[ hold :: this space ]

I’ve written a piece for today’s paper on elections, hope and Pandora’s box.

I’m still on holidays, back on Tuesday…

I’ve written an opinion piece for today’s Age. It’s on the Lord’s Prayer being said at the beginning of the day in Federal Parliament.

I don’t choose topics for opinion pieces - the editor rings with an idea and we throw it around for a bit. if i can get vaguely interested in it after a couple of minute’s conversation then i figure i’ll be able to get enough energy up over the following 36 hours until the deadline, to cope with going to bed at 1 am and getting up at 5 to get the thing done [they always seem to want something in those weeks when every moment of every day is already scheduled]… i love it though; i love being forced to think about an issue that i’d otherwise not care about, to watch my own opinions change as i’m writing it…

[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.

i wrote an article for today’s Age, which someone told me was online but i can’t find it. i’ll paste it below. It’s a faith column about the event of god, provoked by a trip to Tassie with Jonny and Andrew.

jonny took this photo of the moment. it says it all better than the article.

Our plane was two hours late into Hobart, so we arrived at the top of Mt Wellington in the late afternoon. There aren’t trees at the top of the mountain, and we’d come from winter sunshine in the city, so we were completely unprepared for the force of the wind and the cold that battered us as we got out of the car. It was hard to breathe, and we had to fight to stand upright. We were surrounded by barren earth and hard rocks, cast in sharp relief by the eerie glow from the setting sun. My friend said it was like we’d been transported beyond the apocalypse. The starkness made me think we’d been taken back to the beginning of the world; bleak and barren, harsh and cold, breath-less, light-less, life-less.

Stories about the beginning of the world are problematic for many people of faith. It took me many years to discover that most scholars believe the Bible is a collection of stories and writings gathered throughout history, many of which come from very different traditions. When we peel back the dominant voices of tradition that have told us what interpretation we should give to those stories, a different way of understanding God emerges. For example, most people read the first biblical story of creation, assuming it describes an all-powerful God, who creates the world out of nothing. But there’s another way of reading that story: the earth, wind and water already make up the world’s barren and desolate landscape, and then something happens to transform them. God isn’t the maker of all that exists, but the prayer by which what already exists is brought to life. God isn’t in control of the world, God is the possibility of life within the world.

Letting go of the belief that God is all-powerful is pretty risky. There is no certainty at the end of this faith, no assuredness of a happy ending, and no tidy resolution. While it’s a real comfort to believe God might intervene to save us when it all goes horribly wrong, I simply don’t believe God can. God is simply and only the breath of life, the birth of hope, the unexpected genesis of love. There is no fall back plan, no possibility of rescue when it all goes wrong - even though it makes this life impossibly unsure and terrifyingly uncertain. There are those who say this makes God very small, but it only seems that way to those who haven’t experienced the extraordinary gift of life, where it didn’t exist before. Don’t underestimate the faith it takes to believe only in a fragile event.

‘Let there be light’, came the voice at life’s beginning, when all the world was darkness. Perhaps it was more a plea than a command; a longing, a prayer. But it’s enough to give me courage to join my longing to God’s: let there be light in the bleakness of the world. Even when I don’t believe it, and especially in those moments when I can’t, may light still come. Let all that is barren be brought to life.

i’ve written a faith column for the Age today.  It’s about restoration. i don’t think it’s on line… so it goes like this:

–

A few months ago I spent some time visiting Port Phillip Prison, working with a chaplain to design worship for some of the men who are serving sentences there. Over the course of a few weeks we invited the men to write psalms of lament, anger and boredom, giving voice to their longing for redemption and forgiveness; the chance to start again, to prove they can be more than the headlines the world knows them by.

‘I need God to show me strength, to show me the way, so I can get out of here’, wrote Phil. ‘God hasn’t shown anything back yet. I pray a lot. I pray most days to get the strength to go on, but I’m still waiting to be shown the way to believe. My deepest desire is to start a new life.’

It seems to me that faith has its hardest task in prison. Shame collides with compassion. Promises of hope are mocked by a system that relentlessly grinds people down. Well crafted theologies of redemption are given lie when our community doesn’t believe people can change. While the Christian story tells us to have confidence that God has already answered Phil’s prayer, the truth is that makes very little difference if the world doesn’t answer it as well.

