Jehu, the Guy with the Really Big Stone

Dear Jesus,

You don’t me but I sure as heck know you. I was one of the people responsible for all the ruckus last week. However, it wasn’t all my idea.

Silas and I knew each other well. I’m a Pharisee and Silas is a teacher of the law and we both have a bit of a thing for Margarita. She was comely and attractive with those dark eyes and a winning smile. We would see her at the market and our overtures were always met with a disappointing but firm declining of our advances. It drove us nuts.

So we dreamt up this plan. As a Pharisee and a teacher we had heard about you. How forgiving and patient and understanding you always were. A faithful, practising rabbi but somehow different. A bit out there. You drove us nuts in quite a different way. Just when we thought we understood you, you warped our minds and lives with a new saying, a new teaching, a new challenge. Were you for us or against us? We could never work it out.

So one night after a few wines, Silas and I hatched a cunning plan.

We knew that pretty Margarita always went down to the cellar on market day to collect the herbs and olives ready for the customers. Silas would follow her in and if she didn’t see his point of view, then a bit of torn clothing, a bit of shouting and distress and he would bring her in front of you claiming adultery. My job was to round up the crowds and bring them along for the spectacle.

So it was, at the appointed day, at the appointed time everything aligned. You were in town, Margarita had gone down into the cellar and I was hanging out with a few other teachers. The signal was given and it all unfolded. The crowd quickly gathered. Silas dragged a dishevelled, protesting, struggling Margarita before everyone and made the accusation. Not necessarily towards Margarita but to you. His words were smooth and articulate.

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.  In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

All of us had picked up filthy great rocks and we were set to stone her. I could feel the comfortable weight in my hand and I was determined that I was going to be first.

You were composed and unfazed by the shouting around you. You met our noise and questions with your silence.

It was obvious that you could see the trap. If you said ‘Yes, stone her’, then your reputation of compassion and forgiveness was out the window and down the drain. If you said ‘Forgive her’, then you were clearly in breach of the faith that had been handed down and your license as a rabbi would be revoked by the Professional Standards Board.

But you said… nothing. At least not to start with. You just bent down and doodled in the dust. What the heck?

We kept up with our questions louder and louder and then you rose and looked at us. I felt like you were looking straight at me and I prickled. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was as if you knew everything about me.

And then you said it.

“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

And then you just bent down and started to scratch around in the dust again. Just left us to our own thoughts. Left us to work it out for ourselves.

The old codgers were first to drop their rock and walk away, but it took me a while.

I had let my emotions manipulate me. My unreciprocated attraction to Margarita and my theological angst toward you. I was not in control of these things. I was at their mercy, slave to their every whim.

Somehow you knew all this. You knew exactly what to say and the way to say it. Gently, calmly, in a measured voice but again with that dastardly unmistakable compassion. What is more, you knew that I needed to hear these words and obviously I have never forgotten them.

I said at the start of this letter that you did know me, but it turns out you did. You may not have known my name or where I lived, but you knew me in ways that no one else ever had. You saw straight through me. You knew my every flaw and wrinkle. Every rough edge and every chip on my shoulder.

You knew me… You know me. You know me very well indeed. Better than I know myself.

So I dropped my stone and went away fizzing with irritation and humiliation. I just had to write to you and tell you.

Oh, one last thing.  I wonder …what if it was you personally, who was on trial before the crowds?

Would you be so forgiving if someone flogged you, spat upon you, mocked you, denied you, betrayed you; drove some nails through your body and pinned you to the wood? What then? Would you cry out for retaliation, revenge and retribution? Or would you pray ‘Father Forgive’?

Just a question

Yours in the disorientation of my very different dimension.

Jehu
Teacher and Quarryman.

The Sin of Certainty

Way back in January, I went to see the film ’Conclave’. It was a fictitious story about the election of a Pope. Towards the beginning of the film the Dean who helps to co-ordinate the trickiness, delivers a stunning homily to the assembled cardinals. For some of you, it might sound a bit Churchy, but hang in there and read this little gem. What it has to teach us as Christians and indeed people of any faith is sage, honest and essential.

I Quote

“St Paul said, ‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.’ To work together, and to grow together, we must be tolerant. No one person or faction seeking to dominate another. And speaking to the Ephesians, who were of course a mixture of Jews and Gentiles, Paul reminds us that God’s gift to the church…is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views which gives our church its strength. And over the course of many years in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin, which I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross.

Our faith is a living thing, precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty…and no doubt…there would be no mystery…and therefore no need… for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts.

