[ hold :: this space ]

Hi to those who have come here after today’s prison chaplains workshop in Geelong. I really enjoyed the morning. These are the resources that I mentioned:

Philip Zimbardo ‘The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how Good People Turn Evil’
John Caputo ‘The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event’ [another book worth reading along this vein is 'How [not] to speak of God’ by Peter Rollins.

[The other book that's been really critical in my thinking, especially about the perspectives from which our theologies are formed is Sallie McFague's 'Life Abundant', esp. chapter 2]

The images I showed by Banksy can be found here, the Amnesty International advertisements can be found here.

Someone asked about the music playing behind Kevin’s Psalm this morning - that was Sufjan Steven’s song ‘O God, where are you now?’ - it’s available as a download through iTunes, or if you wanted to buy the cd to take into prison, it’s on his ‘Greetings from Michigan’ cd [it would be a great song to base Holy Saturday worship around].

I forgot to mention that I have a book of liturgies available through Proost [you can either subscribe to Proost for a year's worth of fabulous worship resources, or simply buy the book on it's own! it's available through the Proost website as a pdf download, or at UniChurch bookshop in the city]

If you search through this site, looking under the ‘worship in prison’ category there are a stack of other resources… Email me if there’s stuff I’ve forgotten!

Jonny Baker arrives in Australia next week. His program has been changed a little so that we’re now also going to be in Tasmania for a couple of days. Scott, the Mission Development worker with the presbytery, is organising a program which includes dinner on Friday night [email me for details about that], and a workshop on alt worship, mission, culture, creativity, etc. etc. on Saturday, 10 - 4pm, at North Hobart UCA, 2 Swann St, North Hobart.

hope to see you there…

this space was designed for Sunday afternoon’s moment… It was the least labour-intensive sacred space i’ve ever designed, just requiring bowls of water, jugs, glasses and food colouring… it was probably the most difficult physical space i’ve worked in for a while - a cavernous hall, uncovered windows that went forever, 150 people, a cold afternoon, i was really unwell, thank god for sam who came and made it all happen…

gathering:

Since time became time
there has been water
and since people became people
we have been drawn to its edge

and we stand here,
watching for the breath of God
moving over the water,
calling us to wade into the deep
and be washed in mystery…

[as people moved to stations we played Labradford's 'Twenty', and used this video loop]

station 1:

[water jugs filled with icy cold water, glasses, this image]

It was easy to be thirsty
when the water was everywhere
when the world was covered with it
when everywhere we looked, you were.

Somewhere, sometime
the water dried up

and as the cracks have appeared
in the soil of our world
we’ve covered them over
with anything we can find,
until even we have forgotten
the thirst that lies underneath.

We no longer wait for rain
and the underground rivers are drying up…

We have lost the taste of water.
We have forgotten how to thirst.

It takes great courage to ask for what might not be given.
It takes such faith to need what might never come.

if you long for that faith
drink deep…

station 2:

[bowl of salt, bowl of water, pages from newspaper]

You promised there would never again be a flood that would destroy all the world, God,

…and yet just a week ago a million people had their world destroyed in Burma.

You promised.

Did you change your mind, God?

Was it a promise you no longer wanted to live up to?

Or a promise beyond your power in the beginning?

Were we putting words into your mouth,
because we needed you to be the God who could?

Add salt to the water…
let it be tears for those in Burma who have no-one to cry for them,
who have no one left to remember
they were ever alive.

Add salt to the water…
let it be tears for our grief that God is not
who we would want God to be.

station 3:

[bowl of water]

What memory does this water hold…

Can it tell a story of seeping through rocks, inside the earth, for a millennia
or being frozen inside a glacier for centuries?

Has it been one drop
in a literal ocean
washing relentlessly against the rocks of ancient landforms
shaping the earth as we now know it?

Has it quenched the thirst of a parched desert
and flooded whole countries with devastating waves?

Has it rained on the just and the unjust?

