Terry Fitzpatrick Homilist March 5-6 2010
Summer is finally over. And what a summer it has been. As the Gospel writer aptly states, “rains came down floods rose, gales blew and hurled themselves against the houses”.
‘A SUMMER LIKE NO OTHER’, read the headlines in the weekend Courier Mail.
Australia has experienced some of
Just reflecting on some of these extreme weather events:
- We witnessed serious and long lasting floods in many rural Queensland areas, Dalby, Roma, St George, Emerald and Rockhampton;
- And some of the biggest floods on record in Western Victoria, around Swan Hill.
- Unprecedented flash flooding in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley ( amazing footage on the ABC the other night);
- Of course the massive floods in Ipswich and Brisbane wreaking havoc in so many homes and businesses.
- The warmest Spring on record in Perth resulting in widespread fires and extensive damage to the environment with many homes destroyed.
- The severe heat waves in NSW, South Australia and western Queensland.
- The severe tropical Cyclone Yasi in northern Queensland – one of the worst cyclones in living memory in Northern Australia.
And Australia hasn’t been alone. The past year has seen big snowfalls in the US and Europe, severe drought in the Amazon, and severe flooding from South Africa and Sri Lanka to the Philippines and Pakistan.
The issue of climate change has been on the public agenda for most of the week with Federal Parliament debating the merits of a Carbon Tax to abate our prolific expulsion of unregulated carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Buried on page 18 of the Business supplement of the Feb 5-6 Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Garnaut, the Government’s Climate Policy advisor, named the elephant in the room and made the link between recent extreme weather events and climate change. He states that what is written deeply into the scientific literature is the story of the warming of the world, intensifying extreme events. What is more, Garnaut said that since his 2008 review, the science has only become more alarming. The general trend is to confirm that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its fourth assessment report of 2007 underestimated the impacts of climate change. “All the measurable impacts are tracking right at the top of the range of possibilities identified by the panel, or in some cases above them”. “Bear in mind that we’re just at the beginning of the warming process,” he said.
He asks “Why is it, when there is overwhelming scientific consensus that the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already high enough to carry the climate system past significant tipping points, that our political establishment is taking Australia backwards in addressing the climate change emergency?
His answer is found in his original report- that we were coming up against “powerful vested interests”- such as fossil fuel companies and the banks that have invested in them.” This is why Australian governments, state and federal, are not doing what the science shows we should do.” It is going to keep going like this unless the Australian people build a powerful counter-force to those “powerful vested interests”
Cartoon:
Rudd government vs ET scheme.
Cartoon of Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong.
Kevin was on a huge power station emission stack spewing out pollution and CO2.
Penny on a ladder. Kevin is reaching down saying “The cork, Penny, please?”
Penny with this tiny little cork handing it up.
A cartoon clearly indicating that what we were doing was highly inadequate.
I wonder if our lack of action and paralysis as a people is due to a deep disconnection between ourselves as living, alive organisms and the rest of life. Our retreat into our mind space has separated us on many levels from each other and the rest of life on this planet.
The mystics speak of getting in touch with our livingness, that sense of being alive, that breath that breathes us without our doing anything, the pulse within that transports blood and oxygen to our cells- cells which are ever growing and dying without our awareness or controlling them.
When we get in touch with this dimension and stay in touch with it, we touch that deep connectedness within us and all of life.
I wonder if this mystical dimension of oneness and connectedness was experienced at Pentecost for the early apostles when they address the crowds gathered around the place of awakening to the Spirit, they speak a language that all peoples of all cultures understand. It is what the Spirit and getting in touch with the Spirit does to people- it unites and breaks down the barriers, getting in touch with that deep inner aliveness – that which connects us all.
For the Buddhists, they refer to this tapping into the Spirit as tapping into Mindfulness, a mindfulness that is fully aware of all that life is both within one self and outside.
After Judith Lucy’s homily last week, a few of us were talking about having a spiritual practice that awakens this dimension within us; Judith shared that having a spiritual practice such as yoga helps her get in touch with this dimension. We all shared different ways which assisted us in touching that deeper dimension within ourselves. That place where one is one with one self and all of life.
Eckhardt Tolle describes the journey to such a place as the journey to stillness. He writes “To be still is to be conscious without thought. You are never more essentially, more deeply yourself than when you are still. When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves.”
If as a nation we can get beyond the debate on whether to have or not have a Carbon Tax and we are able by some mysterious, miraculous awakening to get beyond the mind games and political debates, and tap into our collective aliveness, that aspect when we tap into our deep connectedness to ourselves and the rest of life on this planet. It is then we will be able to act and act correctly informed by a deep knowing. Action not based on Fear but on Love. Not actions based on fear where we will ultimately poison, pollute and populate ourselves out of existence, but based on love and deep connectedness, knowing that what we do, we ultimately do to ourselves, for the small self is the big self.
When we come to act from this space, we will be basing our decisions and actions on Rock and not on the shifting sands which provides no real lasting and sustainable future.
10/03/2011 at 2:07 am Permalink
OK here’s my comment.