And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness, and who carries on.”

The woman who anointed Jesus for burial

Dear Mary,

I wanted to write to you about a few things but first of all, I should mind my manners and ask how Martha and Lazarus are doing. It was quite a spectacle when your brother emerged from the tomb after four days. There were a good number of tears, many of them mine and lots of people muttering about my noisy sobbing.

And you Mary, even in your deep grief, your faith was unmistakable.

I will never forget the words you spoke so firmly and with that lovely, steadfast conviction of yours.

“Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Odd, isn’t it, that it is in death and weeping we often feel empty-headed, empty-handed and empty-hearted, but that is not how I saw you. That is not how you really were. With your tears and anguish, you were actually quite magnificent and offered so very much to those around us.

Then, just last night we saw each other again in a different place, in a different house, with different people. It was in Simon the Leper’s home. Lazarus was there as was Judas and a gathering of some miscellaneous folk.

I’m aware that you weren’t actually on the guest list but I was overjoyed to see you.

We both knew why you had come and we both knew that the clock was ticking… quickly it seemed. While the guests laughed raucously, we were both acutely aware that a death, my death was imminent and urgently and poignantly you wanted to make things tidy and ordered. To do your part in the preparations for a death that would in turn change every death.

You just didn’t know it at the time… but you would… later.

So you came. And while there was an authentic smile on your lips and you were delighted to see me, your eyes were brim full of tears, almost toppling over with delicate drops.

The perfume you offered was magnificent and the scent filled the house with the fragrance of a healing death and deep beauty.

I reckon everyone there misinterpreted what you did next. Their crusty, accusatory gossip was quite audible.  And when you bent down, that is when you could no longer hold back your tears and they spilled onto my feet. And I understood that not only were they tears of repentance for the way your life had turned out, but the droplets were genuine gifts of grief.  So Mary, what with your heady perfume, your tears and your hair drying my feet, I finally knew that now I was ready. I had been touched, anointed and sealed in love.

I get that you probably thought you had nothing to offer me last night. That you felt that what you had done wasn’t nearly good enough. In fact, you probably thought that nothing you could ever do was going to be enough. But the reality was the opposite. I was now ready to go to the grave.

I shall never forget you leaving that night. You turned, snubbed all the naysayers by you ignoring them and you walked slowly towards the door. Needing to leave, but yet… not wanting to leave. You stopped .. Everyone was watching you. The silence hung heavily in the room like the delicious aroma of the nard.

You looked at me as I looked at you. We gazed at each other and for a brief but long moment, nothing else mattered. There was only you and I.

We smiled, we looked, we knew. All was ready now. Everything that could be done, was done. Not even the harshness of denial, betrayal, crucifixion and a cold borrowed tomb could taint and diminish what had passed between us. Nor could it stop its eternal consequences for all people, for all places, for all time. In fact it was your potent ingredients of steadfastness and selflessness that would roll away the stone and wipe away every tear.

As you walked away that night you probably thought that you had seen me for the last time. That you would never see me again. But no! You and I Mary; we are people of Faith. We are people of courage. We are people of captivating, irresistible and inescapable love. We are people of surprise.

The surprise of Lazarus’s continued life was made possible by faith, courage and love. Your visit to Simon’s place was all of those things. What will follow in the days and weeks after the Passover will be all of those things and so much more.

So wait Mary, it is not much longer now. Forgiveness is already yours, it always has been. Wait, weep if you must, but you must always, always know … you did a beautiful thing for me and it will be told through all the ages, for as long as I love you. Forever and ever, yours,

Jesus.

What’s your colour?

Well, it’s official. We're going to have an election.  The scurrilous rumour was confirmed with a postcard that came into my letter box the other day.

I expect to get many such postcards, all of them passionate, (as you would expect) offering different perspectives. For all our rolling of eyeballs and heavy sighs, it’s great that we live in such a colourful democracy.

In my dotage, I’m more aware of the different colours that different parties sport. This is an excellent marketing instrument and you know immediately which clan your postcard is from.

But the thing I come back to in the midst of the high vis vest, words, hard hats, and my beloved postcards, is the people behind the various hues. While I might dispute reverently and appropriately, while I might dis/agree passionately, I must never forget that these are only academic thrusts and parries. Each of the folk who front up behind a microphone, or splash around with words on a screen, has feelings and emotions. Cut any of them and they bleed. Tell them a half-decent joke and they smirk. They have relatives and friends, they engage in jocularity and tears. Growing up, they have had their hearts broken and probably broken a few hearts along the way.

