People were surprised by the impact of the talks given by Sr Ilia Delio when she was in Perth earlier this week.

‘This is the direction we [Christians, the Church] should be heading,’ one bishop declared.

These listeners were referring to Sister Ilia asking us to look at God’s world through modern lenses rather than our typical medieval thought forms. The evolutionary universe is a helpful framework for Christian spirituality, because God is love and love is dynamic, unfolding: evolutionary.  More than that, Sr Ilia claimed: evolutionary changes require chance, law and deep time. These three factors mean that in the short term, God’s universe can seem messy and unfinished, but creatures yearn to be more complete. Creation is on its way to its destination, which is none other the completion of the Incarnation of the Christ.

Sr Ilia’s main inspirations are the Franciscan theologians Bonaventure and Dun Scotus, and in the 20^th Century, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin.

In her talk about living the Gospel in the 21^st Century, Ilia critiqued our usual approach to prayer as something we do in order to reach out to someone/something ‘out there’. But in reality, she reminded us, prayer is about going inward. If we abide in the presence of Christ, Christ is found in our hearts in our innermost selves. Prayer is not about ‘doing’, but about dwelling in ourselves and in all creation and therefore in Christ.

In an infinitely connected universe, we become more human by reaching out to others and to the future. Christ is incarnate in human being. The more we become ourselves, the more we express Christ.

In an aside about cyborgs, Ilia urged us to take note of the futurists’ warnings. Technology changes us: implants stop depression, Google changes the nature of information, and repaired organs give new but subtly different life. If the next steps in human evolution are to be hastened by technology (and Sr Ilia did not take sides in that particular controversy, but if we are,) then we need to take a close look at what that evolved humanity might be.

On the other hand, 96% of all species have lived – and then become extinct. Why should homo sapiens be any different? Could another species take up the cause of consciousness?

I heard Ilia Delio while reading Tom Frame’s excellent Evolution in the Antipodes which describes Darwin’s Australian legacy, beginning with Darwin’s visit to Port Jackson, Hobart and King George Sound in 1837, and continuing to whether creation science causes problems for Australian schools in the 2000s.

Tom’s careful analysis looks at Darwin from the point of view of the controversy his ideas sparked. We need to understand that history. But Sr Ilia admits nothing controversial about evolution: it is simply the way we moderns describe change in the universe. If we see things through the lens of evolution, we will know better who we are, and how to express whose we are.

The church as institution is in the process of collapsing.  While our national population continues to increase, the numbers at church continue to decline, and those I still meet at church are ever older and greyer.  The number of clergy remains more or less constant, but fewer of working age are working, or working full-time.

The church is collapsing, or if not, then it is being radically re-shaped.

It is easy to see the past as a Golden Age, with full churches charged only with evangelising those in its pews. In reality, the full churches of the 1950s though high on attendance, were low on involvement. If attenders then saw any real benefit it was more as insurance for the after-life than for opportunities for service. The massive man-power of the fifties was never mobilised for the Gospel.

We need to be clear about the connection between church and Gospel, between the institution and its mission. For they are not the same thing, and nor has the church ever really been shaped to serve only itself.

The church is God’s instrument to use as God wishes for God’s mission. My assertion is that God radically re-shapes the church for God’s purposes at least once each generation. In each generation, we seek out leaders to show the way forward: how we are now and in the near future to serve God’s Good News.

I have always expected bishops to be among those who will lead us. They are primarily ordained as ministers of the Gospel and only secondarily as bishops in the Church of God.

My high expectations of bishops are too often disappointed. I hear of bishops, for example, trying to force the amalgamation of dying parishes. Bishops’ instincts seem to lead them to preserve the institution and to fabricate a patch that will be doomed because of the impossible demands it will make on personnel, particularly on clergy. One priest will be asked to double the number of Sunday services and yet maintain or increase her efforts in pastoral care and parish management. The bishop, it seems, is desperate to preserve the past, and is unwilling to pay the price of scouting the future.

The others pressured in these situations may also seek preservation at the least cost. Maybe, they suggest, close one parish and require its remnant to attend another perhaps more viable parish. Maybe, they say, seek out ways to share scarce resources more efficiently.

But these proposals, too, are an attempt to stitch together a fraying institution, and will end up holding the tearing fabric for only a few moments longer.

God’s mission demands we ask radical questions.  The church’s current practice is to offer the Eucharist so that it is readily available. Now, I am one who loves the Eucharist. I am fed deeply by my participation in the sacrament, and I am bonded more passionately in the Body of Christ at each celebration.

 But let us ask what would happen if the Eucharist were less easily accessed.

It might mean that those who really loved the Eucharist would make a greater effort to attend when it was offered, thus making each service both better attended and more greatly appreciated.

On the other hand, it may force small groups of believers into finding other ways to meet their hunger for Eucharist, lay-led agape meals, for example, or vodcasted services delivered on DVD by pastoral assistants also bearing consecrated bread and wine.

Our bishops are our teachers, “perfecters” as Thomas Aquinas called them. Well, let them “perfect”, not the organisation of an institution, but our understanding of the Eucharist and our spiritual needs which are supplied by it.

Let our bishops “perfect” our desire to serve in the community, perhaps by bringing their lights out from under buckets.

For example, I would like to hear more, and more regularly of the involvement of the Archbishop of Perth in L’Arche. Maybe writing a blog about their personal ministry, as does Archbishop of Melbourne Philip Freier, should be required of all diocesan bishops.

Bishops’ oratory should be so persuasive that it is broadcast by the mass media and reinforced by technology narrow-casting to the faithful. Then we would be inspired by a sharp and bright vision of the Gospel.

But how I wish our bishops would lead us out of the mire of a collapsing institution into the narrow paths of following our Lord on his mission in the world.

Wills, Garry, What the Gospels Meant,
 New York: Viking 2008 (209 pages)

Reviewed by Ted Witham

My friend, acclaimed teacher of storytelling Bob Wilhelm, recommended What the Gospels Meant.  This latest work by Garry Wills will indeed appeal to storytellers (among others), because it shows how the Gospels are not simply stories about Jesus, not unsophisticated biographies, but rather they are narratives with intent. 

