The most significant religious events recounted in the Bible do not occur in ‘temples made with hands.’ The most important religion in that book is unorganized and is sometimes profoundly disruptive of organization. From Abraham to Jesus, the most important people are not priests but shepherds, soldiers, property owners, workers, housewives, queens and kings, manservants and maidservants, fishermen, prisoners, whores, even bureaucrats. The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the middle of the sea, in prisons…. Religion, according to this view, is less to be celebrated in rituals than practiced in the world.
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In moving house I have a new route to walk to the train station, to work, to the shops…this is the word on the street…
These are some of our reflections on peace.
What is peace?
Do we have it? How do we know we don’t?
How can we get it? What can we do?
We make wreathes out of the rosemary, olive branches and bay leaves growing in our garden – symbols of evergreen to represent everlasting life brought through Jesus and the circular shape of the wreath represents God, with no beginning and no end.
Rosemary – an emblem of both fidelity and remembrance
Olive branch – used for pleading for peace and a sign after the great flood that the dove found land and a promise it would not flood again.
Bay laurel – laurel wreath – victory.
Prayer by Bron Hayward
Some fine Saturday I would like to recommend you idle away an afternoon doing the Billibellary’s Walk at the University of Melbourne. I work in the precinct so it felt like a good fit to contextualise what was happening in this specific place 300 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, now… or maybe what’s not happening…?
Billibellary’s Walk
Wominjeka. Welcome to Wurundjeri Country
Billibellary’s Walk is named after the Ngurungaeta, or clan head, of the Wurundjeri people at the time of Melbourne’s settlement. The walk is a cultural interpretation of the University’s Parkville campus landscape that provides an experience of connection to Country which Wurundjeri people continue to have, both physically and spiritually.
The walk is designed to help participants hear the whispers and songs of the Wurundjeri people that lie within the University of Melbourne’s built environment. The walk alerts us to signs and stories that may not be apparent to visitors, but which provide some insight into the experience of the Wurundjeri people of the Woiwurrung language group who have walked the grounds upon which the University now stands for more than 40,000 years. It is intended to provide the impetus for further exploration of issues pertinent to the Aboriginal community.
http://www.murrupbarak.unimelb.edu.au/
The actual talking-point sites around the campus don’t often have a strong link to what you’re talking through but probably understanding that little remains from earlier times is precisely part of the journey they are taking you on. I was lucky enough to do it with Samara from the Indigenous Hospitality House in Carlton so the talking points and questions were enriched by having someone along so much more deeply invested and holding wisdom in cultural awareness. You could do it as a tourist, as a social studies class, as someone seeking to hear truth… being open to ideas, history, stories and what they have to teach us about the impacts of colonisation. You could do it as someone who likes to look at a big, tall, beautiful tree and know that it’s been there since before you came along and will stand for many years after you go – bearing witness.
The walk poses a lot of questions. It doesn’t necessarily have the answers. You have to sit in that. Not having the answers. This is something we’re still living out hey…
I find myself getting fired up as our conversation canvasses: religion, authoritarianism, institutionalisation…. from colonisation to terrorism to the Royal Commission investigating child abuse… it all somehow feels like the same thing and it feels broken.
“We’re not going to be the ones who fix it” Samara points out.
“Then who?” I demand.
“We be a part of it.”
This walk invites you to do that. Be a part of it.
These are some of the hopes of our community.
Prayer written by Bron Hayward
A Poetry Handbook – Mary Oliver
p.120
“Among the things I learned in those years were two of special interest to poets. First, that one can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world’s work schedule begins. Also, that one can live simply and honorably on just about enough to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.
This I have always known – that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret.”
fragments in the dreaming
skittish across the landscape of my mind
some disparate thoughts slow
go side by side mismatched a way
sometimes they chase each other
along and around – chasing, racing
and I am there with my
reins of reason to draw them in
I seek rest, a blank unknowing
and have instead this kaleidoscope
of people, stories, ideas, words
I seek to, and do, resist it
but sometimes, rarely, I join the
Dance and explore a terrain
both fearsome and wondrous
Talitha Fraser
I have started reading The Jihad of Jesus by Dave Andrews. With a title like that I think it confronts and offends peoples sensibilities before they ever read a page. I can assure you there is plenty of scope for it to confront and offend sensibilities once you open it too. How can it not? This is a self-effacing story. I’m only 30 pages in but I understand that it costs something – before I can preach to you about non-violence I must confess the horrendous history of violence, rape, torture, murder done in Your name. It makes you wonder, why anyone might align themselves with such a thing as this? How can you be associated with Christians, with religion, when it has not just participated in but driven so much atrocity in the world?
I do find it hard to align with the structure, the culture of the “institution” of the church. I can feel very far away from You when I am in these walls. It is necessary for healing, on both sides, to participate in building a world that is different. Who is sick? Who needs to be saved? We do not send a doctor for those who are well but those who are sick. I know I am sick. I know I need help. I need help everyday. I must take the plank out of my own eye before I look at the speck in yours. Do you not want to be well? I do. I long to be well. It hurts. It’s uncomfortable, it’s sickening to read these things and understand that they form part of the cultural tail I claim. But we get Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa too. What is stopping you from being the next Martin Luther King? These were imperfect human beings – MLK cheated on his wife with some regularity I believe and MT was someone who set such high standards she was difficult to please and work with. Side by side with them they might not be so easy to admire and love as their reputations act like airbrush to photography. I am not so easy to love up close. Religion is not so admirable up close either.
We judge those harshly who have gone before. In our current age where brain comes before brawn we think “how savage“, we want to know how these actions might conceivably be justified and the only response we have is “they know not what they do”. We know now – issues of indigenous land rights and protection of culture, mandatory detention of refugees, family violence, climate change, water shut offs in Detroit, war and genocide… we have our own share in stupidity or willful blindness or whatever you want to call the gross injustices of our own time… consumption climbing relative to our social isolation as we look for the things that will fill us but not to each other.
[p.1, The Jihad of Jesus]
“Jihad is an Islamic term referring to a religious duty for Muslims.
In Arabic, the word jihad translates as a noun meaning “struggle”… there are two commonly accepted meanings of jihad: an inner spiritual struggle and an outer spiritual struggle.
The “greater jihad” is the inner struggle by a believer to fulfill his or her religious duties. This non-violent meaning is stressed by both Muslim and non-Muslim religious authors.
The “lesser jihad” is the physical struggle against oppressors, including enemies of Islam. This physical struggle can take a violent or non-violent form.”
If fulfilling your greater struggle is to follow the call to living a life of love, peace, forgiveness… then this “lesser” struggle needs to be framed by the principles of the first.
I am grateful for smart, wise elders who can write these books, have these conversations, articulate what needs to be said – even if it confronts and offends.
You called me
You created me
and called me by name
in every echo of every
need, want, exclamation
I know I am made
I know I am named
I know I am Yours
made, named, Yours
Talitha Fraser
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