[ hold :: this space ]

We’ve been talking over the last few months about some options for sourcing accommodation for people leaving prisons. Housing is one of the top three factors that prevents recidivism, so it’s become one of our big policy areas. We’ve come up with ideas about prioritising ex-prisoners as tenants in manses, and a few other things.

About six weeks ago, i came home from a meeting about just that topic to discover that i had new neighbours. they moved into an apartment upstairs and across from me that used to be home to some goths who were fabulous neighbours, but who were stalked by some fundamentalist christians who used to leave typed anonymous letters about hell and damnation in their letterbox. That’s a whole other post in itself…

So the new neighbours moved in - E and J, we’ll call them. They’re part of a transitional program which gets people off the streets and into apartments. The program offers caseworkers and support systems - it was lauded in the media this week, and i think it’s fabulous.

It was probably about three days in that the arguments started. There would be shouting and screaming, which would begin around 4 or 5 in the morning - every morning - and last for a couple of hours, normally until one of the caseworkers would arrive and sort things out. Their arguments could be heard down the end of the street. It was pretty awful. After a couple of weeks E and J wrote lovely letters and cards to each of us in the apartment block, apologising for their behaviour and talking about how hard it was to move into an apartment after being on the streets. It was a lovely gesture. I wrote one back saying that I hoped things would work out for them.

Last weekend it got uglier, the violence went to a whole new level. There was no shouting or screaming, just the sound of fist on flesh, which was chilling and sickening. The police responded really quickly - they know the address now - arriving just as i was leaving to go to Benalla to do worship up there. We had a quick conversation about what had happened during the morning and how this shouldn’t happen in ‘nice suburbs like this’. Then during the week one of the people who owns another apartment in the block was assaulted by E, so an order was made that E and J need to move out straight away.

Of course they do. It’s been unsafe and it’s been terrible. But i hate that while it’s worked out fine for me [as I always knew it would], that E and J can’t esape the hell they’re living in - whether it’s of their own or the world’s making. i hate that this gift of hope and a new start is in tatters for them. I hate that i feel so relieved; that i’m coming face to face with my own hypocrisy; that from 9 to 5 i’m advocating something that i can’t live in reality. I hate that i gave up thinking that he would stop hitting her, and that i hoped only for me to stop hearing.

‘Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation’. One of the police officers said this to me last Sunday, and the quote’s been rolling around my mind this week. My version of hell these last few weeks has been temporary, and i always had many options when i wanted to escape it. I know that for many this is not temporary, and it’s inescapable. I suspect there are people who have read this blog who have often wondered at my naivety, and some who are reading the stuff i’ve put together for advent, and the plans we’ve been describing for communal justice, and thinking that it just doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny of their reality. and they are right. There are some realities this can’t stand up to. I’m so sorry if things i’ve written have been simplistic about your reality, and offered judgement instead of compassion. There are some things for which no prayer or promise of hope can offer a solution. I only wish I had an alternative.

i’ve been invited to be part of steering group for an exhibition on Women in the Torah, to be held at the Jewish Museum late next year. I’m really enjoying being part of a conversation with people from another faith, in an environment where i’m the guest, not the host; where mine is the minority perspective.

Rebecca, who is curating the exhibition, talked about a conversation she had with Rachel, a Muslim, who is also going to be part of the steering group, about the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, and her discomfort with the way the story plays out for Hagar. Rachel’s reply was that it’s not how the story is understood by Muslims, that from their perspective, what happens to Hagar is a necessary part of the divine plan. Hagar exits stage left from the Judeo-Christian story, and ends up centre stage in a whole new story of faith.

I wrote here once before about those in our stories of faith who are abandoned by the side of the road. I think i need to rewrite that…

In a few weeks time we’re beginning some work with women in Dame Phyllis Frost Prison, exploring some of the stories from the bible that will have particular resonance for them… the rape of Tamar, Lot’s daughters, Hagar’s story, Dinah’s story… These are characters who have largely been left abandoned by the side of faith’s road. i hope we can find the faith they might take centre-stage in…

i’m planning some sacred spaces for christmas at the moment, for a variety of contexts and ‘audiences’. today was my big day to make it happen - almost meeting free, working from home, a whole day to get inspired, and pull it together. It’s 3.30 and all i have is a dozen less ideas than i did at this time yesterday. luckily, i know it’s like this every christmas, so i’m not panicked. though maybe i need the panic. either that or gin.

and instead of being a place where we talk about these things, describe them so you don’t miss them when they happen, it would be nice if it was a place to encounter these things, so we go away different… so i started thinking about the wishlist, what i really wanted for christmas… in a space, and really, just in general…

light
a moment of knowing that this night is not all there is
and not all there will be

hope
an encounter with the kind of hope that captivates our imagination
so we can’t help but become more than who we thought we were,
and find ourselves living for something that is all at once
preposterous and impossible

peace
- world peace -
predictable, i guess, and unlikely
so perhaps a smaller moment would do
- just a sign that we want war to stop enough
to relinquish the satisfaction of the moral high ground
to give up our easy stereotypes and caricatures
of nations and people

