Death to the Church

Anne Manne, in her feature “Rape among the Lamingtons,” [Warning: her outstanding article may trigger deep emotional responses][1] has written one of the most devastating exposes I have read in a lifetime. One respondent, when I posted a link on my Facebook page, wrote “Sickening. Perverted. Revolting. These are the three words that rise up for me. I don't want to be associated with institutions like this.” 

I get that, I really do. Except that for me walking away may not help, may be just produce another head in the sand. After all, governments rape and kill, banks, extort, petro-corps screw Mother Earth, and humanity just screws. The institution is dying, justifiably. But do we walk away?

That cannot be, at least for me, the answer. It is too comfortable. The institution I love has screwed human beings over, tainted its message (a message it claims has eternal ramifications, though I have less certainty about that), left shattered lives reeling in its wake. I have few words that convey my horror. Even “fuck” has been so denuded of meaning that it is utterly inadequate. Like Dylan standing at the grave of the Masters of War, we have to stand there until we sure that its dead. Except we must stay in the coffin.

Reading Manne’s piece, fewer then twelve hours after skimming after the Royal Commission’s Report of Case Study No 36: the response of the Church of England Boys’ Society and the Anglican Dioceses of Tasmania, Adelaide and Brisbane to Allegations of Sexual Abuse (January 2017)[2] left me struggling to find meaning in so much that I have believed in and served and proclaimed for more than thirty years. Twilight zone, sliding into midnight zone, darkness long past the eleventh hour. Darkness visible. Dark, as Lawrence put it, darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom.

The Report names figures like Daniels[3] and Brandenberg,[4] and adds for me extra, if irrational chills. Though I never met either of them, I was close to many who knew them well. One family in particular, with whom I stayed from time to time, were very close to both these men. Often, when I signed my hosts’ visitors’ book, I saw either Daniels’ or Brandenburg’s name amongst the names above mine. I knew of Daniels in particular as one of the up-and-coming priests in Tasmania, a name bandied around as someone to watch, someone I should meet. I never did.

I was never sexually abused by a priest. God knows what I would have done if I had been. I was protected, probably, only by the fact that I was married and, as it happens, married to the daughter of a bishop (later archbishop). His credentials as an opponent of sexual predation and indeed libertinism were impeccable, a dimension off-putting to would-be predators. I wonder how many others of who we younger men shared a knowing look and a nudge, nudge, wink, wink were in fact serious and serial predators? 

So I was saved from the predation of perpetrators of evil, men like Daniels, Brandenberg, Hawkins,[5] Elliot,[6] Rushton,[7] Hatley Gray,[8] Parker,[9] Lawrence[10] and others.

Thank God.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink? Manne tells of the vicious cynicism with which one powerful, obfuscating lay-person, a diocesan council member and solicitor, sought to downplay the seriousness of a brutal anal rape that took place on a table filled with lamingtons (small cakes) by bringing lamingtons to the meeting at which this same “rape among the lamingtons” was discussed. How sick, we might say in common parlance, was that? How evil? How satanic, with all the deepest resonances of those ancient adjectives?

This obfuscator generated what Manne calls a “grotesquely discordant response” to the evil. “Thus it is not child rape but merely funny, having sex with a boy on a table of lamingtons.” It is, Manne notes, a form of interpretive denial, designed to shroud the horror of an event in a cloud of faux humour. As a way to trivialize a cataclysmic assault on any person this form of dark humour is a satanic dehumanization of exactly the sort utilised by Nazis[11] and other perpetrators of extreme evil. It is an attempt to disassociate from the heinous nature of evil acts. 

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink? I can only hope that when we trivialized rumours and innuendos at the time I first encountered them (in the libertine early 1980s) we did so because we assumed that participants in the slightly seedy, Brideshead Revisited ecclesiastical underworld were consenting adults; never in my wildest nightmares did I think we might be talking about the rape of children. 