Sure the postcards are helpfully colour-coded as I triage them across the desk. But it's the person behind the colour that’s the most important thing. To all of those who are running, no matter what your colour or policy, all the very best. To those of us who vote, remember that first and foremost, at the top of the ballot paper, these are real flesh and blood human beings, exactly like the one you see in the mirror.

Judas to Jesus

Dear Jesus,

I have wanted to write this letter for some time now. You see, I have this burning, puzzling question that I can never get my head around. It’s a complex thing and I’m hoping that by writing this letter I can clarify a few things in my mind, but especially in my heart.

It all has to do with our rather awkward and bizarre relationship, especially about the issue of control.

You see, I had always assumed that you were the Master and in complete control of absolutely everything. You were the leader, the boss, the guru, the chairman of the board. It was you who had the power over all of us. Especially over me. Hec! You could have asked me to jump off the temple and I would have done it for you cheerfully if that’s what you had wanted.

You called me and I followed you. I watched with awe, surprise and glee as you drove out demons, healed the sick, fed the hungry and said the wise, hard things graciously.

You even ticked off the powerful Scribes and Pharisees. Surely you had it all there at your fingertips. And so the question eventually came bubbling up in my mind … Is there anything you couldn’t do? Surely that was a better place to start. I was completely enthralled by you and so it seemed was everyone else, even though they may not have liked you or gone away tittering, mumbling and irritable. Even raising Lazarus’ corpse after a few days in a tomb was not beyond you. I listened and I obeyed. I was even the treasurer which is the most tiresome job of all. ‘The poor we always have with us’ You said so yourself.

So here’s the thing. That if you could do all those things and they were wild and whacky and indescribably astounding…how come ….how come you didn’t stop me when I went to the chief priests to sell you down the Jordan.

You knew what I was up to. ‘What you must do .. do it quickly’

So I did and I believed with all my heart that that was what you wanted of me. The directive was simple as it was clear.

I knew where to find you that night and it’s almost as if you were waiting and expecting us.

And when I led them to you in this black night, with blazing torches and fearsome eyes in the dark, you did not run away, although I sort of wanted you to, hoping that the confrontation would not happen and that it could be avoided. That you could mysteriously evaporate all the angst and anger. Just quietly slip through the crowd.

But you just simply stood there turned to greet us and then in a gesture that flipped my heart, you offered me your cheek to kiss.

What you must do ... do it swiftly. So I did. Is this what you wanted all along?

Where were your power and authority when the crowds turned nasty and you plummeted in the polls before Pilate in a matter of hours? Where was your influence and control as you fell heavily, bleeding out onto the dusty, rocky road?

I stood there watching you. The ferocious din of the crowds rang in my ears… thinking… any moment now… he’s going to get up and make all this stop. It’s all going to be sweetness and light and honey. But No… you just staggered on like some crazed loon with that hideous glazed look in your eyes. The life ebbing out of them.

And in a hideous twist, there was a moment when it was as if everything stopped. The memory is always before me every time I close my eyes. There you were, sprawled in the dust like a beautiful insect pinned for heinous amusement. Never, ever,.. have I felt so powerless.

So here are my questions to you Jesus.

Who was in control? Was it you? For a while there it certainly looked like you had all the answers and were supreme over all things. Or did I have all the power, because I made it all happen?

And on a more personal level which is why I’m writing this wretched letter anyway, did you really have power and authority and control over me or not? That’s what I’d really like to know. Need to know.

Because if you did, then surely the most loving thing you could have done was to stop me. Call me out publicly or privately, wouldn’t have mattered and said the hard, hard things graciously which was of course what you always did.

And afterwards.. when the noise had stopped and the crowds had gone back home to their bread and olives for the Passover…if you were/are God almighty, could you not have washed away my guilt and stopped me from taking my own life? Wouldn't that have been the compassionate, caring, loving thing to do? Aren’t you here to save me, to save us all?

I await your prompt and courteous reply

Your servant (I think)

Judas.

The Lie I Believed

My father died swiftly and unexpectedly.

The whole thing was shocking and surreal at the time.

One of the many things that came out of it was the brutal realisation that one day it will be my turn. With the generation ahead of me now gone I was ‘next in line.’

‘Hec’, I thought. ‘I better have something in place for when I die.’

So I phoned a funeral director I knew well and I put the kettle on. While I was waiting I thought, ‘This is going to be a cinch. I’ve watched this process lots of times.’ In fact, it was brutal and confronting.