Wills shows how the Gospels are made up to show the truth about Jesus by weaving together aspects of the Scriptures, folklore and wider imagery.  These compositions are not fabrications; rather they are what we would call creative fiction. The gospel writers start from the truth that "Jesus died for our sins, and was raised again, according to Sacred Scripture."  This Pauline kernel is expanded in each gospel in different ways. 

Mark is concerned particularly to show how Jesus confronted and overcame the daemonic powers.  Matthew draws a picture of Jesus the teacher, while Luke paints Jesus the reconciler.  John begins and ends with the destruction of the Jewish Temple: Jesus has come to show a new and inner route to the Father.

As Wills himself writes, "the Johannine school meditated on the fullest and deepest meanings of what Jesus said, and impressed these meanings more fully and at length than if they were just reporting ipsissima verba.[ the very words themselves] ” (p. 170)

Some popular writers explaining what the Gospels meant pretend that there has not been 200 years of biblical criticism: they treat the New Testament as literally true. If the Gospels say that is what Jesus said, then they are the actual words he spoke.

Others follow the Jesus Seminar to its logical end and believe that Jesus said and did only those things that can be proved by modern historical methods. One scholar satirised the Jesus Seminar’s results by asserting that their Jesus was reduced to a wandering Stoic who came to a bad end.

Of course, neither of these does justice to the intelligence of the Gospels. Writers like Garry Wills take biblical criticism seriously into account; they read the text carefully (Wills’ translations are surprisingly fresh) and they remain orthodox.

I did enjoy Wills’ reminder that the original Greek of the Gospels was rough, marketplace language.  His translation of John 20 captures the movement between polished and unpolished speech and the abrupt changes of tense.

“Then Simon Peter arrives, following [the other disciple] and he entered the tomb. And he inspects the winding cloths lying there, and the veil for covering the face, not with the winding cloths but apart, folded up in its own location.” (p. 201)

Our familiar translations usually smooth away this vivid immediacy.

And more: this closer version of the Greek yields the insight that the other disciple was “faster not only at running but also at comprehending.” (p. 201)

Garry Wills relies heavily on the work of Fr Raymond Brown. Where Brown is technical, however, Wills writes more simply. In fact, he seems to aim to write as he describes the writing in John’s Gospel: “The language is very simple, almost childlike in its short plain statements, but rich in its simplicity.” (p. 171)

I commend What the Gospel Mean. You could confidently recommend to any intelligent lay-person looking for a basic understanding of Christian faith – and how we know this Revelation from the four Gospels.

If I have a criticism of this compendious history of the Franciscan movement, it is that its driving theme gets overwhelmed by the quantity of detail.  Maurice Carmody OFM has such a big story to tell, that it is sometimes difficult to know why he is telling it.

This is not his fault.  This history is, at least to my knowledge, the first attempt to tell the whole story from the initial companions of Francis of Assisi right through to the Franciscan family of the 21st century.   Of all books in the 16-page bibliography, Fr Maurice mentions only two or three which attempt the same historical range as The Franciscan Story.

And what a story it is!  The Franciscan Story begins with the stories of Francis and Clare, then explores the Brotherhood's increasing acceptance by the Church, the growth of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, before arriving at the central theme of the story, which is the tension at the heart of the Franciscan community: is it possible to really live the life of poverty with the same austerity as St Francis?

This tension leads to division, firstly into the Conventuals and the Observants, and then on into greater and different reforms and divisions, always over the question of poverty.  This division made the Franciscan family in these early centuries vulnerable to being taken over as a tool of papal policy, especially as, from Bonaventure on, the friars produced great diplomats who placed themselves at the service of Popes.

The age of division came to an end at the end of the 19th century with the so-called Leonine Union, the attempt to bring together all the First Order friars under Pope Leo XIII.  This is Carmody's area of academic speciality, and his description of the intertwining of papal and Italian politics is fascinating.

The story ends with extended comments about the Second and Third Orders in modern times.  As a Tertiary I was struck with Leo XIII’s definition of Third Order spirituality:

The Order of St Francis is based entirely on the observance of the precepts of Jesus Christ.  The holy founder had no other object in view than that the Order should be a kind of training ground for the intensive practice of the Christian rule of life.  (p. 458)

The weakness with this definition is that successive Popes in the 20th century narrowed the role of the Seculars to personal piety, discouraging the social activism that has often animated Franciscan Christians.

Much of  Carmody's story is told through the lens of great individuals' lives.  Some of these as a Franciscan I would rather not know much about.  An example: the Order in the early 16th century was dominated by John Capistran. A very able judge, John became a friar with an energetic ministry as an Inquisitor and diplomat. He played a leading military role in the siege of Belgrade in 1546. A Humble and peace-making Franciscan? Maybe not.

I enjoyed learning so much more about the Franciscan heritage, and can commend Maurice Carmody’s clarity and grasp of a huge body of material.

EASTER POEM

Shout, all people, shout it out!
God has won, is One.
God gave your path and set you out:
New life has just begun.

Shout, all God’s priests, by joy surprised
for God does hear, is here.
Each to each the loving Christ
walks with us; for God is near.

Shout all layfolk, shout hurrays!
For God makes sense, and sends
each willing person filled with praise
to tell how love extends.

Shout, all husbands, make much noise,
for God gives love, is love.
Through tender care and daily joys
there’s closeness undreamed of.

Shout, all wives, shout through the house
for God is troth, gives troth.
With bonds of love to godly spouse:
God’s love commits to both.

Shout, Franciscans, “peace and good”
for Jesus is our Brother.
All creatures we encounter should
be kin to one another.

Shout, all pet dogs, raise your bark
for God, be sure, is sure.
Faith in owners’ kindly spark
reveals that faith’s trust pure.

Shout, all pet cats, lift your purr
for God gives the rest their rest.
The senses stroke across the fur:
God’s calm is thus possessed.

Once was a time when I couldn't bear Christmas celebrations.  I don't mean Nativity plays or decorations which tell the story of the birth of Jesus.  I don't mean Midnight Mass and Christmas church services.  These I have always held in positive regard and still do.  They are the heart of Christmas.

No: what once got up my nose was Father Christmas, elves and reindeers.  I got teed off by snow scenes and reminders of the winter solstice.  In Bethlehem, it could conceivably have snowed  when Jesus was born, but as Bethlehem enjoys a climate rather like that inland from Perth, Brookton, say, or Merredin , snow is unlikely.  Certainly Christine Rosetti's "snow upon snow" is impossible.