In Case Study No 36 the narrative recalls a moment when one of the serial abusers, Garth Hawkins, groomed a witness known as BYF. “We find that Hawkins …[12] ran his fingers through BYF’s hair, told him he was good looking, gave him compliments and invited BYF to share his bed.” Though I never met Hawkins, in 1983 I attended a clergy conference in a Victorian diocese. A priest – another figure considered to be “up-and-coming” in the national church – ran his hands through my hair, commenting tenderly on its alleged beauty, while his colleagues laughed. At 23 I looked about 16, and was, I assume he assumed, fair game for predation.

Homophobic in those days, I started, pulled back, and pushed his hand away. As the designated driver for the guest speaker I was icy sober; had I been less so, and unaccompanied, had I been alcohol- or other drug-befuddled, my bewilderment may well have compromised my reactions (as I well know, from occasions in my life not involving predatory clergy). Either way, as I pulled away I noted in the corner of my eye another priest, seated nearby, shaking his head in a vehement caution to the perpetrator, gesturing towards my soon-to-be father in law, warning that my links made me a risky prospect.[13] 

 

I can only begin to imagine the horror that the victims and survivors of this systemic perpetration of evil have experienced – and are still experiencing decades after the crime. To experience sexual assault or rape is to experience the deepest denial of human rights. To experience systemic cover-up and denial of the events is to enter into a Kafka-esque world in which yes means no and no means yes and any utterance can be tied down in an ugly slick of institutional obfuscation and denial. It is also to be confronted by the deep fiscal pockets of a bullying institution. To turn to trusted figures in an institution that is meant to be bearer of light and hope, to find there only cynical stalling tactics, smoke and mirrors, lies, threats, and systematic re-rape, is horror to match any that the great writers and painters of despair have depicted. It is to be embedded in the screamingest pores of Munch’s scream. It is to die a living death. 

The church deliberately prolonged and exacerbated the agony of the victims. The church that I love perpetrated evil every bit as great as the church that nudged and winked, aided and abetted the rise of Adolf Hitler. I was the church. My friends were the church. We are as tainted as post-war German Christians were tainted, tainted with the knowledge that our nudges and winks and blind eyes were acid in the raw wounds of the silenced sacrificial victims. 

For thirty years I have defended and served the institution that perpetrated this chorus of silent screams. I have stayed within the institution, arguing that inside, not outside, is the place to achieve reform. I argued often in preaching and writing that the institution was dying, had to die, and that its death was an act of the God I believed I served. I called it “creative entropy.” But never did I believe the depravity to which my tribe had sunk, that the death had to be so dead. I thought that the death was because we were marginalised. I knew of the horrors of the Canadian Anglican church, but Canada is so far away. I did not know how dead we must die.  

Where to from here, knowing my people decimated human lives in the name of the Christ I believed we were serving?

I can only for now stutter apologies to those who suffered. I am so sorry we never heard your cries. I will stay with this institution, for I know no other way, now. I will stay with it in its deserved death throes, will not swim from this Titanic. But by God, the vocation of those of us who are left will be to sink with this beast deep beneath uncaring waves. Only then might something resembling Christ-love rise, phoenix-like, from the tomb that is ours. 


Abuse survivor Clare Pascoe adds the following:


Three things I think those who are left must push for:

1) an independent complaint panel. Until the church demonstrates, by acceding to that, that it is willing to be externally accountable, it will not regain trust.

2) meeting survivors. Very few clergy, and even fewer laypeople have actually come face to face with survivors and their pain. Even reading RC reports is still one step removed. Congregations need to invite survivors to their parish to tell their story in person; to tell of the abuse, and of the church's humiliating and horrifying response.

And

3) listening to survivors. Not just listening to their stories, but to the insights they've gained about what needs to change. Because we are really the only ones who can see that clearly, from the depths of our bad experiences.

---

[1] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/may/1493560800/anne-manne/rape-among-lamingtons. Retrieved Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

[2]http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/bdf99b59-7e8f-4e5e-9ce3-c36253cc96de/Report-of-Case-Study-No-36. Retrieved Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

[3] Case Study No 36, 49-74.

