St Mary's

Homily – St. Mary’s in Exile

Sunday 7^th March 2010

Dr. Val Webb

© Copyright belongs to author. This cannot be reproduced/published without author permission.

Last month, when John sent me today’s Gospel reading, the timing was perfect.  The fig trees in our orchard were bulging with ripe, purple figs and we were eating fresh figs, stewed figs, figs with cheese, fig salad and fig jam.  However, one of our trees has stubbornly refused to bear fruit for even longer than the three years recorded in this parable from Jesus, and so the reading grabbed my attention in a practical way.

This parable isn’t just a simple story – they never are, although we often tell them as if they were cosy little stories affirming how we already act.  The parables that Jesus told were all about subverting the status quo and challenging myths perpetuated by the dominant and powerful in society as to how life is.  Despite Christian art depicting Jesus working with his father in a well-appointed carpenter’s shop, Jesus’ family were at the bottom of the social class – they were landless Galilean peasants and basic labourers, perhaps building scaffolding for stonework on construction sites.  Remember the derisive words when he taught in his hometown and the locals took offense — “Where did he get his wisdom and healing powers — Isn’t this the carpenter’s son whose parents and siblings we know?”  This makes it all the more pertinent when Jesus tells parables about reimagining a world that subverts powerful religious, political and social norms.  When the Samaritan became the hero in the “Good Samaritan” story, the Jewish audience would have been outraged because of their established myths about the despised Samaritans.  And so, if we are to understand this parable of the fig tree, we need to search for clues in the story that tell us what dominant Jewish myth is being challenged by Jesus in his turn-the-world-upside-down style.

The fig tree was symbolic in biblical times – it meant peace and prosperity with its sweet fruit and its shady leaves, but it was also a symbol for the Jewish people themselves.  In another story in two of the Gospels, Jesus looks for fruit on a fig tree out of season and curses it because it had none – a strange story that referred to the Jews — but this parable is the opposite of that story.  According to our Gospel reading, people had come to Jesus to tell him that some Galileans had been murdered by Pilate, assuming that this tragedy happened because of their sinfulness, that same belief that led people to ask Jesus about the blind man “Who sinned, he or his parents?”  Who knows – since Jesus was Galilean, perhaps this was also a cheap shot at Galileans.  Jesus comes straight back at them.  Trying to make direct links between sin and consequent suffering is wrong and totally misses the point, which is that everyone is capable of missing the mark and thus all need to repent our damaging actions.  To prove his point, Jesus pulls in another example.  Apparently some fortification tower had fallen and killed a group of people, and Jesus made the point that, whether a natural disaster like this or deliberate evil like people being murdered, neither was punishment for human sin, but all of us need to repent our wrongs.  It’s also good to remember that repentance was more about corporate repentance in Jesus’ day, rather than individuals counting out the many sins they needed to confess.  Repentance was about collective guilt, about changing one’s mind and ways and coming to a new way of thinking and acting as a people – bringing in God’s reign.

The fig tree parable challenges the Jewish myth that poverty, illness and suffering are the result of sin; and wealth, health and success were signs of righteousness, a theology preached openly in Victorian England and still believed internally by many people today who refuse to address homelessness, poverty and powerlessness.   It’s interesting to imagine who they players are in this parable – Jesus doesn’t tell us, expecting that we can work it out.  It is the owner of the orchard that comes to check the trees and found this non-productive tree.  The owner tells the gardener to cut it down.  Although in the long run, it is about economics – who wants a fig tree with no fruit to sell or eat – the reason given here is “Why should it exhaust the soil?” or, in other words, why should something unproductive be a drain on resources that could be put to better use, namely to support those that are productive.  Does this sound a bit like some of today’s arguments – why pump money and resources into welfare systems or prop up unproductive members of society or, as a corollary, let’s give incentive payments to those who produce results and millions to CEO’s who will get the most profit out of the soil?  It’s the old argument of the best use of limited resources, an argument that always pushes some off the lifeboat.  So who is the owner of the orchard in the story?