[to know that any label
Israeli
or Palestinian
Iraqi
Muslim
Jew
Christian
witch
gay
straight
paedophile
murderer
evangelical
liberal
progressive
is never enough
to do justice to anyone

but i digress]

joy
to experience a moment it’s real,
when the theory becomes sacrament,
where we wonder what just happened then…

[That’s all i want for christmas

though i acknowledge
that i’d be happy to settle for less
like those earrings with the origami birds, a le creuset casserole, or the new augie march cd

and perhaps therein lies the problem…]

so many things i’ve been meaning to write about…

it’s finished now, but Ecstatic City at the ngv was simply superb. Due to the water crisis in melbourne the fountains in the moat at the front of the gallery have been switched off, so Chris Doyle made a fountain by projecting images of melbourne people jumping onto the front of the gallery. It was beautiful.

21:100:100 is still on… it’s a sound installation in at Gertrude art gallery, 100 works by 100 sound artists… everything ambient, electronica, drone. i was a little underwhelmed when i walked in - i wanted images, or darkness, some way of getting lost in it - but after a while i felt like a kid in a candy store. It’s an overwhelming collection of works, best consumed in medium sized doses over repeat visits. we were there for a couple of hours the other day. i’d really like to do more with sound in the stuff we do. it’s always the thing we think of last, the accompanying soundtrack rather than the central piece…

i kept meaning to blog about man on wire when i first saw it, but couldn’t ever find the words. It’s an extraordinary film, one i still think about. a couple of friends have said they won’t see it because they’re terrified of heights. i’m not good with heights [i'm not scared i'll fall, i'm scared i'll jump], and it didn’t bother me at all when i was seeing the film. oddly though, later that night i was lying in bed, and i felt almost paralysed with fear as i thought about what Philippe Petit had done. he was walking - dancing - on a tight rope, a quarter of a mile above the earth. it’s a film about passion and courage and the pursuit of dreams, but more than that, it’s about wonder and awe and defying the hypothetical and real laws of gravity that would keep us pinned to earth. i loved it.

tonight we’re having a between the spaces dinner to plan a christmas ‘moment’… and then i’m off and away for a week. see you when i’m back.

[written after visiting gloucester cathedral, and hearing an all-too familiar voice...]

i go for months without thinking of you
and then there you are

and again
against my will
i want you.

seduced by a memory
of space and time
redolent with whispered secrets
and ancient prayers,
certainty and promise:

i’m yours
i hear my echo
bend me
break me.

familiarity enfolds me
in a tissue-thin layer
of endearments and nostalgia,
wrapping a once-full box of promises
with the gift already taken.

i know myself here
but it’s not a self i want to know.

This is the power
of old lovers and gods

made from a time
i was naked before you
whispering my dreams
fears
tears
hopes
into a space
i did not know was unsafe.

i wrap myself tight against the memories.
i will not let them be enough.

Andrew Denton interviewed Philippe Petit on Enough Rope tonight, in anticipation of Man on Wire opening in Australia this week.

Denton: Of all the amazing things in this act, the thing that most astonishes me is when you lie down on the wire, you lie flat, and then you stand up again. That strikes me as breaking several laws of gravity.

Petit: [bemused, as though the idea of laws of gravity is entirely new to him] You know, I never thought of the high wire as a technical world,  although i am practicing still today three hours a day on the wire. I always thought of the wire as theatre, as something really very special and inspiring, where the physical act should not have the most importance… and when you say that laying down the wire and standing up is physically demanding and physically difficult, i’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the idea… of a man or a woman walking on thin air or a little wire, that at some point will be so well in their world that they can fall asleep…

Is that not our task?  Finding the way of being so well in the world that we are bemused by the idea that some law of gravity might get in our way…

A friend just gave me Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s cd, Gurrumul, which I’m really enjoying. He’s part of the lineup for the Melbourne Arts Festival which begins this week. I won’t get to hear him but I am going to see Batsheva perform Three on Saturday night - I saw them a few years ago at the festival, and still it rates as the best live performance i’ve seen, of any genre. I’m trying not to have unrealistic expectations about Saturday night.

We’re also going to poke around Ecstatic City for a while on Saturday, and the 21:100:100 sound exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space sounds fantastic [go read the description!], and if the stars align right i’ll get to the concert performance. Melbourne’s great during the festival - lots of street art and performances. If your budget’s tight, there’s a page full of free stuff here.

This isn’t connected to the festival, but I’ve put it into my diary for next week. From the Irfan website:

irfanspace: an exploration of the pathways and spaces between people, cultures, past, present and eternity. sound, images and poetry from islamic cultures and traditions around the world invite reflection and engagement locally, globally, internally.

irfanspace is a mixed-media exhibition featuring photography, sound and video installation, poetry, and interactive online media presented by Mark Pedersen, Natalia Gould and Nazid Kimmie at Kinross House, 603 Toorak Rd. throughout October 2008.