I wanted an earnestly Christian Christmas.  I wrote things on Christmas cards like "Put Christ back into Christmass" and "Jesus is the Reason for the Season".

I was ashamed when, for example, the predominantly Hindu City Council of Curepipe in Mauritius displayed a huge Christmas stable on top of its civic buildings when predominantly Christian Councils in Mauritius, as here, completely omitted all reference to the Christian story in their decorations.

"It's our season!" I wanted to shout.  Don't let it become just a celebration of consumerism, empty whipping up desire for material things.  I found it so easy to denigrate all but the religious aspects of Christmas.

Of course I want the story of Jesus' birth to be the heart of Christmas.  I pray that this story will lead many to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation.  But I also now feel free to allow Yuletide its place.

It may not be high theology, but family gatherings are a reason to celebrate, and a universal sign of the unity of the human family under God.

 It may turn into nature mysticism, but celebrating the turn of the seasons is a reminder of God's providence, Brother Sun turning the cold of winter to the warmth of summer and bringing forth the fruits of the earth.

It may not be the wisdom of the Magi, but gifts appearing on a child's bed on Christmas morning are wonderful sacraments of parental love.

It may not be the mystery of angels, but flying reindeers and the romantic characteristics of holly are also symbols of all that is transcendent and beyond our knowledge.

It may lead to overindulgence, but celebrating God and each other with food and drink makes us more truly human.

Work and secular "Christmas" parties may disturb our Advent, but they do bring people together and build community.

So, this summer solstice I say not only "Christmas blessings" (oh how pious!), but also with good cheer, "Merry Christmas."

It may be simplistic, but I am warming to Michael Crosby's definition of economics: economics concerns the balance between persons, relations and resources.

We in the West are seduced by the idea that economics concerns resources and their trading.  But as Crosby points out, “when resources take priority over persons involved and affected, including how they relate to each other and make transactions, the market takes priority... When this happens the freedom of the market takes precedence over authentic individual freedom."  (Crosby, 62).

This is a simple but telling analysis of the global financial crisis.  In the free market, the trading of resources takes priority over people.  In the free market the winners are those who achieve the most trading.  To achieve that, the most valued quality is greed.  It is not simply about controlling the most resources because the rich man may simply be sitting on his assets, or heaven forbid, giving them away.  No, the winners in the free markets are the most active traders, because their trading activities will create demand for more and more goods. 

This leads not only to more trading, but more desire/greed for the goods available.

These active traders are the winners because they give priority to resources.  But the existence of winners implies the existence of losers.  In an un-regulated free market, the gap between the winners and those without access to resources, will become wider and wider.  The symptoms of this runaway greed are now all too visible, from astronomical executive salaries, to sub-prime mortgages.

The past few months have taught us all new words and new disturbing facts to go with them.  Giving priority to resources, opened the floodgates of greed and consumer objects.

 The solution is not to put priority onto relations.  Starting with relationships , Crosby argues, will always lead to a command economy.  Then the gap will expand between the powerful and the powerless, the central bureaucrats with their holiday dachas, and the peasants scratching a meagre living from unproductive soil, or between much travelled Ministers and lay brothers used as personal servants. 

 As Franciscans, we should be arguing for, and living out,   economics which places priority on persons.  Crosby shows that though Francis wrote no criticism of the violent and unequal society he found in Assisi and Italy, he lived out an alternative economy by creating fraternal communities.     

 Hermitages and houses should have only the resources needed for the persons in them.   In other words, in an economy which places priority on persons, resources have little importance. To maintain a priority on persons, resources should in fact be stripped away to only that which is needed.  The purpose of poverty is to throw persons into the high light.

Likewise, Franciscan fraternities do not give priority to relations in their economies.   To define members of the community as anything other than a sister or a brother, is to give those members coercive power over others.     This was a revolutionary thought for the contemporaries of Francis. Every member of mediaeval society was in an unequal power relation, either with control or possession of other persons, or without power.

I know too little about economics to judge whether Father Michael's analysis is too simplistic.   However, it gives me a good insight into the current crisis.  

Crosby says Francis had a choice when God pointed out the church crumbling around him. Either he could point out the ruins, or he could repair them. In the spirit of repairing, rather than critiquing,  as Franciscans we should resolve again to live with those around us, whether at church, in the wider community, or in our Franciscan oikonomia  more intentionally, more intensely, seeing more deeply that each person we meet is our equal with whom we share the resources God has given us. Thank God for them.                   

Close-up and personal, Max wanted you to know that though he wore a vocational collar, his identity was not reduced to being a priest.  Close-up and personal, Max was a complex human being, and intentionally modelled that complexity.  He had learned – and therefore taught – that priestly identity and Christian identity should never be reduced to something simple.

Some accused Max of vagueness, because when you saw more closely who he was and how he thought, there was little to pin down.  But this would be to miss the point.

Max often asserted with glee that he was a "simple Bible Christian".  Evangelicals who knew him fell about laughing.  Yet over the three years of our acquaintance, I discovered Max's self-definition was indeed accurate.  However, to discover his meaning, I had to dwell deeply on each adjective in the description.

Max was simple, not in the obvious sense of being uncomplicated, but because his life was directed towards God whose heart is simplicity.  For Max, this meant a single-hearted complexity; and this paradox is meant to be lived out.

Both a simple and Bible Christian: Max did live by the Scriptures, but viewed them as the complex and diverse documents they are – never as proof texts.

There was a Pied Piper in Max's personality.  He was brilliant at table talk.  As theological students, we were expected to join him in the College dining room for lunch most days, not only to listen, but also to engage with his supple intellect.

Max taught me to question everything in theology; and to question deeply in a spirit of trust.  The truth for Max was in the intellectual struggle, the effort to see the simplicity in the complexity.  Max's security as a theologian seemed to derive from his immersion in the Fathers of the East, the Gregorys and Isaac and Antony.  They taught Max that spirituality and theology are the same enterprise: subtle depths of their world revolved around the centrality of God.

Once, when we had both left Trinity College, Max to his bishop-ing and me to school chaplaincy, Max told me how he used to conduct his episcopal visits to the Wangaratta clergy.  He would sit in the back of the congregation and appraise the sermon of the poor priest.  He explained to me that his purpose was not to critique their preaching, but to hear whether they focused on the doctrine of God.  Oh, Max!  I did not dare to tell him that such a scheme would not work, and I think in any case by then he had worked that out.  He was telling me by way of confession, of reflection after the event.

