Mother's Day

I guess many of us will be thinking of our mothers at this time with Mother's Day on Sunday 10  May in lots of countries [ of course I realise that in the UK Mothering Sunday is in Mid-Lent...this year on 22nd March 2020].

This is my mother Lil (Lillian) who died in 2002.
The photo is taken in (we think) 1946. So she would have been in her mid 20s (25 or 26). It's a beautiful photo of her

This morning we celebrated my eldest daughter's birthday. And it was great to be with both of my daughters who are also mothers, S with 2 girls and one boy, and K who has 2 boys...but still in utero....only weeks ...possibly days to go. And my youngest daughter who has a kitten.

I know my Mum would be so proud of all her grandchildren and great grandchildren, and the sense that life has gone on

Not sure if my grandson looks like his great-grandmother. But he's a very happy boy. Credit to the nurture of his Mum and Dad, and the laughing of his sisters

In these days of pestilence, may we rejoice in the good stories of our families.

And my thoughts go out to those who live in unsafe or abusive families.

Go and wash your hands!!

A new way - let's sing

This week has been interesting.
Last Sunday we had a wonderful Mass to conclude my ministry at St Mary Magdalene's.
It was nice that quite a few folk gathered together.
Particularly  my three daughters who with my two granddaughters sang to me.
In our family this is the way you show how much you love  another person.
I often tell the story, with great  joy, how my first son-in-law Dénes said to to Sarah, his beloved, "Your family always sing at each other!!"
It was good to hear an 'outsider'  [ for such he was then] discover this great treasure....WE just did it...sang G & S, Barby Girl, Musicals...all the time.

When I was younger and we used to drive to far beaches in SA in the car we would sing Church songs, the Beaumont Folk Mass...and all sorts of other things. My Dad, who was not particularly religious, used to love it. 
I just muse that  now Dénes now sings to his daughters ... and indeed to us all.

Coffee spoons

One of the most perceptive comments about the movement of life is the oft quoted linee oTS Eliot's poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock ..I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
Some days seem like that to me, I go from one cup of coffee to the next...though perhaps I could more accruately say I have measured out my life by radio programs.
There are certain things I like to listen to and they rather punctuate the week.
Sometimes I find myself organising my life around them...being in the right place at the right time....or being close to the radio at the right time.
Mondays are often like that...because I like to listen to political commentatorst making comment about the ridiculous carryings on in our nation's capital.
Then sometimes, like Eliot, I look back and see how pathetically small it all is
Contrast that with a a few years ago when we  had a rather overwhelming family week .
When we had the funeral of the last person in a generation. So now in that branch of the Little family (my mother) I am part of the oldest generation. That is secretly overpowering I think.
We had a wedding, and the matron of honour decided she would give birth...not during the ceremony, ....but a new generation continues. The wedding was terrific and there was a real sense of family.
At one stage we had a "Clark photo" and though there were thirty odd of us I suppose (and could have been more) there were only my immediate family who are actually still called Clark. And in that curious way that things go on, I realised because I have daughters and my brother has no children...it is unlikely that our name will be perpetuated any way.
Does it matter?...Is it coffee spoons...or radio programs? Maybe. But important to one's own family

The change in my life- The Popstar

This first week of 2015 was a monumental week for me 
A couple of years ago, probably when I was feeling a bit down, 
I prayed the prayer of a patriarch (look up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob if you need to understand the Jewish Christian heritage.)...but there are plenty of other Patriarchs & Matriarchs....
I think of Henry  & Lillian Clark for example, 
who would never have thought of  themselves as such 
and yet parented 4 daughters, 2 sons, 9 granddaughters,  4 grandsons who in turn have parented  8 daughters & 7 sons...
this will at least give L something to check and tell me I have got the numbers wrong
I prayed as Abraham and Sarah had prayed...
or tried to... that I too would be the father of a generation.
She's looking pretty good so far, 
more than one person has commented that she would appear to have her eye on me....
and those long curly baby fingers...
well I am pretty well wrapped around them!

