St Mary's

One particular person cannot speak on behalf of everybody’s personal spiritual creed.  Once we try and draw a box around ourselves and state “That is what St Mary’s in Exile believes!” we run the very real risk of excluding new insights and new ways to experience our shared journey.

David Cantwell



My name is David Cantwell and I have been a member of this community since 1987.

I feel I have come full circle given my first real encounter with Peter Kennedy was at our rented flat in the late 80’s.  We had invited him over for dinner as Trish and I had become engaged and in true Catholic tradition, we invited the priest over for dinner.

Reverend Ken Howell conducts the 9am Mass at St Mary's Church, South Brisbane, on Sunday July 11. Photo: Michelle Smith

KATE DENNEHY July 19, 2010 – 10:37AM

The pictures tell the story of attendance at the two St Mary’s Catholic churches at South Brisbane with the rebel congregation substantially outnumbering the traditionalists last week.

Fairfax Media’s Sun-Herald dropped in unannounced at the 9am services on a recent Sunday to check on parishioner numbers following last year’s very public split.

This book ‘The Future of Faith” by Harvey Cox was given to me recently in Melbourne by the Progressive Christian Network.  It is a book which I believe can help us to understand what happened to this community and why it happened and what our future might look like.  I found it easy to read and indeed compelling.  I want to look only at Chapter 1 entitled “ An Age of the Spirit” – “The Sacred in the Secular?”

Cox begins with a question “ What does the future hold for religion and for Christianity in particular?”  I believe the clue to a correct answer is

“The realm of God is very near to you, for in God we live and move and have our being”.

Indigenous peoples were very aware of this. God was everywhere.

The sacred infused all of life; this is reflected in this Native American Navajo chant.

“The mountains, I become part of it…

The herbs, the fir tree, I become part of it.

The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering waters, I become part of it.

The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen…

I become part of it.”

Our collective sense of being a part of nature, our world, our environment was lost somewhere in our move to go indoors, building bigger and more elaborate buildings – filling them with more and more things – Symbolically, removing ourselves from nature, from Mother Earth, from the source of our life. The rhythm of life, the movements of nature, the cycles of the moon, the rise and fall of the tides, the gathering of clouds, the direction of the wind, become insignificant, unimportant, along with so much which connected us to our fragile planet.

The removal of Indigenous peoples from their land, their mother, their source – and we were seemingly oblivious to what damage such severing would cause. Land was a commodity to be owned, bought and sold, fenced, dug up, damaged and destroyed at a whim.

CALLED TO SAY YES TO THE EMPTINESS

This week many of us from St Mary’s had the good fortune of being part of the 50 lives 50 homes campaign. An Australian first. Karyn Walsh and members of Micah went to United States last year and came home with the idea of launching this program. It was a comprehensive survey of Brisbane’s homeless. It asked homeless people to put their names and detailed information about their circumstances on a register. This register which would then be used to determine their level of need and vulnerability with an attempt to house and support Brisbane’s 50 most vulnerable homeless people.

We visited the streets and shelters of Brisbane at 4am armed only with surveys and clip boards and a 5 dollar food voucher as added incentive. As we met for our initial training in All Hallows School in down town Brisbane, (The staff, parents and students of the school were marvellous offering meals and support.) I immediately spied an opportunity of waking a little later when we were being placed into our various groups. Those who were visiting the shelters and food vans didn’t have to rise until 5am (u-hoooo) compared with the ridiculous 3am (boo-hoo) rise for the people surveying the people living on the street. This was an opportunity not to be missed for an anxious late riser like myself.

Hello everyone. My name is Mary Pease and I want to share with you some of the lessons in life I have learnt since I started  attending St Mary’s in Exile.

My first Mass at SMX was in July last year. About 3 months previously, I had left my husband of 25 years, departing with a boot load of belongings. After two months of living in motels and house sitting, I moved into rental accommodation. I then  caught up with my lovely friends, Peter and Su Norris, for coffee and a chat. Peter and Su have been part of the St Mary’s Community for years, and they suggested that I attend. The timing was right for me. I had stopped believing in heaven as a physical place, and had rejected a lot of Church Dogma. I was still however attending Mass in my own parish occasionally, as I needed the sense of Community and the core message of Christianity. I took up Peter and Su’s offer to attend SMX, and was a “convert” from the first Mass.

About 4 months after joining SMX, in November 2009, I had some abdominal pain. I felt my abdomen, and felt a large mass, in the left lower side of my abdomen and rising up to the level of my navel. This filled me with shock, disbelief and dread. I am a doctor, a GP, I had kept up with my own health checks, and I had not had any symptoms until the episode of pain.  About 3 weeks later, I had surgery to remove the lump- the upshot was that I had a very aggressive cancer of the uterus, a sarcoma. Further tests showed that it had already spread to a lymph gland below my diaphragm, and I had some lesions in my lungs which were possibly small lung secondaries also. Sarcoma of the uterus is an extremely rare form of cancer- in my 30 years of medical practice, I have never had a patient with this condition. The predicted life expectancy is limited. It is not a cancer that responds to either radiotherapy or chemotherapy, although I was offered chemotherapy. My oncologist is a very kind and compassionate  person, and explained that chemo could possibly extend my symptom-free interval, but would not extend my life expectancy. I chose NOT to have chemo.

THE DISCIPLESHIP OF EQUALS: the NEW COMMUNITY

FIRST READING – Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book LIFE TOGETHER, section on ministry.

“An argument started among them (the disciples of Jesus) as to which of them was the greatest”. Perhaps we do not bear in mind enough that no Christian community ever comes together without this thought immediately emerging as a seed of discord. Thus at the very beginning of Christian fellowship there is engendered an invisible, often unconscious, life-and-death contest. This is enough to destroy a fellowship.

All this can occur in the most polite or even pious environment. But the important thing is that a Christian community should know that somewhere in it there will certainly be ‘an argument among them as to which of them is the greatest.’ It is the struggle of the natural person for self-justification. One finds it only in comparing oneself with others, in condemning and judging others. Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.