[4] Case Study No 36, 83-104.

[5] Case Study No 36, 10-11, 15-16.

[6] Case Study No 36, 107-122.

[7] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim.

[8] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim. To be strictly distinguished from Paul Gray, the victim, survivor, and witness, who was a preyed upon by Rushton. Manne notes, “Hatley Gray pleaded guilty and was given a three-year good behaviour bond and a $100 fine. As Sharp argued, this was a “very generous” result for raping a 15-year-old boy. Hatley Gray was then employed by the Willochra diocese in South Australia as a youth worker.”

[9] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim.

[10] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim.

[11] Hitler was well known for making jokes about Jews, according to his bodyguard, Rochus Misch, in a book yet to be released. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1028813/Hitler-comedian-The-Nazi-leaders-bodyguard-reveals-different-dictator.html . Retrieved Thursday, 18 May 2017.

[12] The ellipsis denotes omission of reference to (now) Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, who was interrogated in depth about his awareness of paedophile activity in the Diocese of Tasmania. Later reference to Aspinall notes “We are satisfied that, when Hawkins asked if one of the young men would spend the night in his bed, Mr Aspinall jokingly pressured BYF to do so. However, Mr Aspinall did not do so with any belief or intent that BYF would be sexually abused by Hawkins.” [12] Case Study No 36, 11.

[13] Unfortunately – or otherwise – I remain unsure of the identity of that priest, as two similarly named priests from that diocese at the time have become confused in my mind.

the morning after the day before

(An address to the ANZAC Parade in Charleville, QLD, 2005)

90 years ago a group of Young NZ and Australian men faced a dawn that would change their respective nations. In blood they gave birth to a tradition that has been at the very heart of the psyches of the two nations ever since.

For a few years in the 60s and 70s the power of the ANZAC tradition looked a little shaky. Those of us who dwelt in the luxurious peace that our servicemen and women had won for us – often at the cost of their lives, decided we hated war. What we forgot was that those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, and those whose lives were changed for ever, hated war as well. None but those who are insane like war. By the sacrifice you service men and women made and continue to make our lives were set free. By the standards of bravery you exemplified we were enabled to be a generation that never had to serve. Slowly, as a product of the peace won for us by those who have served, I learned how important this day and the tradition it serves is for us, and for the generations that come after us. For those of us who haven’t served, let us commit to tell our children of the sacrifice that our men and women have made. Lest we forget, indeed.

The tradition goes on. So too does the bravery and the payment of all degrees of sacrifice. For those who have served in the New Zealand and Australian armed services, for those whose lives have been changed for ever by the horror of war, for those whose lives have been lost, not forgetting most recently those who died in the Kanimbla Sea King tragedy, serving the suffering people of Indonesia, we give our thanks. For those who currently serve in theatres of war or the threat of war, or natural disaster, we give our thanks. I personally pay tribute to the chaplains who seek to bring light amidst the darkness that is the inevitable corollary of war. We give you thanks.

May the Anzac tradition continue until the reign of God breathes peace and justice into all lives. Australian and New Zealand service men and women, we the civilian people of Australia and New Zealand salute you. Lest we forget.

on VAT 69 and funny hats

I remembered the moment, I suppose, because I was reminded recently of the walk-in pantry in the house in which I grew up. The conversation drifted on to the pleasures of walk-in pantries. My mind drifted to the memory of a fifteen-year-old boy sneaking into that pantry when his mother was out, not long after his father had died.

He tiptoed in, zeroed in on a bottle of VAT 69, poured it into a glass of milk because he’d read somewhere that’s how to drink whisky, and set about drinking it. Rum and milk might have been better. The toxic, synapse-exploding emulsion put him off whisky for years, and alcohol for, well, weeks.