For Max was a teacher who transformed the way his students thought by drawing us into the complexity, thus giving us lifelong tools to search diligently for the single heart of God.

Ave atque vale, magister mi.

When I was about 40, I dreamed I would like to study medicine. It was a sort of mid-life crisis that never became critical! My wife and spiritual director talked me out of it – easily – on the grounds that I would find it unsatisfying to make a difference to health one individual at a time. I was called – and am still called – to a ministry to the many through preaching and writing.

My GP said I would find general practice boring: treating cold after simple cold with no conversation. Hugh made this statement while his waiting room filled and our conversation covered not only my mid-life ‘crisis’, but music, the church, politics, our families, travel.

This ‘crisis’ occurred at a difficult time in parish ministry. I was looking subconsciously for an escape from a parish in which the ‘difficult parishioner’ was the norm, and the pleasant parishioner the exception. It’s no wonder I dreamed of something else, but it does tell me something about myself.

Looking back 20 years, I can see that my desire was not to practise medicine, it was to study medicine. I envied the broad knowledge base a doctor needs: science (anatomy, physiology, biology, bio-mechanics) and the humanities (psychology, social awareness, passion for helping people).

I love to accumulate knowledge to convert to useful fuel for my thinking, writing and preaching. I want to know how the world works, and how sharp minds see the workings of the world. It’s not surprising that the doctors I know have sharp minds: the selection criteria for medical faculties include high academic ability as well as some insight into ethical and human situations. Rather like, I guess, the requirements for clergy, although our pre-requisites are spelled out differently, and a score greater that 99 for matriculation (TEE) is not compulsory.

But the helping professions are about translating knowledge, sometimes arcane, sometimes highly technical, into processes for healing and fostering personal growth in others. Calls to turn theology or medicine into ‘how to’ training miss this point. The discipline of theology, like that of medicine, teaches us to think in a particular way about the world and the interactions people have in it. I have often found myself drawing on the depth of my training, even though the particular content may not be directly relevant.

It’s not necessarily important to know that Antony of Egypt lived as a solitary in a silo for 20 years; but the movement from prayer in solitude to modelling prayer in community may well be the insight that a person needs now. Nor is it necessarily important to know how Jean Calvin turned Geneva into a tyrranical theocracy; but it may well be useful to know to moderate enthusiastic parish reforms.

I’m a little past mid-life, but perhaps a few more mid-life crises could throw light on my journey – as this one continues to do.

The other morning Rae and I were praying for our children.  Nothing marvelous about that: even if we were not praying people, we would still give thanks every morning for the gift of our two kids.

But as we were praying, I was thinking of how tough it has been.  When we were in Perth, Clare lived in England for six years.  The month we moved to Busselton (last December) Clare and Jamie moved back to Perth.  They have their own life, and it is a good life.  We are glad for them.  But we miss them. 

Words came unbidden into my heart: "Be thou about their path, be thou within their hearts."  The words I remembered were part of a prayer used by Fred Eccleston our school chaplain at boarders' services.  More than I realised at the time, those words stabilised me at those times I missed the farm and my parents and my brothers and sister.

I did some frantic googling and rifflings through old prayer manuals.  Eventually, somewhere on the Internet, I found the prayer.

 Lord of Love, who art not far from any of thy children,
watch with thy care those we love who are far from us:
be thou about their path:
be thou within their hearts;
make it their joy to do thy will.
Let not distance break the bonds of love
     that bindeth them to us and to thee;
but unite us closer in thy love
    for the sake of Jesus Christ.                                   

The prayer was written by William Boyd Carpenter, an English bishop noted for his preaching.  Carpenter, I learned, preached without notes, and made much use of stories: a preacher after my own heart!

It's now good to look back and appreciate the words he wrote down in this prayer.

LEADING THE LEADERS.

 Is it possible to be disappointed by a book, yet still find it excellent?  I am not sure who recommended Graham Standish's new book to me (Humble leadership: being radically open to God's guidance and grace) , but I started into reading it with the hope that I would learn a great deal from it, and be bursting to recommend it to other leaders.

It is a good book.  It begins and ends with the spiritual dimensions of leadership.  Standish criticises the unthinking way Christian leaders sometimes adopt the advice for secular leaders.  He believes Christian leaders should be

·        humble,

·        self-aware,

·        prayerful,

·        unifying,

·        and spirit-led.

He rejects the notion that humble leadership is ineffective, citing, with some contradiction, how the successful CEOs of secular organisation are often humble.  I liked his attempts to find sources for understanding leadership in the scriptures and in church history, particularly in the desert Fathers. 

His favourite is Dorotheos of Gaza, whose key principle was to first blame oneself before blaming our followers. Standish writes, "I have found that even though it is easy to detect others' faults, I can work to detect how I failed to give enough instruction or guidance.  By sharing the blame for the failure, I not only hold the other person accountable, I become accountable to helping resolve the problem."  (Page 168).

The leadership he recommends is not only godly, but also opens the way for God to transform the congregation or institution that the leader leads. 

But what should I make of Standish's concept of "mystical intelligence?"  I realised as I was searching the book for a way to grow in my understanding of the process of discernment.  It is obvious that leaders need discernment, but is it pure gift or can it be learned?  And if discernment can be learned, how do you learn it?

I find Standish's answer somewhat puzzling and evasive.  He posits an additional intelligence named mystical intelligence to add to IQ and emotional intelligence.  This is how he describes it:

Mystical intelligence incorporates [IQ and EQ], but adds a deeper awareness that is in tune with our transconscious, which integrates both our aspirations (yearning for God) and inspirations (the deeply sensed in-breathings of God into our mind, heart and soul).  

The transconscious is a level of consciousness that goes beyond conscious or unconscious awareness. This level of consciousness is connected to the transcendent, to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit who speaks to us from the eternal. Just as we can live unaware of unconscious motivations and unresolved conflicts that cause certain behaviors in us, behaviors that counselors have to help us resolve, we can also live in ignorance of our transconscious. While the transconscious is a dimension of consciousness that is connected to the sacred and divine, it is also easy to ignore because it's a deep, rather than a surface consciousness. Like the unconscious, it lies deep within our psyche connecting it with God at levels that the conscious mind doesn’t easily access.