Journeys of life....part the first

There was a curious radio program today which suggested that young people should not travel overseas.
I think the thesis was that basically you are "too young to appreciate the experience" and, more than that, you might be ruined and never learn to settle down.
I will get to that later on (part the fourth perhaps)
But as a boy it was wonderful to grow up in West Cumberland  ( the Western Lake District) we used to go to the beach at St Bees (where my Dad had lived as a boy  and my Great Uncle and Aunt still lived ...he had been both the bank manager and a lighthouse operator....!) and then we stayed at Braystones...just a bit further down the coast. Coastally beautiful!
How we swam I don't know as it was the Irish Sea, by Australian standards it was probably colder than even the south of Tasmania.!   As I reflect, I realise that at least one of our holiday 'houses' probably did not have electricity nor running water (we used to go to the Well to fill buckets!). But I think we got up at 6 or 7 spent the day at the beach, picked mushrooms, built sandcastles, swam...caught crabs, picked cuvvins...( a sea snail which you picked and soaked and cooked...Yum! [let us not however begin to think about the discharge from the Windscales Nuclear Reactor...which meant that Sellafield was discharging waste water which may or may not have been tainted by nuclear waste....might explain why I have three brains!]...but we enjoyed them...Cumbrian escargots)
The main picture above is of the wonderful Campsite that the Scouts developed at Ennerdale. Many of my holidays as a teenage boy were as a member of that organisation. I am really happy that I had the opportunity to be both a Cub and a Scout.
The formal campsite, but also rough camping in fields and on mountainsides was very enjoyable. And is etched very deep in my memory.
For all these childhood holidays I am really grateful.

Marriage Equality---

This is a reblog of a post from September 2014

I had a very thoughtful and charitable letter from A who "respectfully disagreed" with my views about same-sex marriage.
I think it is now better to call it "equal marriage"
I wrote in reply

A
Thanks for your response to my blog
I have made a number of posts over the years …you may not have tracked them all down
On my blog a link might be:
http://stephenclarks.blogspot.com.au/search?q=gay+marriage

I have a high view of marriage, [ this may surprise you] and part of my discussion about equal marriage opportunity is about encouraging commitment, morality and in particular an environment in which children may be nurtured  with the assurance of love and security. This latter principle is one that is explicitly stated in the Anglican marriage services.
It does seem to me that the gender of the parents is secondary to the parents’ commitment to love each other. This is the primary environment out of which children will know that they are loved. And in that love to allow the children to know that they are loved.
We are all well aware that many homosexual people live immoral lives…..I want them to live committed, decent lives.
Sorry,
I could also re-write that statement :  

We are all well aware that many heterosexual people live immoral lives…..I want them to live committed, decent lives.
I have experienced a couple of extraordinary things in the last year. A homosexual couple (male) who have embraced twins into their lives. They seemed to think it was going to be a breeze, and it wasn't…my observation is that it has transformed their relationship. They are deeper people, more loving, more capable of embracing carefully the lives of the fragile.
Most gay people do not “choose to be gay”…they are born that way.
Did God want them to live a life doomed to failure? With all due respect, I don’t think God is like that. God does not make life particularly hard for 10%…!

It is not as if we have a God who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses! (Heb 4:15)

I do not think homosexuality is a weakness, any more than heterosexuality is. We struggle with both! We are after all made in God's image. Male and female God created us, ...is it too presumptuous to say "gay and straight" God created us!

Mummy dearest

Good to hear that the Family Court refused to "rule" in the case of a woman who had petitioned to stop her former husband's wife/partner from being called "Mum" by their child.
These things are never straight forward.
When my wife and I separated the best thing my lawyer said to me about our minor child (who is in her teens) was that there was no point in getting a custody order for a 15 year old.

This has proved to be rather true. She seems to do what she likes, and moves from one to the other at will.

There was wise advice from some on the radio, which really said "Don't make the child have to decide loyalty each time they are called to address their parent of step parent"; "Children want adults to be happy and don't want to be the cause of confrontation"

I must admit that it is unlikely any of my children would want to call anyone else "Dad" unless they wanted to really crap me off (and it is quite possible that they might want to do that) but as Freda Briggs, well-respected child advocate put it...the Family Court's time should nto be wasted with this sort of stuff.