But how did I  ... (I’ll dispense with the whole ‘reader: he was I’ charade because it was bleedingly obvious, and any psychologist could tell you I was using the foil purely as a psychological ploy by which to distance my adult self from the trauma of having once been an adolescent) ...how did I know VAT-69 was whisky? It was not because I had pored [or poured, for that matter] over Sir Ernest Shackleton’s diaries. Biggles was the limit of my adventurers’ memoirs).

No. Five years earlier I had been told a joke. It went something like

“What’s the Pope’s phone number?”

“I dunno.”

“VAT 69”. Kerchunk-plunk.

As a joke it was not in the big league and I fear I have it wrong. Maybe it was ‘who does the pope call in an emergency?’ I don't do jokes. But it didn’t work at all. I barely knew of the existence of some person called ‘pope,’ did not know he lived in a town (or whatever) called ‘Vatican,’ and had no idea what VAT 69 was.

Funnily enough, because it was the 1960s, the peculiarities of the phone number, foreign to a modern ear, I got. My phone number at the time was 201D. Why shouldn’t this pope fellow be VAT 69? The number was back to front and it would take a while to Morse out V-A-T but I figured he (it never occurred to me he could be a she) lived in England and maybe Brits had back to front phone numbers.

Somehow though I gleaned that the combination of letters and numbers referred to a thing called whisky. Some years later I noticed some in a walk-in pantry. Some years later I mixed some with milk, and blew my synapses.

Some decades later I was an adult. Perhaps because I had consumed too much VAT 69 (in fact I’ve only ever risked it once since, and prefer, on rare whisky occasions, nectars for gods far more discerning) I was an adult of somewhat addled brain. The synapses that were blown out in a walk-in pantry a few weeks after my father died were perhaps specifically those that look after the memory of positions in which I place my wallet, keys, phone and anything else that I place.  Parking doesn’t count. My synapses cope with parking spots. So far.

As an adult I had stumbled into a job called priesthood. Amongst other things this entailed wondering around a small part of a large building wearing funny clothes. The large building was variously called a church, of if committed to a particular role, a cathedral.  Cathedrals have a special chair in them, where bishops – of which I later learned the pope is a special example that I get to ignore – park their bottoms from time to time.  The word ‘cathedral’ comes from ‘cathedra’, which is the Latin name for a bishop’s bottom.

Often, if I was meandering around the small part of the big building I would discover that I had forgotten something. But often the something I had forgotten would be locked away somewhere, so I would need my keys. But often I would forget where my keys were. So, to circumvent this sad side-effect of the alleged papal phone number, I would attach the keys by a lanyard, to my person.

The small part is called a ‘sanctuary’, though in the USA that word refers to the whole kit and caboodle so it’s a bit confusing. In churchy traditions that are a bit ‘high’ (a reference to how much the participants move their bodies around rather than to their altitude, though on the other hand Shakers and Pentecostals move their bodies around a lot, so this won’t do as a description ... let’s try ‘a reference to how much the participants move their bodies around in an orderly and choreographed manner’ … though the choreography is by centuries of tradition rather than by someone creative and dictatorially directive) …

Oh dear. Where was I? Damned synapses.

Oh. In churchy traditions that are a bit ‘high’ you can tell the sanctuary because the people who move around in it wear funny clothes. They look ridiculous, but a bit like the emperor’s new clothes the participants in the moving around believe that they don’t look ridiculous at all. So they wear them.  And this memory-challenged wielder of funny clothes and keys would often attach the latter to the former in case some sort of excursion to a cupboard was needed.

Some wielders of funny clothes never need to excurt (and that should be a word) because they never damaged their synapses with VAT 69, but a few of us struggle with imperfections. Some of the most self-righteous wielders of funny clothes refer to the flawed wielders of funny clothes as ‘incompetent’ but on the whole I think the Jesus-dude who was (is) the excuse for funny rites and clothes would prefer that damaged individuals can be wielders of funny clothes (and keys) too, because sometimes the Damaged are otherly-competented, and those other competences are a gift that sometimes outweigh the lamentable flaws in a few synapses.