Has it been cried in tears of relief
joy
loneliness
despair
by our ancestors a thousand years ago,
and their ancestors ten thousand before?

Has it birthed the babies of our neighbours
and washed the bodies of their dead?

If the water holds histories’ stories of faithfulness, resilience, fragility, tragedy, ecstasy,
it can hold all of your story too.

Write what you need to tell today into the water with your finger.

station 4:

[bowl of water with blue food colouring - and we would have used a clip from Whalerider too, but that didn't happen...]

Remember when the water called you,
when you could no more resist its call
than forget to breathe.

Remember when you would willingly drown in the water
because the life it would give
was worth dying for

or because you knew
you could only find life
through drowning.

If you remember -
or if you long to remember –
mark the back of your hand with the sign of a cross…

gathering back:

[we played Glosoli by Sigur Ros to draw people back, then finished with this blessing:]

If you have been standing at the edge of the ocean
and paddling your feet in the calm shallows…
look beyond.

May you leave here with the faith to yearn for the vast and endless sea…

The workshop on Saturday was excellent. A couple of stories… Alf who wrote some psalms with us was released last week. i so hope the world is treating him gently… [i wish i had more faith we were]

Kerry was one of the speakers at the workshop - she was an inmate in the women’s prison until 4 months ago. While she was in prison she completed an arts degree, then got her masters degree in creative writing, and is now half way through her PhD. She’s one of the rare ones - someone who prison didn’t beat. People kept saying to me through the day that it was rare to hear stories that are told with such integrity and dignity. But she told us the story of another woman who was released from the prison a week ago, someone who was so looking forward to being out… who died, terribly, on Friday night… Hers is a story that’s repeated way too often: when you’ve been in prison for a very long time, getting out of prison is all you live for. You think prison is the hardest thing to cope with; you have no idea how difficult re-entry will be. When you back into the world which has got used to living without you - after the initial celebration and your family and friends have gone back to their lives, when the hardness of everything becomes all-consuming, when you miss those who are inside who have become your family - you no longer have anywhere you belong. She survived a week.

It was, overwhelmingly, a day for older people. Out of the 35 people who came to the workshop, there would have been two who were under 50. I wonder if social activism that moves beyond protests, internet action and donating money is becoming less common than it used to be - or if protests, internet action and donations have given us the mistaken belief that that’s all we need to do to change the world. I wish that anyone who believes that young people are the hope of the world could have seen the energy for action amongst that group of people - and their hands-on commitment to change the world.

It was, overwhelmingly, an optimistic day.

i’ll write more about what comes next, next week. We had some local media come along [the journalist arrived just as we were sticking it to the Herald Sun, for the damage they cause by sensationalising and reporting from ignorance. i had to do a quick check as to whether the local paper was a Fairfax or Murdoch publication... luckily the former. I'll put their stories up if they come my way.]

It’s busy at the moment. I got into the office this morning while it was still dark, and i’ve been watching the sun come up over the buildings outside my window - Melbourne glows in autumn. The other afternoon we had a fierce storm - thunder, lightning, hail… I could see everyone in the office block over on the next street  lined up against their windows watching it. It was a shared moment of awe: the city needs more of them.

Anyway… as I said, it’s busy. Here are a few of the reasons why there won’t be much action on the blog over the next few weeks.

Don’t tell Grace who’s processing the registrations, but I’m willing to extend the deadline to register for the Communal Justice Workshop on Saturday. A few people have asked if we’ll be filming sessions - we will be, but due to privacy issues [respecting those who are telling stories - particularly ex-prisoners and victims of crime] we won’t be able to make them widely available.

I’m speaking at the Progressive Christian Network gathering in St Davids UC, Canterbury on May 18.

The Urban Ministry Forum seems like it is shaping up nicely. It’s here in Melbourne, from May 29 to June 1. Jonny Baker will speaking at that - he arrives in just a few weeks.

There are a small number of spaces left for the alt worship nosh… I’m so looking forward to this. Registration forms can be downloaded here:  altworshipnosh.pdf.