It’s the gardener, the hired hand, who stops the hand of the owner, saying that this is not the only solution.  The gardener is passionate about the trees and the soil.  “If you’re worried about exhausting the soil,” the gardener says, “I shall cultivate the ground around the tree and fertilize it so that it has a better chance to bear figs – leave it for another year while I try.  If not, you can cut it down.”  The gardener argues for a reprieve, offering nurture and special care of this unproductive tree by providing better resources which add rather than take away from the whole.  The gardener is not about to give up on it or the exhausted soil.  The story is actually not about the either/or of one fig tree, but about how to nourish all life — the interdependence of soil, air and all the trees – so that everything and everyone flourishes.

I’m so glad that this was the Gospel reading assigned for today because it made me look more closely to see what Jesus might have been saying about the worldview of his time.  I hadn’t noticed how contemporary the parable is, which is exactly what parables are for – metaphors and stories drawing on common life that arrest us with their vividness or strangeness, such that we have to stop and tease them out.  We could think through this parable for all its meanings for hours and not exhaust it – make it your meditation for the coming week.  What does it say about sharing resources?  What about people we think of as “unproductive” or a drain on society’s resources?  How do we measure productivity in people?  Why is it so much about economics in our society?  Who deserves the best care, the extra fertilizer and digging around their roots?  What does it say about mercy, new life, hope, the patience and commitment of the gardener?

So who are the players in the parable?  Interestingly, the owner of the orchard is not God – or at least we don’t imagine so.  We need to give God the compassionate role, the merciful role, that of the gardener who tenderly cares for the plant – and yet we are making that assumption, it is not spelled out as that.  What if the orchard owner is God, the God with whom the Jews who questioned Jesus would relate – didn’t they assume that suffering and death was God’s punishment on sin which, in the case of a fig tree, meant not bearing fruit?  Wasn’t that their original assumption that Jesus challenged – the direct relationship, 2 + 2 = 4 between sin and punishment?  They would be thinking that God was the orchard owner until, wait, the gardener stands up to this God and stays the Divine hand, desiring mercy not death.  So is the gardener the “other” God, the God of the transformed way of living, the God whose “reign” Jesus is all about bringing in?  Is this about the conflict between the ways we have imaged God as the punishing Judge who comes from outside the orchard to give orders, control and to destroy – and the God who gives and operates within the garden, the gardener who nurtures the soil, cares for the trees and promotes the flourishing of everything within the universe, seeing the unique worth of each?

Dare I bring the metaphor even closer?  You’re allowed to do anything with parables.  There is more to life than figs.  In biblical times, the fig tree was valued as a beautiful shade tree, something essential for hot climates.  The leaves were used as medicinal poultices for healing the sick and fig leaves were incorporated into the Genesis story in order to hide the nakedness and shame of Adam and Eve.  They are also a symbol of peace and prosperity – all this without even the need for fruit.  Perhaps the owner of the orchard is the institutional church who only judge the usefulness of a fig tree or congregation by the homogenous crop of traditional fruit or believers it produces.  The orchard owner had to search for fruit on the tree which suggests it had a healthy mass of leaves under which they might be hidden.  St. Mary’s has been about the leaves – sheltering people from the heat of an unforgiving, merciless world; spreading its leaves such that peoples’ fear and nakedness will not be exposed to cruel judgment; making leaf poultices that heal the body as well as the soul; and offering a cool haven of peace and calm in a hostile world where all questions can be asked and discussed.  The orchard owner sees only figs as the point of the tree, but this community has recognized so much more and thus the Spirit of the community, the gardener, asks that it be allowed to grow, to be cultivated and fertilized to see what it can actually become, something beyond the institutional vision.

When I started pondering this parable, I saw nothing of this – it was a fig tree story with a generic idea of God’s care, but it gets deeper and deeper and wider and wider as we apply our own particular experiences and context to it.  This is the beauty of parables – they are free of baggage about truth, doctrine and form, because they loudly proclaim themselves as fiction and thus we are free to take them on board and let them speak to our own situation – Jesus said after one of his parables, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”  He was also reluctant to explain his parables when the disciples found them troubling for exactly this same reason – let them simply speak to where the hearer is in their life.  Some might say, why bother about these old stories?  We can come up with similar examples in our own day, but when so much of the Bible has become outdated with its cosmology, patriarchy and violence and when so much of what is good in it has been smothered by institutional baggage and medieval interpretation, even the person of Jesus himself, it is refreshing to be able to take these stories which, according to contemporary scholars are more likely than other material to have come from the lips of Jesus, and thus feel we are responding to what he saw as the transformed way to live in the world and with each other.