So one day this owner of keys and damaged synapses was wondering around in a sanctuary, keys and funny clothes melded with some discretion but apparently not enough. It must have been an important day, because a bishop was there, and bishops are very important, and they wear rather silly hats to prove that, but they don’t know they are silly hats because, well, bishops are a bit like emperors sometimes. They also wear flamboyant rings, because that shows they can write important letters, and they carry a crooked pole, and they wear similar funny clothes to the other people meandering around the sanctuary but more of them, to show that they are much more important or maybe much nearer to God or Jesus or Donald Trump or someone.

And on that day I was indeed wondering around in a sanctuary wearing preposterous looking clothes and the bishop in his (though it could be a her) funny  hat noticed my keys on a lanyard and snarled ‘take them off, they look ridiculous.’ And I glanced at the silly bishoppy hat on the bishoppy head, but I didn’t say anything because bishops are enormously powerful in their own small spheres of influence and I was quite keen to have a job by the end of the day and sadly I am as flawed and corrupt as the next person. So I shifted the keys a little so they were discretely hidden beneath one of the silly-looking clothes I was wearing, and my life and my job went on. Both, I guess only for a while but let’s not get all metaphysical here.

And somewhere between a bunch of keys and some silly clothes I realised it was all about emperors’ clothes (and yes the apostrophe is where it should be) and VAT-69 jokes.

Because VAT 69 jokes are only funny if you know

a)       phone numbers once looked a bit like that, and
b)      the pope lives in a place called Vatican City, and
c)       VAT 69 is a whisky
d)      and whisky tastes lousy with milk.

No – wait … the last doesn’t matter. Different folks, different strokes and all that.

And keys on a lanyard only matter if the observer is so obsessed with emperors’ clothes, so obsessed with protocol and self-importance, so disoriented and disconnected that the clothing of lackeys around him (or her) becomes an issue that may detract from the gravitas of their own clothes, the solemnity of their own ritual, the importance of their own role. Keys on a lanyard matter only if the observer of the keys is so unaware of how it all looks when little boys see the emperor’s clothes (or not), and does not realise that the keys are probably the only readily comprehensible thing in the whole obscure sanctuary and its strange, obfuscating rituals.

VAT 69 jokes work if you know a few things about whisky, Catholicism and phone numbers. Funny clothes can work if you know a few things about their (accrued) symbolism. Keys work, well, pretty much everywhere.

And those of us who wear (or used to) funny clothes in an obscure part of an incomprehensible building might need the occasional reminder that snarling about keys on lanyard might well be a parable about obscurantism, missed priorities, about an utter lack of reality about emperors’ clothes and bishops’ silly hats, and about a growing disconnect from a carpenter’s son named Jesus who at one stage had something to do with the rites in the funny building but who these days might be more likely to be busking in the mall or sleeping rough in a bus shelter, adjacent to a homeless bro with a bottle of VAT 69.  

Tightened zippers?

As we journey into Advent our liturgical readings will take us deeper and deeper into portents and portents of portents, into the surreal and the potentially scary. As we go home in the evenings (or perhaps as we walk out the  door if we have our smartphones attuned to media feeds) we will receive news reports of  portents and portents of portents, taking us into the surreal twilight realms of the potentially scary and even apocalyptic.

Back in another pocket of time, another apocalyptic moment, when (as I said recently in a sermon) Khrushchev and Kennedy were glaring at each other across the Bay of Pigs,  civilization was also dwelling in a twilight world, under the potential shadow of a nuclear winter, waiting with bated breath and tightened zippers.

Tightened zippers? Bob Dylan memorably wrote at the time

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurl’d

Fear to bring children

Into this world.

They were dark times and there really was a sense that procreation of new generations should be off the agenda, that this was endgame in Orwellian times, and humanity was subsiding into the deepest of doo doos.