We went through everything and at the end of the process he handed me a piece of paper. “Now David, this is what we have agreed upon”.

As I took the piece of paper a little voice whispered a lie to me. ‘This is what your life amounts to. This one bit of paper sums up all there is about David Oulton’

Now typing it out and reading it, I can see how ludicrous the lie was, but at the time… it was quite plausible and for a few fleeting seconds I believed the lie.

The truth is actually something quite different, right at the other end of the spectrum in fact. No bit of paper, no wicked act, no good deed, no heroic action, no flimsy prayer, no error of judgement, no act of compassion, can ever come close to being the totality of who we are. We are of infinite, immeasurable, beauty and worth. Nothing can ever encapsulate all that we have been, all that we are and all that we will be. And if it is true of our own selves, then it must be true of every other person in our lives and beyond.

The Sound of Silence

I’m typing this with one of my ears heavily waxed. I am given to understand that this is not like having your legs waxed, but an experience that lasts much longer in time with quite different outcomes.

I expect that this situation will last a few very annoying weeks when I visit a medical guru who will get out their ‘dewaxing gun’ and make my hearing all better again.

But in every ‘adversity’ (and really it’s not a life-threatening ailment no matter how much of a ‘woosey boy patient’ I want to play) there are valuable lessons to be learnt.

There are countless people in our community who live ‘deafness’ as a part of their everyday, humdrum, routine life. Some live with hearing aids, some have learnt to ‘sign’, and some have devised other tricks to help them survive. It is highly likely that I have spoken to and listened to many such people. Perhaps dear reader you are one of them.

Hear then I must say a hearty and heartfelt sorry for it is inevitable that I have not listened and been as patient and as understanding as I should have. I have more sympathy for you now than in the past and while I hope that my situation is resolved swiftly, your condition may well be permanent. If I have misjudged, misinterpreted and not been as patient as I would have, could have, should have, then know that I will try to do better and go more like a glacier in my judgment and decision-making.

On retreat I savour silence. There the sound of silence is delicious and much-needed. This sound of silence is not nearly as much fun, but I take to heart and into my life, the noisy lessons it has thrummed into me.

So Who is Gill Hicks?

Gill was an Australian woman living in London in 2005 when she got on the tube on the Piccadilly Line on her way to work. It was just another day and she was on the way to the office. On this particular day amazingly and weirdly, she was running late. Gill never ran late but that morning she had a blazing row with her fiancé and she was determined to give him the flick and begin a new life. She was banging drawers to try and wake him up and it meant that she took a scarf to wear which crucially would later save her life.

In the crowded carriage, she was standing close to Jermaine Lindsay who was carrying a bomb. Only one person was separating her from Jermaine. In effect, he saved her life with his own body even though he didn’t plan it that way over his cereal that morning. Later Jill would meet this man’s wife who said

“If this is the last thing he did with his life to save mine, then what a wonderful thing he's done in his last moments.”

As the bomb was detonated, she felt as though she was being enveloped in inky blackness.

In the explosion, Gill lost both her legs, as she waited for help to come, she made a contract with herself to survive. But she says, she wasn't fully aware of the 'fine print’.

After an hour in the dark, she was rescued and on the way to the hospital, she experienced clinical death several times, and had to be resuscitated.

During this time Gill heard two insistent voices in her head: one was female, inviting her to surrender into the peace of death. The other voice was male, and it was demanding that she choose to live.

This is where the wonderful scarf came in “because I still had the scarf on and calmly managed to tie tourniquets around the tops of my legs. And I knew that I was in a very, very, very serious situation. But, there was a girl across from me saying, you know, what's your name and what do you do?" and trying to keep each other awake.”

From the start of her recovery, she was determined not to dwell on hate or revenge. Instead, Gill became close friends with the many police officers and medical staff who saved her life. She says the love she received from complete strangers is much more important to her than the hateful attack on herself and her fellow passengers.

Later Jill would say that I received unconditional love from strangers. That is why I don't feel any hatred; it's too precious. What I've been given back is too precious to allow the cancerous nature of hatred and bitterness to decay my life.

I would say I'm angry and I think that's okay. But equally, it's the anger that gets me up in the morning to say, what am I going to do about it?”

We now know a fair bit about the bomber on your train. He was a troubled 19-year-old who'd fallen under the influence of a bad mind. Many people wouldn't see him as troubled and wouldn't want to say he was wicked. Jill had this to say about the bomber.