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

Field of Argent

Today is our twenty fifth wedding anniversary which gives cause for thought. I remember when I thought that 25 years was an impossibly long time and that only old people could possibly get there. The first time I was chastened by that was when my parents had theirs. They didn't seem that old. I suppose my mother was slightly older than I am now and my father slightly younger.
Indeed one of the things I note (is this a feature of growing old?) is that anything less than forty years is almost passé and Golden wedding anniversaries are quite common, so that I could happily write in the card I got for S that I hope we would have another 25 better years.
I am not so pedestrian as to suggest that the last two and a half decades have been so fantastic that we would want the next twenty five years to be just like it. God forbid! I just hope I am better at it than I have been.
Highlights? Well of course our three children have been the chief fruit of this period. We have managed to cope with three lots of school, and two lots of university so far. We haven't quite managed to liberate them from the nest. I look forward to that day!
But not only do we have children and nephews and nieces its been a great thing to marry some of them off, and bso there are also great nephews and nieces and. I am ready to be a grandfather. These are words I had never envisaged saying.
Our parents taught us how important family holidays were and we have been able to have good family holidays at least once every year. Not always far away, though we have enjoyed some pretty quality times in the last few years.
Lowlights? Can you imagine living with me for 25 years? Even my parents didn't have to cope with that! So it has not been without its trials. We had a period of separation about ten years ago, which was awful but necessary. My best man deserted us in our hour of need, apparently we used up all our quota of neediness and he had nothing more to give.
We have lived in 6 different places in that period. Both my parents died. The world has changed and John Howard has been PM for more than a third of that time! It would be remiss of me not to say that being a minister of the church has taken its toll on all of us.
Here's to the next 25!

Change and growth

Another increase to the family this week. Lillian Ellen, the daughter of my niece.

She is the second child to be called Lily, after my mother. And in a way it’s a bit disturbing. What does it mean as we deliberately do things which pass on the generations?

To be fair to M, the mother of the child, she was probably closer to my mother than most of her other grandchildren; and was deeply saddened by her death. Which is why I think she should perhaps have been a little more cautious about having this reminder ever present in her own daughter.

I, for example, was not named after my grandfather whose death in unfortunate circumstances had deeply rocked the family. By the time my younger brother was born they had obviously got over it and he was named Richard after the man in question. Well he has to live with that and I don’t, but I have always thought it a bit odd that if you are going to pass a name down that you should either give it to everyone, or to the eldest…but we never did things logically in our family. Any way, I am glad also that I don’t have the unfortunate reminder…I make heavy weather of it any way

Early morning mueslings

As we begin the final stage of our Grand Tour, this time next week we will be preparing for the flight from KL to Adelaide, there are certain random musings about world culture that float in and out at irregular intervals. Some of them are:

• Family is a very close bond. Yesterday my aunt showed me pictures of my grandmother at her wedding and you would have sworn it was my sister. These physical characteristics are perhaps more noticeable when the gaps of observation are decades rather than days or weeks.
• Family Personality transcends all sorts of things. My aunty with whom we have been staying (and who will be reading this!!..hello Adelaide) who is my father's half sister is also remarkably like me in many ways. Both bossy and right! Of course we are also wildly different. My cousins with whom we grew up and from whom we have been separated for many years, are able just to sit down and pick up the conversation and get up to speed in half an hour. A great thing. Of course we walk out of each other's lives for another few years today,
• Supermarkets are a great leveller. They all look like Blackwood or Unley. Though they have their distinctive stuff. Fabulously cheap Pasta and cheese in Rome, beautiful patisserie on the shelves in Paris, and good Pork Pies in England!! Yet there is plastic wrap, garbage bags, shampoo and cup-a-soup, that all look the same!! Great levellers and yet there is regional stamping.
• Cars. The world is transport mad and greedy, it is interesting to note what Adelaide could avoid if it acts now. But most places leave it till it's too late. Maybe this is simplistic...but the world can't go on doing what it has been doing.
• Politics. There is an opportunistic sameness about the process, having been in France for the last Presidential election, and England for Blair's resignation one might asell have been in Australia.
• Synod. I missed my first synod ever because I was away. I seem to have survived!