Dylan himself has produced nearly as many children as I have since then, so I guess he overcame his sense of apocalyptic despair.  Yet we would be fools, as our pockets vibrate with the latest news from Aleppo or Fotokol, not to wonder what world we are giving our tamariki and mokopuna. Is there a future, either in terms of clashing religions, ecological destruction, or economic collapse?

The weird and wonderful biblical language of portents and portents of portents, or earthquakes and famines and insurrections, is not about Syria, Turkey, Russia, no matter what the idiot fringes of Christian distortion may proclaim. It is about ever thus and ever will be thus, from the time the first amoeba crawled out of the primeval swamp until the time the last human dodo, alone and frightened, curls up in a foetal ball beneath a dead tree.

But it does not end with that. It ends with hope, ends with the radical in-break of an unimaginable New Heavens and New Earth, of Hope with a capital H. Another prophetic (and love -struck) song-writer writes of having “self deception tattooed like a flag across my back / holding hands with war-mongers I feel I’ve been betrayed.” That is what our brothers and sisters who set out in hope to flee apocalyptic scenes may feel—and what any of us could feel one day if our small safe worlds were to turn to custard and to bombs. “I advertise the scars of middle classness like a shiny piece of junk mail” continues that prophetic vision of Greg Arnold. If our small comfort zones of routine and sameness, nostalgia and myopia were all we were to cling to then the readings of the next few weeks would be no more than a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal.

If though our comfort is based in the radical promise of Jesus, present in word and sacrament, reaching out to us from God’s eternity future, then we can look our descendants in the eye, however scary the world becomes (and it will) and whisper the words of Jesus-hope: “I go before you into Galilee.”

 

Remembrance, Because God ...

We Will Remember them ...

No-one in their right mind glorifies war, and we like to think we are in our right mind. Nevertheless this Sunday, at Ormond and the Cathedral, we will join cathedrals and churches around the world, we will remember those who died and those whose lives were unalterably changed by the war that changed the face of the world; we will hold them before God in prayer and song, in spoken words and in silence. We will hold in the presence of God our uncles, aunts, parents, siblings, those we knew or knew of, and those no-one remembers. We will do so because God ...

As Christians we are caught between the Already and the Not-Yet. We believe that in the mysteries of the Resurrection God's final defeat of sorrow and suffering, injustice and death was achieved. Yet in every war, in every newscast, in multitudinous conversations we hear of sorrow and suffering, injustice and death. As we remember those who died in the unimaginable horrors of 1914-1918, 1939-1945, and indeed every war and every injustice (and let us not forget Māori and Pakeha alike, all who died in the injustices of the land wars of Aotearoa New Zealand) we do so clinging to a strange hope that their death was not the end of life, because God ...

On Sunday we will sing hymns and say prayers and break open the word with these complex mysteries in mind. We will do so not as a people without hope but as those who cling tenaciously to the glorious hope of resurrection in Jesus Christ, that injustice, suffering and death are not the final word, because God breathed resurrection even into the death of God.

On an unrelated note, spare a moment to rejoice in the work our young families have done with the Community Garden. Already it is beginning to produce, and however small the crop maybe it is a reminder that we care for those who are not as fortunate as we are. Take time out to have a look (pull a weed), eat a lettuce leaf, and rejoice to in the work of Amy and Jennifer Whyman who completed the gospel proclaiming sign: "Go in peace: eat your fill."

 

 

on cling wrap and guns

It’s time these Pokes woke up, for there is much to poke. Originally I had intended for them to be a place to replicate the sort of sometimes acerbic, sometimes playful commentary I used to make first in the Central Western Sunday paper in central New South Wales, then in Allan Reeder’s Market-Place across Anglican Australia. I thought I’d reproduce my pew sheet commentary for a wider readership (if anyone clicked by). Perhaps I still will, and perhaps this will be a place for more astringent comment still, though I will never quite reach the skills of Georgia Lewis’ The Rant Mistress or robyncadwallader’s Write in Pencil Only. I note, too, Robyn’s far less narcissistic title! Still, it’s time this sleeping microbe re-awoke, so that my penmanship is not spent merely on Broken Moments and its long and potentially soporific homiletic.