Mystical intelligence arises out of the transconscious, so that we live in openness to the sacred and divine in everything. By becoming open transconsciously, we develop an intuitive, integrative awareness of God's presence in all situations that help us to lead others in God's direction. When we are transconsciously aware, we sense God's presence and guidance at deep levels beyond normal perception. It's the depth of this awareness that causes others to be skeptical of our discernments. What we see is not readily apparent to others, and sometimes it's only fairly apparent to us.  (Pages 147-148)

Maybe I've missed something somewhere, but this definition seems to define "transconscious" in terms of mystical intelligence, and mystical intelligence in terms of "transconscious”.  Are these two vaguely defined qualities an extension of Freudian concepts or do they come from the mystical tradition? is Standish saying anything more than that we should trust in our praying?

I would dearly love to be a more discerning leader.  I know that one way, I can become more discerning is by working harder at my praying.  This excellent book, however, by abandoning its usual clarity, lets me down at this point.  It seems there are no skills I can learn to be a better discerner.  It's back to my prayers, I think.

Rae and I, finally, after two years, visited my parents’ grave with its new headstone, and Mum’s ashes interred in Dad’s grave. All looks well, even though the Tambellup cemetery is a bleak sandy hill suitable for no habitation – except for rabbits! Continued after picture....

It set Rae and me discussing where we would like our remains to be placed. Our conclusion was that we would like our ashes interred in the rose garden at St David’s in Ardross where we met and were married, and where we worshipped for a dozen years until moving to Busselton.

It also set me thinking about the meaning of death for a Christian. I have been reading and reviewing Adams Vs God – the Rematch, and find this atheist’s view of death quite attractive. Because Adams believes that there is nothing after death, he values life highly. Death may mean extinction, but this extinction is no problem; after all, he says, we were extinct for eternity before our birth.

In my own thinking, Philip Adams’ concept of death connects with that of the King in Ionesco’s intriguing play Le Roi se meurt, (The King is dying), who cries out in restrained agony, “When I die, the Universe dies with me!” Existentially that rings true. My death is the death – from my perspective – of everything that there is. Upon my death, the material universe, my wife and friends, will no longer be available to me. In that sense, they die with me.

I know I take a line unpopular among Christians when I state the place to start in our understanding of death is here: that death is death; it is final, extinction both subjectively and objectively. After death is nothing. Evidently thinking of King Louis XV, the King in Le Roi se meurt reflects on the absolute finality of death and exclaims, “Après moi, le déluge!” One interpretation of Ionesco’s flood to follow is that if you state the blunt truth that death is the end, a flood of denial will greet you. 

I know: I have started arguments in congregations by making this claim. Some Christians flinch in the face of death; in a fit of wishful thinking they turn the resurrection into a comforting statement of personal immortality. Instead of the death of death (“Death, where is thy sting?”), they wish to slide right past its appalling reality and avoid dying altogether.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we slipped over death into everlasting bliss? Wouldn’t it be lovely to meet our lovers and friends, and converse with Virgil and Dante in paradise? Wouldn’t it be just perfect?

In Scripture, the snake tempts the man and the woman to think that they will not die.”Of course you will not die... You will become like gods, knowing good and evil.” The temptation to ignore death is real.

Denying death in this way makes a travesty of resurrection. Unless we face the finality of death, unless we acknowledge in our depths that death is the end, we cannot begin to appreciate the grace of God who chooses to raise us from its finality.

I felt little emotion as Rae and I stood at my parents’ grave with its new headstone. Theirs and the neighbouring graves of Nan and Grandad and our little niece Ebony did not tap the well of grief even though it still there, still fresh from Mum’s death. Those whom I loved are certainly not there, and in any reasonable sense of the phrase, they are certainly not “anywhere”.

Anna, the young friend of Mister God, made the best attempt to describe the ‘place’ where their dead are.  They are, she asserted, “in Mister God’s middle”. The childish phrase captures the grace of God who knows the dead are dead (God mysteriously experienced the death of Jesus) and yet who simply does not allow death the final word.

Reviewed by Ted Witham

As a rule, they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. On that somewhat precarious principle, I like books that challenge my faith. I like to be forced to enrich my concepts of God, my superstitions about Word and Sacrament, or my unexamined assumptions about what the cross and resurrection mean.

The Violence of God and the War on Terror is one such book. Let its author, Jeremy Young, into your head long enough to convince you of the basic point in his book, and you have to change either how you think of faith or what authority you give to the Bible – or both.

 Young, an Anglican priest and family therapist, starts with the thought experiment that the Bible is the report of a family about an abusive family member. The people of the Old Testament describe a pattern sadly familiar to a family therapist. This God is apt to uncontrolled rage if he doesn’t get his own way. Often he orders total destruction of his enemies[1], and lets that anger hover over his family as a threat. Ultimately, as the historical books record, God uses superpowers Assyria and Babylon to crush his own people, destroying the kingdoms and allowing them to be taken into punitive exile. To cap all that, God then makes the Israelites feel that they had brought this punishment on themselves.

The family therapist notes the similarities between this wild rage, the actual violence, inducing guilt and the behaviour of a violent husband towards his wife, the people of Israel. Even passages like Hosea 11 extolling God’s gentle love are suspect: they are like the “honeymoon” phase in the abuse cycle.

In Young’s exposition, the New Testament God is not much better. There God behaves towards his Son as an abusive father. Young argues that the NT authors take this view whether you read the atonement expresses God’s love or God’s wrath. In fact, if God allows his son to be abandoned, tortured and crucified as a demonstration of love, this may be even sicker than a father striking his son in a rage or in an attempt to avenge his honour.

I loathed Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ. It dwelt so lovingly on scarified flesh and unspeakable pain, and then had the temerity to place these horrors in the framework of God’s love.  A loving father, surely, would do everything in his power to prevent his son being treated with such violence.

The tragedy family therapists often see is that the victim of abuse often repeats the cycle of abuse in the next generation or the next relationship. Abused children can become abusive parents. Battered spouses often escape one violent partner only to fall into the brutal hands of another man who initially seems strong and protective, but turns out to be as violent as the first.

