosophic/theological idea of re-membering, in such a way that we are present at past events and that we bring their meaning into the present....we call this anamnesis.
THis is what I think we are quite good at enabling to happen on ANZAC day...making that event preset in such a way as to appropriate it for thew present.
May it not be morbid, may it not be jingoistic. May it be true!

An appropriate check -but to what avail?

The news that Donald Rumsfeld has fallen on his sword (or been pushed) in the wake of the much vaunted anti-bellum vote represented by resounding Democrat victories in the mid term Congressional election (here) comes as no surprise.
It is, I suppose, an appropriate reminder to all in power that they are all vulnerable. But does it really achieve anything. The Americans (and we as the 52nd state!) are still 'twixt the rock and the hard place. The damage has been done, and evacuating now will, one suspects, not actually make the country a safer place in the short term. But the war ( one suggests) was never about making Iraq safe, it was about the politics of oil. And what that was all about, who knows.
The other war mongers, Cheney, in particular remain firmly ensconced. Bush will limp with ever increasing ignominy to the end of a lame-duck Presidency. And hundreds of people have died.
The Howards and the Downers will continue to justify this awful war. And I am left with the reminder of how in the pre-war days week after week thousands of us marched against the war and were ignored by our government.
What has been achieved?
Well for our sins the evil Saddam will ultimately be executed and no one has raised their voice to say the death penalty is objectively wrong.
What a mess!