Where do you find yourself in this parable?  Are you part of the soil that nourishes life, or the gardener who never give up on anything or anyone – God has no hands but our hands, so the cultivating and nurturing is ours to do.  Or the fig tree that had a series of bad years and has been rendered unproductive and dying of thirst and nourishment, needing some good soil around you to support and strengthen you – or even simply not to give up on you?  Or do you find yourself more in the role of the orchard owner, striving for profit and success, and valuing everything and everyone around you by the bottom line?  Or, perhaps you are one of the other trees in the orchard, disdainful of the one squandering the soil without giving anything back, or alternately, thankful for a gardener who sees value and potential life in every tree?

From what I have read about this community, especially in the recent book published about Father Kennedy and you all, I see you as the gardener, caring for so many people whom the orchard owner would reject, believing in the worth of every living thing, resisting a society that looks only at productivity and the bottom line and, most of all, living in hope that, with a little bit of cultivation, nurture and tender loving care, everyone of us can flourish and no one needs to be overlooked or eliminated. You are believers in the interconnectedness of all life and the Spirit that lives within you and this garden, caring about its survival and flourishing.  May you continue to be so.

You can support St Mary’s by donating to

St Mary’s Community Ltd, BSB 064-131 10339414

or contact St Mary’s Catholic Community and Micah Projects

PO Box 3449 SOUTH BRISBANE 4101 Ph 3029 7000

www.stmaryssouthbrisbane.com

The new sets of envelopes for the community giving system have arrived and will be available for collection after Masses on the weekend.

The various ways to donate here at St Mary’s include:
1    A cash donation is placed on the collection plate,
2    A numbered envelope is used where amounts can be written according to the contributor’s wishes,
3    A quarterly/half yearly contribution can be given and apportioned according to the members wishes using a plain envelope with details and amount enclosed,
4    Community members may wish to use their own internet banking system to transfer an amount weekly, monthly or quarterly to the St Mary’s account or approach their own bank to arrange a periodic payment to BSB 064-131  Account number: 10332933

Increasingly more members are choosing this fourth option and a form for this purpose is available giving the details of St Mary’s Commonwealth Bank account.  If you are not using prenumbered envelopes we ask that you consider joining this scheme and leave your name and address on the sheet provided at Mass so that appropriate receipts can be issued for the tax deductible portions that are given.

Here at St Mary’s we have only one collection time during the mass. This collection time is just after the Homily and before the Prayers of the Faithful. One amount is given by the those present to cover the traditional first and second collections.

Baptism recertification

Baptism recertification

‘For Baptism to be valid the Catholic Church requires that the minister must pour the water and say the words in the ritual. This has not always happened in this parish. This certificate attests that a ceremony took place but is not a guarantee that the Baptism was valid. If the one whose name appears on the certificate is preparing for the reception of other sacraments such as the reconciliation and confirmation reception of first holy communion  or wishing to be married in the Catholic Church  please show this certificate to the priest involved in the preparation. He will do what is needed to ensure validity of the baptism.’

Peter Kennedy response

This is an excellent example of what the former Scottish Anglican Primate Richard Holloway calls the “theology of anxiety” which the church imposes upon its people, in the name of orthodoxy”.

It is moreover a nonsense to argue that a baptism is invalid – “read ‘does not work” – because the celebrant uses the words “Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of Life” instead of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. We can only talk about God in metaphor – that which is unknowable, ineffable is always beyond words.

The Leadership of the Catholic Church in this Archdiocese is complicit in encouraging unnecessary anxiety in the minds of some parents. But not many I would suggest.

As Father Eric Hodgers – a priest in the Melbourne Archdiocese – said only last year: “of course baptisms at St Mary’s are valid. All you have to do is apply the ‘duck test’. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck”.

What Eric Hodgers is pointing out, albeit humorously, is that the INTENTION to baptise is what matters, not the use or non-use of a “magical” formula/metaphor.

The Catholic Church under its current leadership is rapidly descending into farce.

Where are the voices of sanity?