Young wonders whether the violence seen in Christian crusades, Islamic jihad or in Israeli over-reactions to Palestinian provocation is an outworking of Biblical religion. As children of Abraham’s God, we inflict on others what God has inflicted on us. Alternatively, we, the bride of Christ, allow ourselves to be so pathologically passive that we invite violence onto ourselves.

Of course, we have heard these allegations before – but usually from virulent atheists like Richard Dawkins, not, as here, from a Christian theologian noting this pattern in Scripture and daring to speak out his insight. Young goes further to claim that accounts of this violent God are not just a small part of Scripture, a minority tradition. Rather the abusive God is the Bible’s central message about him.

Young makes his case well. His unflinching honesty disconcerted me at times, though his conclusion did give me a little comfort.

Essentially, Young concludes, you have a choice between three logical consequences of his reading of Scripture:

1.     You can agree that God is violent, and God’s violence justifies my violence and that of others. This is the stated position of many jihadists, and the implied position of many Christian fundamentalists.

2.     You can decide on other grounds that God is not by nature violent. Rather, the minority view in Scripture is that God is essentially love (as in, for examples, the epistles attributed to St John[2]), and this view more nearly approaches the truth about God. This response raises huge questions about the authority of Scripture because your acceptance of Scripture becomes conditional.  As I attempted one day to justify homosexuality from Scripture Hugh McGinlay said to me with some exasperation, “Why don’t you just say that homosexuality is OK, and admit that the Bible is wrong on that point?” Hugh will be glad to know I am coming around to his viewpoint.

3.     You can join Richard Dawkinsand Christopher Hitchensand throw God out completely on the grounds that belief in God is dangerous[3], and those who worship God will sooner or later emulate God’s violence.

I take the second view, but with some fear and trembling. It seems to exalt my view over that of the Bible. However it may be less arrogant than that.  As Young points out, the community of interpretation, both Christian and Jewish, has tended to interpret Scripture as though “God is love” is the majority tradition.

The Violence of God is the last in a series of books I have been reading about Scripture’s “difficult” passages.  Ellen Davis' The Art of Reading Scripture urges us[4] to read Scripture as Christians, rather than primarily as scholars or fundamentalists.  Surely it makes sense for Christians to see, for example, Isaiah’s suffering servant as prefiguring Christ – rather than as scholars insisting only on the text’s original context, or as fundamentalists reducing the image to just one meaning. For Davis, any text can yield its blessing for us now.

Living Through Pain encourages[5] the reader of the Psalms to “hang in” with the Psalmist in her suffering, even if there is no solution or remedy for the Psalmist’s pain; to the extent of maybe concluding with Psalm 88 that all that remains is “darkness” – unresolved pain.

The world has become darker: for me, as chronic pain tries to further restrict my life; for the world, as an abusive President keeps striking out in rage against the trauma of 9/11, whose perpetrators were replicating the violence earlier directed against them.

It is an important time to look with courage into both the world’s darkness and the darkness at the heart of Scripture.  Only an unflinching gaze at the Bible’s horrors will reveal the love at its heart burning away the darkness, which has not overcome it.

Living in the US, we found some things difficult. Difficult perhaps only because they were different. American kids took us aback by asking us "What?" instead of “I beg your pardon”, but then our kids often called American adults by their Christian names, which Americans felt as disrespect.  Just as people thought our kids polite because they said "please" and "thank you", we found American kids very polite because they consistently called us " Sir" and "Ma'am".

Some issues, however, offended us because they were not just different, but morally deficient.  In a recent speech, Barack Obama quotes the truism that the most segregated hour in the US is on a Sunday morning.  That matches my experience.

I remember being surprised, for example, when asked to take services in the Episcopal churches in the North Carolina town of Oxford.  St Stephen’s Oxford, was the "white" church.  Carpeted and air-conditioned, white painted throughout, the church building reflected the wealth of the town.  The American flag decorated the sanctuary.  As the service began, the congregation sang “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and saluted the flag.  (During this ritual, I faced the altar in silence and acknowledged my God!)

St Stephen’s was full of white folks; not a black face, nor a brown face, nor a yellow face to be seen.  I knew the power of this.  It was not simply coincidence.  An elegant, well-spoken, black-skinned lady arrived one Sunday in our home church in Durham, NC.  We greeted her, other foreign students greeted her, local academics greeted her, but long-time locals ignored her.  We believed she came from an island off the American east coast but we never got to find out.  The lady tolerated her “welcome” for only a few weeks.  So we were not surprised by St Stephen’s in Oxford.

After my first service at St Stephen's, I crossed town to Saint Cyprian's Church, the so-called "black" church.  Saint Cyprian's had no carpet or air-conditioning, but in each pew, there were Martin Luther King Jr. fans for the ladies to wave to create a breeze.  There were black folks at St Stephen's.  But there were folks of almost every imaginable ethnic background, even some white folks who like their fellow congregants felt uncomfortable at St Stephen's.  Martin Luther King's fans were alive and well, but it was 20 years since Dr King had been martyred.  We asked ourselves, where were the results of the Civil Rights Movement?

Another 20 years on, and Barack Obama is still talking about the church's segregated hour.

But now there may be a difference.  Obama's speech delivered March 18, and usually reported as a speech on race, moved me deeply.  In the midst of a vigorous competition for power, the speech called for healing, reconciliation, and moving on to “a more perfect union".

Even if Mr Obama fails to win this year's race to the White House, this speech should go down in history for the power of its analysis, for its courage in facing an issue for America, and for the sincerity of its solutions.  Maybe Obama is the man for the moment.

As Professor Philip Gorski from Yale University points out, the speech was about more than race.  The speech pointed out America's "original sin” of slavery, but it moved beyond simply black men's rage.  Obama was not captive to the anger of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He reached out also to white poor and all decent Americans fearful of the oppressors in the current political and economic scene.  He spoke of reconciliation.  He spoke of a new coalition between the élite and the poor, a new covenant between leaders and the led.

Philip Gorski shows that this picture was not only about race and class, but also an appeal to civil religion.  Unlike in other democracies, the language of religion has always played a part in America’s public square.  The Religious Right use the language of religion to promote their view of redemptive violence.  Obama rightly rejects this.  The secular left has tried to empty the public square of religious language.  This, Obama knows, won't wash with the American public.

Decent America has been built in the overlap between belief and unbelief.  Civil religion has powerfully used the rhetoric of Christianity to build the common good.  Even so, care is taken in the language not to exclude non-believers.  This overlap, this civil religion resonates with the American people.

