Making sense of being a priest

My most confronting encounter this week has been with Jason. 

After the Traditional Mass he wandered into the porch , thank God for the open Church.  He just wanted to sit down, or so it seemed, and though I was ready to ‘up and go’ I thought the least I should do was give him some time.
He was clearly in some distress, and his speech was almost unintelligible.The Grandpa in me tells me that you just have to give this some time…try talking to a two year old . It’s not that they are not talking it is that I am not hearing.
Jason sat quietly in front of the glorious image of the risen Jesus with the open wounded hands and tears were flooding.
Oh shit! What am I going to do? This guy has come wanting to receive and can I deliver? Pretty obviously, not!
It is as this point I have to realise thatI am not the one who has to deliver. Why would he want what I have to offer?
“I’ll just sit here, and you just take your time!”  It was the least I could do, and yet I rather begrudged it.
“Do you want me to pray for you?”  I asked. 
Fairly confident that I know how to pray. Not just ritualistically, but with meaning and with the courage to pray for deliverance if necessary.
“Maybe later,” he says. 
So I go and sit down quietly behind him. And for once say nothing!
His tears were flowing, makes me cry now just writing about it. 
His barely intelligible utterances talked of a woman who had been raped and told she would never have children.
That broken woman had met this broken man and they had borne a child…I wrote that they had  fathered a child….and I think that was important for Jason he was a father and felt totally incapable being so. 
In his ramblings he alluded to three others, I am not sure if he was the father. Possibly…even probably.
Then he lapsed into “I don’t want to go to jail, they are just horrible to me in there.”
What had happened I do not want to know, but we can all imagine. 
I do not want to know. But maybe my turning away is part of the problem.
I had waves of fear about him because he seemed erratic, crazed. 
I asked him if he was taking drugs.
He told me he wasn’t. And I believe him. 
But I knew, and he knew that I knew that his mind had been crippled by f&$%in’ meth. 
Don’t use that term lightly.
This was a beautiful man, of gentle spirit  whose humanity has been crippled by the careless greed of the pushers,
I repeat again:
“Oh shit! What am I going to do? This guy has come wanting to receive and can I deliver? Pretty obviously, not!”
We couldn’t sit there for ever, 
I prayed with him.
A gentle prayer, and prayer for deliverance (exorcism)…I am not afeared to pray so [ thank you A J Davies…who though a curious man taught me to trust the prayer …. and deliver us from evil]
As we took a quarter of an hour to leave 
he talked about Her…the mother of the children, 
who was coming in on an interstate bus.
“She will love this place.”
I had to tell him the Church was not open all the time, Tuesdays and Thursdays and of course Sundays.
I really hope we see them ...our prayers   genuine prayers   will be there for them

I was totally struck that he knew how he had been touched by our Shrine.
 
And my heart thrilled, whilst also being sad that he had to blow his nose on his tee shirt because he was so overcome. (  I wanted him to have my used handkerchief, but thought that was a bit disgusting....on reflection it was probably not)
 
Let us not ever begin to think that we live in a country where everyone is equal!!
 
And God forgive me for my failure to be Jesus to this beautiful man.

is simplicity simple?

There are many traditional religious vows taken by Christians who profess to what used to be called 'the religious life'. In their Benedictine form they were styled poverty, chastity and obedience...with a fourth condition..stability...which meant they were supposed to stay in one place.

The Franciscans often came to style 'poverty' as simplicity. This seems quite a reasonable thing to do, since anyone who has actually experienced real poverty would not want to inflict it on anyone. Poverty is not a good condition, it means inadequate shelter, poor healthcare, and bad diet.

The modern "simplicity" movement pops up all over the place.

It is a paradox in a real sense because while it urges people to live simply, such a goal requires commitment and sophistication of a high degree. Akin, indeed, to the commitment of a religious vow. Something which is all embracing and life embracing.

It speaks of:

• Material simplicity - a non-consumerist lifestyle based on becoming self-realised as persons, rather than having lots of things which some dictate who or what I am. It is significant that much of the history of the last few thousand years has promoted "having" as a key indicator of human success. It is also clear that much perceptive literature, both fictional and non-fictional, has exposed the vanity that is exposed when it is discovered that simply having a great pile of 'stuff' does not bring about true happiness or fulfilment.
• Human focus- a recognition that living and working environments should not be institutionally but humanly focused. Welfare service delivery, for example, and educational systems miss the mark when they service only clients and fail to meet individual need
• Self actualisation -a deliberate intention to empower the individual rather than to promote the complex institution. One might say in the words of the old morality tale...teaching people to fish rather than handing out food parcels... and there is of course
• Ecological awareness - a realisation that we live in an interconnected and interdependent world and that we must care for the whole as well as our small part.
• Personal growth - is a key feature. Perhaps it is the dynamic that weaves all this together and the key strategy which is worked out as we try to live simply.