PETER KENNEDY: THE MAN WHO THREATENED ROME National Book Launch Dates

You and your friends are invited to attend the book launch of

PETER KENNEDY: The Man Who Threatened Rome

Flanagan, Martin et al: Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened Rome.
One Day Hill, Melbourne, 2009. ISBN 978 0 9805643 6 5.

If you know of anyone in these locations, please pass on this invitation and information.

Rockhampton – Friday 12th February 7pm
All Saints Anglican Church, Simpson Street, North Rockhampton.
Noel Preston to launch the chaired by Fr Cam Venables.

Canberra – Tuesday 23rd February 12 noon
Parliament House Canberra
Paul Collins is launching the book hat day. If attending please contact Senator Claire Moore’s offices – 02 6277 3447 Parliament House..

Sydney – Tuesday 23rd February 6pm
The Glebe Bookshop 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe – (02 9660 2333
Phillip Adams is launching the book.

Melbourne – Thursday 25th February 6pm
Readings Carlton Bookstore 309 Lygon Street, Carlton – 03 9347 6633
Martin Flanagan is launching his book

HOMILY  by Joan Mooney Jan 23rd-24th 2010

Some years ago one of my brothers was in Ireland researching our family history. One day, not being sure of a destination he asked directions of a bystander. The gentleman replied, ‘Ah well, you go along here, then you turn right, and then you turn right etc etc’. It was all very complicated, and he ended with ……‘but if I was you I wouldn’t be startin’ from here.’

I am calling this talk ‘the way forward.’ One day Thomas, one of the disciples, said to Jesus, “we do not know where we are going, so how can we know the way?’ To get anywhere, then, we need to know not only our destination and the way there, but , most important of all, where we are starting from, where we are now.

TS Eliot puts it-
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

We live in a very future-oriented world. An article by Kevin Rudd in The Australian this week is entitled – How we can achieve a more productive future. He begins …….
As we enter the 2nd decade of the 21st century, we can be optimistic about our future. But we cannot be complacent.

The catchcry of education today is –prepare them for the future. Then there are the ‘futures funds’, whose meaning escapes me entirely, and countless other futures predictions.

What many are forgetting about, is to consider where we are now, for to know where we are now is to know who we are.

To know where we are now is to know our place in history, for the way forward is the way back. The great contribution of Charles Darwin was to show us our position in the chain of evolution. And history is more than facts and data. That part is easy. History, as the word implies, is story, and story includes experience and understanding. We have all kinds of stories to investigate –more than investigate, we have to enter a story, walk around in it , absorb its message, its wisdom, and translate it into an understanding and a guide for ourselves and our own time. We have all sorts of stories – family stories, literary, ancestral, national, global, universal, cosmic etc. A crucial genre of story, in my view, is our religious story. A person I was speaking to recently dismissed our religious heritage as ‘mere fairy stories.’ Unknown to him, his statement was ironic, for fairy stories also hold wisdom.

Why are our religious stories of such importance? Because they contain wisdom. I am not , of course , speaking of literalism and dogmatism, but of the pearls of wisdom hidden in our scriptures. I beg to differ from the person who recently stated that God did not write the scriptures. Divine wisdom, in my view, is clearly evident in our Christian, as well as in the  scriptures of other religious traditions.

To cut people off from their history, from their story, as happened in the dispossession of land of our own and other indigenous people; in the displacement of peoples through war and exile is to deny them their very humanity.

Of course, we don’t want to get stuck in the past, either, to cling to clearly outmoded practices or world views. The thread that binds us to our history is both strong and fragile, and brings us right down to our present time.

What , then, can we do to answer the question in Drew Dellinger’s poem

my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered

Drew Dellinger is a contemporary American philosopher and poet, recently in Brisbane.

In a recent interview, Andrew Denton asked the distinguished White House journalist, Helen Thomas   ‘what do you see as the future of our species?’
She answered – I don’t care about the future, but I worry about how we are now.   -  people killed by wars, the gas chambers, people discriminated against.’ Among a battery of journalists hers was the only voice to publicly challenge George Bush on the torture of Iraqis by American soldiers She asked later- where were they, where were all the colleagues who should have spoken out in support? When Peter and Terry were dismissed from St Mary’s, unjustly, was there a single colleague, a single bishop, a single priest who came publicly to their defence or support. Where were they? We may well ask.