The opening was last night, but i unfortunately couldn’t get there. Nazid Kimmie, whose poetry is part of the exhibition, wrote about it on his blog. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

this is written after thinking about a conversation last week with a young person i mentor who asked why i choose to live with faith when i don’t ascribe to many basic christian beliefs…

i practice faith today
in preparation for the day i need it.

i practice living courage
in the hope i remember how
when life fails me

i practice reconciliation and grace
for the day when i encounter the unforgiveable
in myself or another

i practice imagining a future shaped by peace
for any moment to come whose tomorrow
seems unbearable and unlivable

i practice searching for the possibility of life
inherent in every moment
so i can trust its presence in the depths of hell…

i follow the religion of love, Hassan Massoudy, 2003

A few years ago while i was in the UK i visited the Word into Art exhibition at the British Museum. Last week I found the catalogue from the exhibition, and read it through again. I was really struck by the description of the piece shown above. It reads like this:

Massoudy has written this phrase from the mystical poetry of Ibn ‘Arabi (died 1240) in red in the angular style of script called Kufic. He has highlighted and enlarged the word al-hubb (love) in blue. In Kufic it is very rare to show the dots that distinguished the letters - meaning has to be derived from the context.

[emphasis mine]

Meaning has to be derived from the context… I love that there’s form of Arabic alphabet that demands that interpretive work by its readers. i wish there were a form of the English alphabet that could indicate likewise… Words are given their shape by their context.

I’ve mentioned before that when I write for the paper I get a flurry of emails and responses from people. There are two categories of responses [well, three, if we include the normal 'you have absolutely no idea, how dare you call yourself Christian' responses - which are a little strange, given that i never describe myself as Christian, precisely to avoid such emails]. The first response is from people telling me that I’ve written exactly what they think. These emails come from a cross-section of the religious population - conservative evangelicals, tibetan monks, progressive christians, committed atheists. The second responses come from people who tell me that they never knew there was someone else who thought like them. These are the beautiful and often heartbreaking emails, the ones that I want to honour somehow with something more in depth than a 800 word opinion piece.

For a number of reasons I’ve been wondering whether to start a parallel blog, or some kind of online presence, specifically focussed at exploring faith for those who don’t quite find their faith anymore in the label ‘Christian’, but who don’t resonate at all with any other kind of label. It would have a different focus to this blog, which is about alternative worship, and communal / public experiences of the sacred. I’m really happy to do the thinking about where i am, about my faith and spirituality as it’s unfolding, in a public space [i do it all the time in the newspaper!], but this doesn’t seem to be quite the forum in which to do it.

I’ve been hesitating doing that because it seems self-indulgent, but the idea’s been sticking with me for a while so i thought it might be worth putting out there… if you’re interested in where this might go, let me know…

Unlike the hand forgeries which preceded lithography, photography, film and audio recording, [Walter] Benjamin argues that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries placed art in an era of mechanical reproduction, which necessarily changes our perception of art itself. In particular, Benjamin argues that the “aura” of an original, “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” is depreciated and lost in the reproduction. Further, the authentic work of art had its original value in ritual, and what mattered was the fact of its existence (visible to the spirits) not its display before man. In the age of reproduction, however, art is intended precisely for its own exhibition since the place of its birth, such as a temple or sacred site, is irrelevant when it can be copied and placed in any context; thus an alternative cult ‘the “theology of art” for the sake of art’ is born.

from here, exploring Walter Benjamin’s book ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

i’ve been playing around with a few ideas about next year’s UK trip today. they’re still consolidating, but they’re based in the belief that we need to be finding new ways of offering encounters with stories that are bigger than our own - and that doing that is at least as important a conversation for the church to have as what new communities of faith might look like.

i’ve been thinking about who communicates the essence of faith best to people who are disinterested or disenchanted with Christianity; about who offers a moment of hope, peace, redemption, grace to the world, and who enters into the world’s agony, tragedy, ecstasy. it’s largely artists, musicians and poets. we know that, alt worship emerged from that reality. but often, even in alt worship, we’re simply using art as a way of explaining what we already know and what we think others should believe [the same theology in a different wrapping].

i’ve been reading a lot about the process of creativity recently, mostly interviews with artists and authors. so many of them talk about not knowing when they begin how something they create will end. the shape is uncovered in its making. the artwork’s creation is a revelation, and the artist is shaped by the artwork as much as the artwork is shaped by the artist. i know that my theology and shape has been changed dramatically since i started to write about it [someone told me once that i would believe anything if it made good poetry, and there's more than a little truth in that]. i wonder if it’s one of the reasons why anything beyond straight descriptive art is so terrifying to many christians. - that, and that we lose control of meaning with art, where we had control of meaning with words [well, we thought we did - i've got a whole other post about that coming up!]…

none of this might make sense. it doesn’t quite to me yet. but i’m putting it up in case it resonates with someone - and whether you can push it a bit further for me… but back to the original point of the post: next year’s trip I want to be a kind of hothouse for a group of people who want to explore this in very practical ways - and preferably because it’s in their blood, not because they think it will be good for the church…