Barack Obama inspires partly because he knows how to appeal to the best instincts of his fellow citizens. In this Obama is not simply parroting the language of the civil religion, he is re-minting it.  This phrase "perfecting the Union" recalls both sacralised ways in which many Americans use the word Union (e.g. “these United States”) and also the language of the sacrament of marriage.  He is making something new of the sacred bond between Americans.

I would even take his language a step further; "union" is the language of mysticism.  Mr Obama is hinting that the experience of national unity parallels the journey into closeness with God: perfecting the union.

Because of this many Americans believe they have met in Obama a politician who is not cynical and self-serving.

Are there lessons in this for Australia?  The intensity of responses to the intervention in aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory suggests that race is important for Australia.  We do need to recognize our "original sin" of dispossession.  Until now, each succeeding generation of immigrants has simply added to the effects of aboriginal dispossession.  The formal Apology in Parliament last month gives me hope that we may now begin to heal the wounds at the heart of our national life.

But can we, like Barak Obama’s constituency, be inspired by the language of civil religion?  Unlike the United States, ours is a genuine secular democracy.  The Australian public square is blind to the religion, the beliefs, the philosophy of individuals.  The only identity we have in the public square is that of citizen.  Turkey was founded at about the same time as Australia, and like Turkey, we learned from the mistakes of the new nations of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Nations like the United States, Philip Gorski argues, use the rhetoric of civil religion, a discourse which doesn’t play in liberal democracies. He writes:

By civil religion, I mean a sacralization of the democratic polity and celebration of the sovereign people, that borrows heavily from theistic language and ritual. By religious nationalism, finally, I mean a sacralization of the national state and the election of the common people that glorifies blood sacrifice and rejects the restraints of the covenant.

When Kemal Ataturk founded Turkey the great mass of its citizens were Muslims.  The Australian States that entered federation were composed mainly of Christians.   But Turks and Australians both live in democracies and enjoy a paradox: their religion though respected is irrelevant to the political argument.  Political discourse is not sacralised.  An immediate benefit is that the language of redemptive violence can be decoupled from the rest of public discourse. 

When America is attacked, its public language makes its hard to express anything other than revenge.  In contrast, winning through force is a value only on the fringes of Australian rhetoric, even on ANZAC Day.

Australians Christians have a wide choice in how they participate in politics. Some Christians come into politics as Christians.  They make plain their values and how they derive those values from their faith.  The only "rule" their fellow citizens insist on is to recognise that others have beliefs that differ from theirs.

Other Christians, on the contrary, believe that when they enter the political arena, they leave behind their Christian language.  For them it is inappropriate to mix the language of worship with that of government.  They too must recognise that other participants in political debate may be atheists, Jews or Muslims.

Brian Hill and Tom Wallace in their work on curriculum have shown that Australians do share values and that these values derive ultimately from religion. However, when they are used in public discourse, they inspire only if they are stripped of their religious connotations. 

The idea of a “fair go” resonates more than the concept of justice.  The notion of “mateship” appeals more than the language of love.  Only sometimes, as in the example of reconciliation, does public language overlap with religious language.  Secular Australians apply the word “reconciliation” to the coming together of different groups. Christians may hear the word in this way and also in the context of forgiveness and absolution.

The problem is; the phrases "fair go" and "mateship" are shop-soiled. They have been debased by politicians using them with a self-serving political agenda. In addition, we Australians often use these words with complex layers of irony.

What inspires Americans, then, does not necessarily inspire Australians. Barak Obama moves me partly because I have lived in America, but there is no reason why Mr Obama will move other Australians.

But neither are Australians inspired by clichéd language. Mr Rudd was right to use the language of "Apology" in Parliament. It has few religious connotations, and the constant demand on former Prime Minister Howard to "say sorry" and his refusal to do so debased the phrase.

In the Apology, Rudd’s made an open declaration of the principles that should undergird relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The Prime Minister wants to:

“plac[e] an absolute premium on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership on closing the gap.”

Respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility are powerful words. I find much of the Prime Minister’s language boring and managerial, as words “real measures” and “targets” fail to excite me. But respect (for all God’s children), cooperation (partnership in righteousness) and mutual responsibility (loving one another), even stripped of their Gospel connotations can still call us to action.

 Australia will be best served by nonreligious political language for two main reasons.

·        . Nonreligious language keeps us away from the mythology of winning through force, and

·        . it has a chance of resonating with all of us. 

But we need speech-makers like Mr Rudd at his best who can re-mint the language of our shared values, and through them call us as citizens into ethical and visionary action. 

I have just been rereading parts of Martin Thornton's excellent .  I had forgotten how dismissively Thornton had treated Franciscan spirituality in England.  His first complaint, and indeed his conclusion, is that Franciscan spirituality is simply "confusion"! 

He condemns Franciscan spirituality as schizoid, because it is sometimes affective, sometimes intellectual, emphasising both the Nativity (Francis inventing the Christmas creche) and also the Passion (Francis receiving the stigmata).  Such extremes, Thornton explains, are far from English sensitivities, which prefer the gentler via media. Maybe he is just jealous because he can't have his spiritual cake and contemplate it too!

Thornton's treatment of the Victorine school is far less controverted.  He reminds us of the stages in the spiritual journey, the so-called Three Ways; purgative, illuminative, and unitive. I wish, I wish that the journey of faith was better explained to pilgrims.  Christians seem not to know that there are stages.  They expect to stay in the same comfortable state, and grow gently, without violence.  But it's not the way. 

Jesus uses the image of wheat to explain spiritual growth.  A grain of wheat, he says, goes into the ground and is dead — without apparent growth.  But then there is a sudden and violent transformation.  A green shoot appears and pushes its way to the sun, elbowing aside heavy soil and rocks in its way.  Once its head is in the air, the green shoot grows gradually and gently.  Winter turns to spring, the warmth gradually dries the green sappy plant. Then, within days, the plant is transformed again into a gold snappy reed bulging fruit standing in its top.  Gentle slow growth, violent transformation.  Gradual, sudden. The rhythm of natural growth.