In a recent talk Drew Dellinger suggests that a way forward for is to listen to the voice of women. There’s no shortage of women’s voices in this community, but in most societies and communities throughout the world, despite the great feminist movement, women are still largely unheard. Most commentators judged the Copenhagen meeting a flop. Penny Wong would have been there, but amidst the large array of men in suits I didn’t notice many women.

Most ages of history have made a specific  contribution to our human story eg the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the plays of Shakespeare, the inventions of modern science etc. Drew Dellinger opines that the unique contribution of our era may well be our embracing of ecology. This is more than planting a few trees, important in a practical way  as that is; ecology implies understanding , entering the story of our earth; going further, to cosmology – the story, not just the scientific, facts, of the universe. Cosmology is recognising the interconnectedness of all things, and therefore treating all creatures, all things, with respect, compassion and love.

‘Lifting millions out of subsistence living should be our moral imperative’, writes journalist John Cox. Development is not necessarily a dirty word. Here again the way forward may well be the way back.  Harry S Truman’s inaugural address in 1949 used the word ‘development’ to commit the US to world economic progress. ‘The present focus on terrorism and globalisation makes me pine for the idealism of the 2nd half of C20’, writes Cox. The fierce opposition in the US to Barack Obama’s proposed health reforms is born of the unwillingness of Middle America to share their wealth with the poor, especially the black poor. They are forgetting that in degrading these people they are degrading their own flesh and blood.

Then we have to wake up the dreamers, the poets, the philosophers, the statesmen, of today. A young boy, Laurie Wallis, topped the NSW HSC English course for a sequence of poems in which he meditates on mankind, nature and language. This is a voice, the voice of youth, which we could well heed.

And we have to wake up ourselves. We are all depositaries of wisdom, but on the whole we don’t know how to access it. We can’t just sit around waiting for sparks of wisdom to come forth, we have to prepare the ground.  The great C16 Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, tells us that after spending 20 years meditating, patiently and perseveringly, she experienced a Divine and transforming illumination.  Mozart wrote 41 symphonies. On one occasion he saw in his minds eye an entire symphony. But Mozart, too, had done the hard yards. From the age of three he had studied music, worked at his harmony ezercises. Then there was more more hard work, translating the wisdom of that symphony into a format that others could access. And so we can listen to the great Mozart symphonies today.

On the other hand, the spirit breathes where she will. In our Peace Dance tradition there is a beautiful song and dance. The text is
Suddenly, at any mundane moment, the infinite may come through.

If we are lucky, wisdom may simply strike us out of the blue. As the first reading for today says,

‘wisdom walks about looking for those who are worthy of her.

A pity if we do not recognise her. For Wisdom comes in many guises. She won’t always come as a full-blown symphony.  TS Eliot reminds us–
The only Wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility

That, surely, is accessible to us all.

KR urged us not to be complacent; Goenka, a meditation teacher in the Vipassana tradition, says over and over. Every moment is so precious; we cannot afford to lose a single moment.We can glibly dismiss the fleeting moment as  just that, but this moment,  to give TS Eliot the final word,

‘is not isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

We must seize that moment.