“I'd like to believe, and this is again, you know, he's dead. And so we can only ever presume what he thought. And I'm very cautious of making presumptions because on that morning, he presumed a hell of a lot of things about me. He presumed I was his enemy and he never asked me. I never had a choice.

So I don't want to presume too much about him, but the space that I like to think about with him and indeed what he symbolises is that there is a passion to the crime and that these are people that are wanting to make a difference, albeit in a very misguided way. So it's how do we highlight that... The killing of innocent lives, an eye for an eye doesn't make a situation better.

I feel a great pity for him and pity is perhaps the only emotion I can offer him as he's not here.

I thought about, you know, how this happens, how anyone could feel justified in that type of attack. Indeed, how common this attack is throughout the world and a source of terrorism is a very effective source of getting people to sit up and listen and take notice. And I thought about how do I end this because I'm just one person. So what I can do is... I can... Actually stop an idea of a cycle of this continuing, of wanting retribution. So how can I reverse that cycle and in fact go out and do the complete opposite?

There has to be a line that is drawn. It is not ‘us’ and ‘them’. It stops here.”

Our Master Teacher put this way

“But to you who are listening, I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,  bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High.” 

Of Faith, Hope and Carnage

Some of you will have heard me speak of Nick Cave and heard me quoting him.

I devoured his book ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’ on Retreat last year in pretty much a single gulp, which is a really big deal for me.

I decided to find out a bit more about Nick and of course, much of what follows is a direct filch from the magic of the internet. Faith, Hope and Carnage pretty much describe his life and this homily comes with a health warning. It is not pretty or glamorous or sexy. His life is a cocktail of Faith, hope and carnage mixed through with 20 years of heroin. So here goes.

Nick was born in Warracknabeal (which is a marvellous place to spend your infancy) in 1957 and then moved to Wangaratta where he was a choir boy in the Anglican cathedral there. So far… so good. What could possibly go wrong?

At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School and sent off to Caulfield Grammar. After his secondary schooling, he studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology but dropped out the following year to pursue music. It was around this time that he began to use heroin and continued to do so for the next 20 years.

Nick was 19 when his father was killed in a car collision and his mother told him of his father's death while she was bailing him out of St. Kilda police station where he was being held on a charge of burglary.

It took him a while to find English model Suite Back and they married in 1999. That’s me putting a large dollop of chocolate sauce on history and protecting a few people.

Nick is a father to four children and outlives two of his boys. One had taken LSD and then fallen off a cliff, and the other to suicide. So it is with the greatest level of authenticity and integrity that he can offer us these words.

“Grief is something that you get practiced at”
“Hope is optimism with a broken heart”
“Grief and joy can coexist in the same moment.”

What started me on this quest to learn more about Nick’s life was just one of his many songs.

The song is called ‘Into My Arms’ and  I hope that the words will appear in the pew sheet. My interpretation of it is that it is pretty much a love ballad for his wife but you will discover that The Master also makes an appearance.

“And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love And guide you into my arms”

The verses of the song begin with “I don’t believe in …” and then later say  “But,… if I did…

So we get

I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did, I would kneel down and ask him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Will not to touch a hair on your head
Leave you as you are
If he felt he had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

And in a one swift verse, we caught up in that lovely endearing, delicious slush between believing and disbelieving, bobbing around with faith, doubt, despair and hope. Wanting to believe whilst barely existing in a very inky black cavern.

Now if we are brutally honest and tell the truth, as we are meant to do, is that not also true of each and every one of us in here and everyone out there? Doesn’t every life have darkness and light? Don’t we all live a life of faith, hope and carnage?

But we should let Nick have the last word here.

He once clarified his view on Christianity as "non-political and fully personal and emotional" and described his religious beliefs as "bound up in the liturgy and the ritual and the poetry that swirls around the restless, tortured figure of Jesus, as presented within the sacred domain of the church itself.”

“My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality."

Cave's religious doubts were once a source of discomfort to him, but he eventually concluded:

“Although I've never been an atheist, there are periods when I struggled with the whole thing. As someone who uses words, you need to be able to justify your belief with language, I'd have arguments and the atheist always won because he'd go back to logic. Belief in God is illogical, it's absurd. There's no debate. I feel it intuitively, it comes from the heart, a magical place. But I still fluctuate from day to day. Sometimes I feel very close to the notion of God, other times I don't. I used to see that as a failure. Now I see it as a strength, especially compared to the more fanatical notions of what God is. I think doubt is an essential part of belief.”