Ghosts of the past

I have always felt we had a close family. So it has been interesting in the last week to be with extended family members who we haven't seen for some years in some cases.
It is easy to pick up a whole lot of threads with people who really I don't know terribly well, and yet there is an interface because we share the lives of individuals who we have known.
It is a melancholy reflection of age, I think, that we need to value our family. I think this can be overstated, but we should not be blasé about our families; for ill or for good.
I am conscious of the fact that one way we often deal with family difficulty is by ignoring our family and perhaps withdrawing from it, but we don't escape quite so easily. Walking in the last few days around the haunts of my youth I am glad that I have a sense of ghosts being laid to rest. Ghosts which in many cases I hadn't fully appreciated.
We don't have to blow trumpets or confront anything necessarily but we should at least not try to ignore where we come from, who we are or what has happened to our folk.
I hope you might think about this (if you want) without me having to do more than just tell you that it has been good for me to muse about this in the last few weeks

Converse conversation

I have spent a bit of time with my youngest daughter (13) in the last few weeks. There is a great charge for parents in seeing your children grow and become independent. It is not the physical independence that matters so much at the early teen stage, but the ability to think independently. This is different from the ability to act impulsively.

Anyone can do that! It is not too hard to see a course of action and then hurtle towards it. It would be easy to mistake this for ‘independence’. Indeed we even validate it with sayings like “They’ve got to learn from their mistakes.”

I never tire of saying that that is not entirely true. We don’t –necessarily- learn from our mistakes. We learn from reflecting on them, and then repeating the action in a modified way as a result of our reflection. We don’t always get this.

So it was good to have a bit of reflection with S.

“Have you made any New Year’s Resolutions?” was the topic of our conversation.

She told me that she had not made any as such, and then went on to tell me that she had been thinking about some goals. These included things like acting more independently, being more organized, more exercise….and so on. Indeed she had been thinking about quite a lot.

I have a couple of reflections myself on this conversation. One, of which I am well aware, is that it was good to have a conversation that didn’t particularly have any greater purpose than just having a chat. I wasn’t trying to make a point, as I so often do when I am talking to my children (to little or no avail…so why bother). It was good to let her speak discursively and decide how much to say and when she had said enough etc….

There should be more of it.

Then she asked me if I had made any resolutions. She wrested control of the conversation from her controlling father, not malevolently but on a mutual and firm basis…so indeed wrested is the wrong word….there should be more of it.

I am conscious that in a couple of weeks we will all (five of us) be on holiday together and it takes a while to get to this mutually accepting conversation. But it is a powerfully transforming dynamic when each day you can sit down with your family and just have an engaging conversation, in which you seek to be present with each other and not controlling (very hard in this family…maybe in all families, but really worth it)

Trust

My morning reflection and prayers today ask me the question "What things have I been entrusted with?"
It 's not a rocket science question in many ways and I can arrive quickly at the conclusion that I have been entrusted with a great human treasure. Wife, children, family, parish, friends.
I have a lot of material resources at my finger tips, and, in whole world terms although as a priest I am not in any way wealthy, I do not really want for anything.
The meditation goes on as the scripture says...being faithful in small things you will be entrusted with big things. Have I been faithful with the small things entrusted to me?
There is a a sort of 'mixed economy' I have been quite diligent about some things and slack about others.
It is, any way, a thought to keep me going during the day. What sort of a go have I made of what has been given to me?

Farewell to the destroyer

When I was at theological college the mother of the good senator Natasha Stott-Despoja, was a much loved journalist at The Advertiser. One of my colleagues would refer to her as "Shirley the Destroyer".
Soon the young Senator came to prominence and we understood that the epithet had passed from mother to child.
It was wonderful to see the stuffed shirts get so cross that Natasha the Destroyer could get so much press coverage simply because she was young and a woman. They who lusted after the media would seethe about how unjustified this was. In reality they were just jealous!!
She had much substance, not a little style...and was the source of inspiration to a generation of young voters who were about ready to slough off the dead skin of the political process.
I am pleased that I hear no one today saying that she should not quit politics.(here) She, quoting her health concerns and the need to properly care for her husband and young family, has no doubt made the right choice.
Though cynics will no doubt suggest she is deserting the sinking Democrat ship, she has more than adequately contributed to "vitam politicam". Though I am sure she will not be silenced completely, she will be missed.