Terry’s homily 26-27 December, 2009

Marg Ortiz, in her infinite wisdom, called the summer edition of St Mary’s Matters “Original Blessing”. In it she writes, “As we come up to Christmas, how can we talk about the incarnation in a language that makes sense in today’s world?  If we have an image of God that is in no way the OUT THERE sort, then we need to consider what incarnation means. If God is an integral part of every part of every atom of matter in the earth – as Tillich said, the Ground of All Being – then we are as much in God as Jesus was”.
What a wonderful thought as opposed to that dreadful concept inspired by St Augustine of “Original Sin”, as most of us understood it from our Catechetical Instructions. In the beginning, all of life is in a state of “Original Sin”. Separated from God until Baptism when through some magic words Original Sin is removed. Unbelievable. If you think this concept of Original Sin is dead and buried / think again.
A story related to me after one of the Christmas masses by some people who had lost their certificate for their child who was Baptised at St Mary’s some years ago. They approached the Archdiocese main office, which now runs St Mary’s, and asked for a certificate in order to enrol their child in the local Catholic school. They received a note explaining that the child was invalidly baptised and would need to be baptised again. The father of the child was annoyed and rang and asked to speak to the priest in charge. When the child’s father spoke of his concern for what effect this would have on his child to tell her she needed to be baptised again, in order to go to school, the priest responded by saying that he should be more concerned that the child is still in a state of “Original Sin”. A concept alive and well in the hearts and minds  of people in high places within this diocese.
It was a concept concocted  by Saint Augustine to maintain the power and control of the patriarchal church. Put simply, you kick everyone out of union with God,  and you call this state of non union, Original Sin, and say that the only way to God is through Baptism, by the patriarchal correct formulae, by a Male celibate priest in the Roman Catholic  Church. Everyone else is excluded. A very important belief designed primarily to favour a celibate, male dominated Church which maintains the only way to God is through this Church.
Original Blessing is quite the opposite to Original Sin. In original blessing all of life is blessed, there is no exclusion, no saying this is sacred and this is profane/ you’re in, you’re out. God / the sacred infuses every atom of matter in the earth. Nothing anyone can say or do can bring this about. In Barbara Fiand’s book “From Religion Back to Faith: A Journey of the Heart”, she has a wonderful story that captures this concept of original blessing:

The story is told of an old monk who one night in a dream was visited by the risen Christ. They went on a walk together in quiet intimacy, enjoying each other’s presence. Finally the old man turned to Jesus and asked: “When you walked the hills of Palestine, you mentioned that one day you would come again in all your glory. Lord, it’s been so long: when will you return for good?”
After a few moments of silence the resurrected and living One said, “When my presence in nature all around you and my presence beneath the surface of your skin is as real to you as my presence right now, when this awareness becomes second nature to you, then will I have returned for good.”
The dream was very vivid and carried the monk into the next day when, deep in thought, he walked again, this time by himself – or so he thought. As he stopped and bent over a small pond to wash his face, he gazed “for a brief but eternal moment” at his reflection and at the images of the trees and the sky reflected in the water as well, and there he heard a gentle whisper: “You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

In this story, the old monk realises that he is Holy. He is sacred, infused with God, as much as all that surrounded him.
That the second coming is a realisation that there was no first coming. God has been present all along.
I wonder what state our planet would be in today if we had had a concept of Original Blessing instead of Original Sin. Would we have treated the earth as something to be used and exploited for humanity’s gain or would we have a deep reverence for the earth, avoiding the Environmental Mess we have made of our home? I would like to think the latter would have been the case.
The words of our opening song capture something of what I am trying to say, I would like to finish with them,
THE ORDINARY IS MARVELLOUS

“When we ponder on the advent story,
When we contemplate the wonderous birth, let us sing of miracle and glory
Bursting through our history here on earth.
Let us also prize the common
That which happens everywhere and often.

So we treasure all the common graces,
Live each day as precious and unique.
God is present at all times and places,
On the plains ,as on the peak.
Plain yet wonderous,every
hours,
God,within,enriches us with power.

Illuminating the St Mary’s conflict
Andrew Hamilton December 11, 2009 reprinted from Eurekastreet.com

Flanagan, Martin et al: Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened Rome. One Day Hill, Melbourne, 2009. ISBN 978 0 9805643 6 5. Online

Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened RomeThe conflict between Archbishop John Bathersby and Fr Peter Kennedy’s St Mary’s congregation was passionate and public. This valuable book illuminates the dispute, setting it into a human context that is both much smaller and larger than that offered by the media coverage.

The most instructive and moving contributions to the book are studies of people involved. Two interviews of Kennedy by Martin Flanagan serve as book ends. Flanagan catches the contemplative and detached character of Kennedy’s personality. These make his understated religious leadership so formidable and so attractive.

Michele Gierck’s profiles of a range of people involved in the life of the congregation are also deeply insightful. She allows them to speak for themselves, perhaps more eloquently than they knew they could speak. The stories of people help you see the depth of what is involved in the building and pulling down of communities, the precarious lives that find some mending, the desired connections made, the broken people who find nurturing.