So here I am, in downtown Loveland, Colorado, attending a conference that has been illuminating mostly for the wrong reasons but illuminating nevertheless, muttering profanities about stewed US coffee, observing snippets of the Great Hegemonists’ kulcha, and preparing once more to engage on the micro On The Road adventure that so far (pre-conference) took me from Chicago to Denver via Presho (as you do), exposed me to the Badlands and Wall Drug (and I could tell you which was badder, which was more devoid of goodness, in my books)and Mount Rushmore, and which will now hurtle me across the I80 back to Chicago.

US sport (though thanks to mine hosts I did manage to watch the All Blacks annihilate Les Bleus) has bemused me, US cuisine fattened me, and did I mention US Coffee? US politics has frightened me, US geography exhilarated me, and ironically my 700+ song shuffle has taken me again and again, 90% of the time, back into the voluntary hegemony of US colonialism. Well: except for “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” That was British. Don’t ask.

I won’t even go into the complexities of a society which wraps its apples (at least in this motel) in cling wrap for fear of salmonella contagion, but allows children to carry guns, presumably as part of the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State. Nope, I won’t go there, because I want to get out of Loveland alive, and who knows when I might want to visit Presho once again?

So the sleeping microbe has stirred, and while you’ve escaped most of my ruminations on the delights of downtown Presho, South Dakota (a town that after some thought reminded me uncannily of Augathella in south-west Queensland), I will now surface more regularly, with whimsy and acid, to titillate the pixels of your iWorld (or execrable alternative).

Sclerosis of the Kiwi Heart?

The news of the increasing refugee crisis and catastrophe that is emanating from Europe and Australia, as well as the hardening of heart that is represented by the Trump campaign in the USA, should be interpreted by Christians as deeply demonic.

The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures make plain the responsibility of God’s people to open radical love and hospitality to strangers and wayfarers, the refugees and homeless. It is not an optional extra but an imperative deep from the heart of the embracing, welcoming creator God. Across the Ditch the attitude of the Australian Federal Government, incarcerating human beings on off-shore islands in a complex and costly (just fiscally, let alone in terms of  human costs) campaign of “not my problem” should have every Christian in that country bearing placards in revolt, initiating non-violent protest at every possible opportunity. Some are; it was heart-warming to see the Dean of Hobart amongst those risking arrest in a protest staged in that city.

Across the hemisphere the Christian communities are being put to shame. Iceland, one of the top 10% atheistic nations in the world, has just seen radical subversive action shaming its government: when the Icelandic Government announced it would take 50 refugees from Syria, activist Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir began a Facebook campaign to encourage her fellow citizens to raise their game. Last time I checked 11,000 Icelanders had offered to open their homes. Statistically around 10% of those attend church regularly.

I was in Australia when the Howard Government there perpetrated its lies about “children overboard,”  and later turned the Tampa away from its waters on the stated basis that it was carrying 438 mainly Afghani refugees (this despite the wonderful impact Afghanis had had on the history of Australia). I was deeply proud of Aotearoa New Zealand, when we accepted over 150 of those refugees. Perhaps, like Britain’s Battle of Britain, it was our finest hour?

Because, despite the obscenity of Australia’s policies of off-shore processing, and the growing refusal there to allow media reporting on the shameful abuse of those behind razor wire, the rape, suicide and depression that are pandemic in the camps, nevertheless Australia rates more highly than New Zealand on proportionate intake of the world’s most desperate. Believe it or not, “Australia aims to host 4.7 times as many refugees per capita as New Zealand” [from a 2014 article by Murdoch Stephens, who leads Doing Our Bit, a campaign to double New Zealand's refugee quota and funding].
As a Christian community we should be  gnawing the ears of both (all) sides of parliament.

As a Christian community  we should be making conspicuous noise about the most vulnerable on God’s earth.  Though I am no organiser or politician I am hoping to get involved in action on this front in coming weeks.