The first half of this year has been a relentless flow of events… all good, but at almost all of them i’ve been talking about alt worship to interested onlookers, rather than working with people who live and breathe it. Most of the events are with church groups [conferences, workshops, etc.], and i have to remember a whole different language in those contexts. It’s like i’m searching in my memory for my rusty schoolgirl french [and i never was so good at that - all i have left is 'je voudrais un espresso, s'il vous plait', on which i've survived whole weeks in Paris].

I think humans are hardwired to create - something dulls in me when i don’t have the space to do that…  it’s been a good few months, but i’m a little tarnished. The second half of the year is shaping up quite differently, and already it feels like it will be much more like home…

There’s an excellent opinion piece in the Herald Sun today about the prison system and communal justice. It’s written by Father Joe Caddy, Catholic prison chaplain in Melbourne.

[that's a first from me! 'excellent opinion piece in the Herald Sun'!]

I’ve been reading prison statistics this morning over breakfast, in preparation for the communal justice workshop we’re running on May 10th. Over 85% of the prison population didn’t finish secondary school. It reminds me of some research I read earlier in the year which said that in many US states, projections about the number of prison beds required in 10 years are calculated using the current rates of illiteracy in 11 year olds.

I was reading the Transition from Custody to Community report last night, which describes the issues surrounding re-entry to the community in Victoria. It highlighted the problem that most information about transition programs is communicated via written resources. A large number of prisoners can’t read them.

The whole system is fundamentally flawed.

off to speak to prison chaplains this morning. these two quotes are rolling around in my head. as all other words seem to have disappeared from my mind today, we might just meditate on each of them for the three hours.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.

I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.

- Ernest Hemingway [via kottke]

If the face of the Beloved
does not make you gasp in wonder
and laugh ecstatically with joy
then you must be like a stone
good only for building prison walls.

- Rumi

i’ve been asked a number of times recently what my process is for writing liturgy - and i’ve been trying to find ways of articulating it for a workshop i’m leading on wednesday.

in writing liturgies for prison, i try to find words to name where we are, and to name what it is we wait for - what the ancient stories of faith tell us god does. it’s not that we have any confidence it’s going to happen again, but we know [from those ancient stories of faith] that this is the only way it can happen again.

the act of faith that is the foundation of the liturgies is not believing in god, or the actions of god, rather it’s that the telling and the asking will not break us. or that the breaking will not be the end.

i’m really hopeless at writing hope. i know people do write fabulous liturgies from a perspective of faith - of the wondrous things god does and will do. i don’t.  i write best from a perspective of faithlessness. i honestly don’t know if god - whatever / whoever god is - will do what god does again. when i’m most honest to that,  people tell me they see themselves in what i write.

don’t forget about these things…

Grassroots festival and the holy ground :: holy city space this weekend

The communal justice workshop at Crossroads Uniting in Werribee, on May 10.

The alt worship nosh with Jonny Baker in Queenscliff, on June 6-9 [i'm so looking forward to this! hope you can come...]. download registration forms here: altworshipnosh.pdf

The Urban Mission Forum, with Jonny Baker is happening on May 29 - June 1

I’m speaking at a Progressive Christian Network gathering in St David’s Uniting Church, cnr Burke and Mt Albert Roads Canterbury; Sunday 18 May 2008 at 3:00pm

[I'm also leading a workshop on worship for all metro prison chaplains [a multi-faith group] on April 23, but that’s a closed workshop.]

and stuff happening in other places…

it seems Tassie is the mecca of all things alternative at the moment. 2 things coming up that i’ve been asked to mention:

Response worship in Hobart on April 26

Lacuna worship in Kingston on April 20

[both of those communities have websites - bookmark them if you're interested in following their adventures from here...]

A reminder about this workshop which will be on November 10, here in the city. we’ll be developing stations to use during Advent and Christmas.
Download details here: stations_flyer.pdf