I think with the yoga and stuff, you are barking up the wrong tree, look again, it might just be a fencepost. Then I see, one of you advocates a “deep knowing” and the other one to be “in the mystery”. Climate change seems to have induced a complete fog. I leave you with a genuine enquiry: What could be the purpose of this paradox? ? ?
11/03/2011 at 3:37 pm Permalink
You wonder if the Chinese and a few other Asian countries have a few practical solutions to climate change, with their love of bicycle transport, cheap electronics, and general resourcefulness. A herb garden is going strong at the old St Mary’s in the Catholic Prisons Ministry carpark, looked after by Taiwanese Catholic lady Denise. I am amazed at her resourcefulness, and energy, involved in cleaning, music, flower arranging, and being a lynch pin of the old church – she just doesn’t seem to sleep. Cycling for me has been since my uni days at St Mary’s in the 80s not just a practical and environmentally friendly A to B, but the wonderful outdoors activity and rhythm has inspired many a verse or melody. Countless times I’ve stopped at a newsagent when cycling to jot down those ideas, perhaps I should save my money on paper, and use the HD video on my little Nikon DSLR. The pace on the bicycle is slower than car, and it’s a rougher trip with more hazards, but with its own rewards.
13/03/2011 at 5:19 pm Permalink
Hello Contributors,
We are now being told by the pulpit males that to be consummated with the deepest mystery we must find a yogic connection to the profound, to the alpha point of our stillness, and stuff like that. Actually, we have heard all this before: back in the late 60’s, after the death of Christianity, by a procession of obese Indian guru god-men spewing the stuff. The fat holy men weren’t really after anything all that spiritual; they chased money, women and anything else they could get their hands on. They were cashing in on the vacuum created when we realised that if Rabbi Jesus did die for sins they were his own. And if we were born in original sin it was the sickness of our collective culture to which so called Christianity had made its considerable sick contribution. Nowadays only ageing baby boomers fearing old age and death are still trying to deep breathe their way to spiritual perfection. It’s actually a tough ask: freeing yourself from illusion by taking on the illusion of perfection. But then again, why not? They’ve tried everything else: open- closed- non marriages, same gender experimentation, collective non-linear parenting, although some took a short cut and did drugs now suffering from brain damage. They were revolutionary; so they told themselves. Mainly, it was a consumer pig-on devouring the planet. Rather than dealing with their guilt they now listen to Abbott telling them there is nothing wrong.
The wise women of Peter’s cult must act and act now! They must take control of the pulpit and, for their own spiritual good, send Peter and Terry off to join a men’s group to experience the crisis of masculinity. There they will enter their “dark night of the soul”. Terry will learn what the sixteenth century master discovered: there is not technique. Prayer of quiet, mediation, contemplation, corporal self modification, head stands, sleeping on nails, eating your own urine: they don’t work. The chaos of the mind is too out-of-control for petty ego functions. Only the experience of inner suffering has the power to free us from delusions. Look what happened to Rabbi Jesus who thought he was the Jewish Messiah. The Romans had to thrash it out of him.
Love Fosco
14/03/2011 at 10:52 pm Permalink
I got an email a while ago asking me to explain something or another, not really sure what the issue was.
As the publisher you are soliciting unpaid comments and I have never wanted to usurp your natural rights to publish or not publish. So go ahead and censor if like other publishers, all you want to do is put your spin on things, and not be challenged, to put it a nice way, you have simply gone from debate to advertising.
15/03/2011 at 2:25 pm Permalink
Hello Contributors,
The hater H. St. John is a blessing, why doesn’t everybody acknowledge that? Somebody has to say it as it is. Nice to learn that Tim is a bicycle person. I am a public transporter myself. So there is hope for the planet.
Love Fosco
16/03/2011 at 12:29 pm Permalink
Fosco, issue with H.St.John is he doesn’t use his own name on this blog (not a blessing).
That not withstanding, the last phrase of H.St.John’s above message “you have simply gone from debate to advertising”, is H.St.John’s best comment to date. I don’t disagree with advertising, after all, this is the mode of the Catholic and other churches. This is simply the SME culture, given their largely Catholic heritage. Whether there is a blog on not, Catholics are good business people. Thus is it a good comment from H.St.John, because it accords with comments over the decades made at St Mary’s from even those sympathetic to Kennedy, (e.g. “less dogma from the pulpit”, “why aren’t we looking after this old heritage listed building?”, etc). To put it simply, comment can be bad for business, in attempting to build a brand name. Also, H.St.John receiving an email as described from the moderator questions the impartiality of the moderator, necessary for a good blog debate.
I however, contend this is not the place for that debate – I think a much better debate on critiquing the Catholic church can be held elsewhere. That I don’t know off hand, the URL to that blog, probably shows my failings as a church musician, and something I must research once I’m more on top of the basic issues regarding music at the old church, and have more time on my hands.
26/03/2011 at 6:12 pm Permalink
I agree with Tim, everything I say should be censored out and everyone should be forced to listen to Christmas carols all year round.