I’m predictably cynical about divine miracles, but sometimes as I read the newspaper and listen to talkback radio it seems much easier to believe that God would raise someone from the dead than to believe that we would want someone who has served their time for a crime to be given a place in our community again.

It’s easy to understand why. Those of us who have been victims of crime never want to be faced with that horror again. It’s a natural instinct to separate the parts of ourselves and our communities which bring shame. And, if we’re honest, most of us think that those who have inflicted damage and pain on others are dispensable to our society. But psychologists and theologians would tell us that all of us are diminished when we do that. A healthy community isn’t one that cuts off the parts that hurt it, it’s one that seeks restoration. Our natural instincts aren’t always right. If the hardest task for those in prison is to look for a new way of living, it also seems the hardest task of a community is to let them live it.

The Christian faith is pretty uncompromising about how its followers treat people. At the heart of the faith is a belief that everyone can start again, that we are all more than the story the world knows of us. Christians give up the right to judge, and take up the responsibility to liberate.

It takes us becoming more than who we are, in order to allow others to become more than who they are. It requires us to have unfaltering belief in people who will often let us down. It’s an impossible act of faith. Yet every time I think it’s too hard, I’m haunted by the words of Phil, ‘God hasn’t shown anything back yet’, and I pray forgiveness for the world and for me, for the times we have stood in God’s way.

Cheryl Lawrie
First printed in the Sunday Age, August 10 2008

this is for worship i’m leading next week for the cfm staff gathering

it will take grace to let others here be different to our expectations of them
so we pray for grace

it will take courage for each of us to live beyond the story we know of ourselves
so we pray for courage

it will take wisdom to believe we don’t have all the answers
so we pray for wisdom

it will take hope to believe our future is not yet determined
so we pray for hope

in the story of god all expectations are defied
all things are made possible
the whole world is made new

it will take faith to live as though this can be our story
and so we pray for faith.

apologies… had to take this post down… it’s to be published elsewhere… email if you’re gasping to read it.

quick things…

firstly, i’ve had a few emails about my state of mind, after putting up the solstice stuff. i do worry sometimes that people look for hidden meanings in what i put up here… poetry or reflections that go up here are very rarely a reflection on my current state of mind… i get asked often about the writing i put out publicly - mostly in the Age - and how I can bare my soul to the world. I’m actually not baring my soul. I only write about stuff that no longer has a hold on me. I write in the present tense, but i’m thinking it retrospectively. That’s both to protect what’s still vulnerable and because i’m an introvert… I have to have it sorted in my head before i can find words to put it out to the world, otherwise I’m spectacularly incoherent. [I've just finished writing a piece, and it took 6 drafts. The first five are absolute crap, inarticulate, unfinished sentences, contradictory statements, utter bullshit... and then suddenly it comes together in a final piece that expresses something i never imagined in those first five drafts. in this piece i contradicted my earlier thoughts entirely, and convinced myself of something else completely, quite possibly just because it sounds more poetic in the final form. i am fickle like that.] And when it’s sorted in my head, it’s sorted… I’ve moved on. if i re-read what’s been published, it feels like ancient history, some other person… i’m somewhere else already.

anyway, onto the second point… i still can’t leave comments on the blog. we’re working on it, but there seems no obvious cause, which makes fixing it hard. it makes me grumpy, but not for long. be assured, it’s not causing enough angst to result in black poetry about solstices.

it’s the winter solstice on saturday… we talked about doing a space for it. i’m so glad we decided not to, and i really wish we had…

let there be light

it is
as it was
in the beginning

my world is covered
with rocks
and dirt
with wind
and water

i am barren
breathless
lifeless
lightless

all is dark.

they say you commanded
let there be light

but i think you whispered it
into the night
a plea
a prayer

a fragile hope
and longing

let there be light.

whisper again.

let it be once more
as it was
in the beginning

let light come first
then let there be life
let the rumours of goodness
surround me again.

i am barren
breathless
lifeless
lightless.

let it be
as it will be

let there be light.

like abraham and sarah
i also heard the promise of god on the way
to this new land

but while they tell their story
with words of faithfulness
gift
life
laughter -
you need to know that for me,
those words have become the language of heartbreak;
fleeting,
fickle,
and taunting.

i have been cursed by their blessing.

and in the end
when the plans change,
the promise is withdrawn
and the future rewritten

my dreams have become abraham’s litter,
and i am left on the side of faith’s road.