We do not, of course, cannot, know how a wheat plant feels.  But Jesus was talking not about grass, but about people.  If we haven't experienced it ourselves, we can imagine what it is like to change suddenly from gentle gradual growth to cataclysmic transformation.  Well, actually we do know from experience.  The sudden shocking arrival of puberty is one occasion that throws us into confusion by the changes in our bodies, emotions and spirits.

Yet again this week I met a genuine pilgrim who believes they have suddenly lost their faith, gone beyond the tenets of Christianity, and need to leave the Christian communities which have nurtured them, and which they have nurtured. 

Their faith was so neat, believing, for example, that the Bible contains literal truth about Christ and his world.  Maybe, they suddenly think, they have been thinking about it wrongly all their lives. Their faith, which was so gentle, dependent on a sense of interaction in their prayer life, is suddenly thrown into disarray by the thought that No One is listening.

These are not signs of loss of faith.  These are signs that the stepping stones have become slippery.  These are indications that God is calling the pilgrim further and deeper.  In adolescence, the reaction to this imbalance might be expressed in anger or acting out.  In the spiritual life in the reaction is expressed in a desire for flight; fleeing that is, not soaring. On these stepping stones, what is needed is yes, a steadying arm, but also information.  There is a map to the road ahead, and now is the time to learn to read it.

To use a self-conscious image, the spiritual body has changed.  The map that was suited for feet on a solid path must be exchanged for a map which describes the way through a different medium, swimming in water or in the ether.

There are maps; the teachings of Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor, for example, lead the Christian through the stages that lead to God.  The great Franciscan Bonaventure in many places, and especially in his Itinerarium, the Journey of the Human Person into God, provides sure directions to the way ahead.  I wish, I wish that those who know these things would listen for those slipping and hand them even a simple map.

Martin Thornton reminds us that some spiritual skills are "learned" and some "infused".  Skills that we cannot learn ourselves will be granted to us by our gracious God.  Our task is to step out into the water swirling around the slippery steppingstone.

During school holidays, Sister Maree invited me to help her with the school holiday program.  Fitzroy in those days was populated by latchkey kids and their very poor parents.  70 of these kids came to a program that alternated between craft at the church and excursions to places like the swimming baths, the upper Yarra and variety shows.

Usually the excursions were a total disaster.  Walking back from the swimming baths, we had to cross a local road.  A four-year-old rushed from my group across the road towards Sister Maree.  The child was less in height than an approaching car... at least until the car hit her and sent the girl flying higher in the air.  She suffered only a broken arm.  It could have been far worse, as could have been the near-drowning in the flooded Yarra.  A boy slipped off the muddy bank, the water carried him rapidly downstream into the tangled branches of a fallen tree, from where we were able to retrieve him.

Despite this, the kids loved Sister Maree and seemed to thrive in the atmosphere of the program.  We hoped that our care was doing something good for them.  Those expeditions certainly stick in my memory!

As theological students in the 70s, we spent five days each year in the CHN Retreat House at Cheltenham.  In those days the Sisters were shadowy figures on the edge of thing is in black habits, veils and wimples, serving meals silently, and like Muslims, rushing back to the "The Sisters' Chapel" for prayers five times a day.

On this trip, it was a delight to sit down and eat with the sisters.  Nearly all of them have discarded their habits for modest street wear.  I saw one habit only in three days' visit. That was worn by a Sister who has chosen to live a solitary life, and appears only for Mass.

Sister Josephine, the current Mother, organised my stay efficiently and caringly.  Sister Margaret-Anne and I enjoyed several conversations about matters pastoral and theological -- Margaret works as a hospital chaplain -- and I was delighted to have a half-hour phone conversation with Sister Maree.  Maree and I agreed that we were both too old to take 70 lively undisciplined kids on dangerous excursions.  Other Sisters asked about W.A. and the Third Order, and told good jokes.

Sister Josephine organised Sister Shirley to take me to the airport bus.  I was unprepared for her conversation.  I asked her what her ministry was, which seemed to be pastoral care for whoever she met, so she asked me about my back.  I started to explain about chronic pain, and she cut me off.  "There is some one in Perth you should see," she said, "Margaret Court: she has a great healing ministry, and she would be able to fix your back."

I was taken aback.  I felt it fair to take Shirley seriously, and told her the story of my anointing before major surgery in 1969.  I said that in the moment of anointing and laying on of hands, I knew myself to be totally healed, and that my life's task was to live out that healing.  Shirley was appalled at my theology.  "God does not want you to live as you are.  Maybe if you saw Margaret Court, your back would be straightened, and maybe you'll pain taken away."

I didn't find the words on that day to explain to Sister Shirley that I thank God for the way I am.  Whatever I said seemed sick to her.  "Why would God want you be that way?" The more I tried to explain that everybody is limited, imperfect, in pain, and this is what life is like, the more Shirley disagreed.

This is a most challenging argument for Christians.  The tension between God's permissive will (God allows us to suffer), and God's deliberative will (God sometimes chooses to heal individuals), cannot be resolved this side of death.  I cannot know for certain whether I am unconsciously rejecting healing that God is offering.

Part of be being healed, however, is acceptance.  Just to carry on, especially with the disabilities I carry, I need to be somewhat settled about the way I am.  The Sister Shirleys of this world disturb that peace, and one part of me is glad that they do.  Without their insistent questioning of my acceptance, I might miss out on opportunities for healing.  But I also feel that their intervention is unhelpful.  I am past the place of having my hopes are falsely raised, but I am sure that many others with chronic difficulties can be seduced by false hopes.

The level of my pain and of the success of my coping with it, vary from day to day.  If on a day when I am not coping, someone starts insisting on the need for me to present myself to some healer, I find it hard to be objective.

satan invited Jesus to change rocks into bread.  Jesus refused.  It is not always creative or good to fix things.  If someone is healed, what a wonderful opportunity to praise God.  If Jesus fed the poor with rock cakes it would be an occasion for praise.  But in the wilderness Jesus shows us that it isn't always so.  Rocks are meant to be rocks.  Some people with scoliosis and chronic pain are meant to have scoliosis and chronic pain.

For me it is unhealthy to constantly expect God to give me a straight spine and no pain.  To do so is to be ungrateful for the body I have, for the person I am.  Of course I want to be changed.  But I can be changed only as I accept myself for who I am and offer that to God for healing.

So thank you, Sister Shirley, but no thank you.  My healing is to learn to live triumphantly with what God has given, and to learn not to scrabble for what God has not given.