These pieces, together with the autobiographical reflections by people who have known St Mary’s, suggest why and how the St Mary’s congregation will survive its separation from the Brisbane Catholic church.

The large themes of the story bear wider reflection. Most contributors emphasise the importance of the congregation, expressing disappointment and surprise that it was not consulted during the conflict. This suggests disconnection between the inclusive and self-effacing leadership offered to the community by its two priests, and the place in the Catholic Tradition of the priest as teacher and as responsible to the Bishop for his community.

There may also be a larger tension between the Australian preference for association between equals and the hierarchical structures of the Catholic church. This tension expresses itself occasionally in conflict of the kind experienced at St Mary’s but more often in the quiet withdrawal from the Catholic Church by people who identify it with authoritarian ways of relating.

Many contributors also express outrage that blow-ins who came to St Mary’s to tape sermons, photograph ceremonies, and denounce it to the Archbishop and to the Vatican were given credit by Church authorities. They see this as noxious as welcoming blowflies to Christmas dinner. Certainly, it is hard to imagine anything more alienating to its members than a school, a society or a church that encourages tell-tales and snitches.

But the contributors return to the break between the St Mary’s community and the Brisbane Catholic Church. Much of the comment deals with the underlying tension between the inclusiveness of the community worship and its symbols and the insistence by the Archbishop on the universal symbols of the Catholic Church. I found myself most exercised personally by this question.

I take it as axiomatic that Christian communities should offer hospitality to the hesitant, doubtful, searching and disconcerted. That is a Christian ideal, and also reflects life in any congregation and seasons in the life of most Christians. Congregations that claim to be models of untroubled faith and Christian living simply suffer from lack of self-knowledge.

The merit of St Mary’s is that the diversity of the congregation is evident, and that its welcome to those on the margins of the Catholic Church is explicit and is honoured in its practice as well as in its rhetoric. That is why the separation is such a loss for the Brisbane Catholic Church. If one of the traditional identifying qualities of the Catholic Church is holiness, and if energetic and visible reaching out to marginalised people is an essential expression of holiness, to lose people who offer such a conspicuous example of it is to lose much.

The question the book leaves me with is not about the inclusiveness of the community, but about what people are included into. In my understanding, at the heart of Catholic faith has been the conviction that God has acted decisively for all human beings in the life, death and rising of Jesus Christ. The implications of this faith have been spelled out in summary form in the claim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that God is trinity.

This fundamental belief shapes relationships in the Church and its teaching. It is expressed through symbols of faith in the church. The language of liturgy and the ways of praying provide a matrix within which doubt, hesitation, wonderment and disconcertment can be held. The shared symbols allow a proper tension between what is received and what is individually believed, lived and struggled with.

The reflections in this book generally focus on the tension between these symbols and creeds, and the belief of individuals or the demands of modernity. That in itself is unproblematic. Peter Kennedy himself wants to preserve a proper silence about God and to insist on the limitations of words and language.

But in the reflections that insist on the need for new words, for respect for the mystery of God, it was not clear whether the decisive investment of God in the life of Jesus Christ was an event for which new words needed to be found, or was part of the old words that needed to be superseded. I did not find any clear assertion that in Jesus Christ God has spoken a decisive word into silence, and that this is the heart of Christian faith.

A large question to be left with. And that is the significance of the dispute and the merit of this book.
Andrew HamiltonAndrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.

Peter Kennedy; The Man who Threatened Rome, was launched on Saturday December 5th 2009 at the Uniting Church West End, by journalist Martin Flanagan along with Michele Gierck, publishers Bernadette and Milton Walters, artist Peter Hudson, commentator Paul Collins, singers/songwriters Shane Howard and Robert Perrier and  Uncle Des Sandy who gave a  welcome to country.

Should you wish to purchase this book then ask for it at your local book store, the publishers are One Day Hill, a Melbourne company.  Copies will be sold at all weekend masses or can be requested via this website or by phoning 07 3029 7000.

$30 per book -a portion goes to Micah Projects and St Mary’s Community in Exile.

If you would like to follow this event as reported by the media then follow these links

http://www.abc.net.au/news

http://www.cathnews.com

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/

or the http://www.sunherald.com.au/

read the many comments and give your comment to enable more consideration by all readers and to continue this open dialogue.