Some of these thoughts draw upon Duane Elgin author of a Voluntary Simplicity Report published in 1977 (see a precis here)

Casting ravioli before swine

Fr Tim Jones, a priest in York, England was quoted as suggesting that it may be OK for the poor to shoplift from large supermarkets. In a bizarre little twist, amidst huge public outcry, one of his parishioners bought a whole pile of tinned ravioli, hid outsid the church and tipped the messy stuff all over the erstwhile vicar. Said parishioner was apparently 'outraged'.
I must admit I am not. One of the great problems for the Anglican church is that we are so middle-class that we are more likely to be outraged by the assault on our supermarkets by the unwashed than to be outraged by the thought of some people being so poor that they can't afford to eat.
Having grown up just after the War in a family which was no doubt poor, I can happily say that we (kids) didn't really know or care that we were poor. But as we grew I realise that there were things which were hard for my parents to provide us which other kids took for granted. This was not, as the middle class so often assume, because my parents were poor providers; but rather because there were many kids, both my parents came from modest families...so there was no inherited wealth...and my dad was the only bread winner.
As I grew, I realised that one of the things about Anglo Saxon society is that no one thinks or declares that they are well-off. Everyone thinks their families only have modest incomes. This seems farcical to the really poor, because we can spot that though the next rung up the ladder declaim that they are 'poor' we think that families that afford music lessons, overseas holidays, cars even in those days, and certainly private education have a lot more stuff than we did.
The middle class in particular, thinking they are poor...but mistaken in my view, have no conception of whta it might be like to not actually have any savings, or any security or certainty about what will happen for the next week because there is no food and no money.
My question, which Fr Jones attempts to answer...is just what are the poor supposed to do when they have no money, and no way of accessing services. (Had a chap like this came knocking at my door on Boxing Day!)
We can say ...they should have been wiser, saved more. But I think often we just don't understand what it is like to be poor.

What are the poor people doing...?

I have a very good dentist (see here) but I've seen him 3 times in the last fortnight. The last time today...and my teeth feel great.
Now we are fortunate to have Extras Cover (at a cost) and I've still shelled out over $1000 excess in this short space of time.
It is (of course) worth it...but what do the poor people do?

I'm more out of touch than you are

The latest politcial game is "Who is the most out of touch?", in trying to expose Turnbull as an elitist he was pilloried in this AFL Grand Final week for not knowing which team he supports...and plucking "The Roosters" out of mid-air. Not a bad try, unfortunately the nearest thing to 'roosters' are probably the Swans, or the Eagles or the Crows.
Does it matter? It seemed to, because it showed he lacked common touch. I remember a former Archdeacon, Alan Daw, telling some of us younger clergy that it always paid to know what was happening in the local footy as it gave you an immediate intro...not bad advice, at times it has worked. Malcolm could learn from the Venerable Alan
Now the Opposition is throwing it back...The Government is out of touch
This is just as tiresome, and is I suppose to be expected.
Parliamentarians are almost always by definition going to be 'out of touch' with their electorates. As relatively high achievers, from fairly well-educated backgrounds, with a certain degree of success under their belts...they are always going to be rather alienated from the so-called 'battlers'.
Indeed I suspect most of them would have no idea what it is like to be ina house where there is simply not enough money to see the week out.
So we do the best we can.
My advice is that these ruling elites should at least find various key voices who can speak into their ears to give them a hint of what it might be like for those who are doing it tough. This is much more fruitful than the "who's most out of touch?' argument

The price of progress

I have watched in the last few days what are really sad tales of our world. While we bemoan the price of petrol and the cost of food in Australia, there should be no reason why anyone in this land should not be able to access at least one and probably three square meals tomorrow.
It is not so fortunate elsewhere. Last night's Dateline highlighted the shortage of bread in Cairo.
Now Cairo is not Zimbabwe or Mali, it is relatively affluent and people are without staples.
Tonight's Insight was frighteningly close to home.The story of families trying to make it on $400-$500 a week...with mortages, petrol, health and children.
The all too common story of families not having enough money to meet crisis needs.
Having grown up in an household with one income, many children and no capital to fall back on I am all too well aware that many of the middle-class just don't get this. They do not understand how a family can simply not have enough money to put petrol in the car, or to replace clothing.
They do not understand how the poor do not insure their houses and cars not because they are stupid, but because there is simply not money to do it.
There are always those ready to moralise about the way those who try to live on tiny incomes spend their money. I just don't think they get the reality of poverty means not that the poor choose foolishly but that they have no choice.
I am drawn to one banking advert which says...Every generation should live better than the one that went before...and I think we should be ashamed that too many people, certainly in the developing world, but also in our midst can't actually relaise that goal.

We are the world

What next? Yesterday's Religion Report reminded that nothing we do, eat, see or enjoy is without taint. (For traditional Christians this is nothing new!)

The focus...chocolate. British social activist, Steve Chalke reminded the listeners that in many places the production of chocolate is only made possible by  low cost labour  provided by children sold into slave-like conditions. This does not suprise us. 

Rather we choose to be ignorant, I guess. 

The same point has been made about coffee in times past, and it is now obvious and clear that we should look for the "fair trade" markings on almost anything.

Fair Trade is a new and necessary buzz word/concept. It applies to coffee, rice, clothing manufacture and anything else that we, the greedy West, demand that the poor make for us, to satisfy our insatiable greed.

Nothing we do, eat or use is morally neutral. Our response to that has usually (as I say) to just be plain dumb about it. 

If we are to be responsible we have to do a bit better than that.

It is popping up all around us though, isn't it?

The trafficking of people...worth more than the global illegal drugs industry.

The rebuilding of the devastated Iraq attracting the poorest of the Asian poor (here)

It is almost all we can do to worry about whether or not we can have drippers on our lawns.

We just simply have to do better!

Today, by the way, is the memoria of Vincent de Paul.  To whom we have generously given bags and bags of unwanted clothes in the last few weeks. The tribute to our own unending need to have stuff without end!